The Oracle.(Biography)

Arianna Huffington's best-selling biographies of Maria Callas (1981) and Pablo Picasso (1988) both open with anecdotes intended to illuminate an essential truth about the subject's fate. Were she to write her own life, Huffington said not long ago, she would begin in the spring of 1969. Huffington--then Stassinopoulos--and her mother, Elli, had moved from Athens to London, where they lived in a rented flat in Manchester Square, so that Arianna could take the entrance exams for Cambridge. (She had resolved to attend the university a couple of years earlier, after seeing a picture of it in a magazine. "It was a perfect example of what we now call visualization," she later wrote.) Finally, one afternoon, a telegram arrived: "AWARDED. GIRTON. EXHIBITION." Neither Arianna nor her mother understood the term "exhibition," so they called Arianna's tutor, who explained that she had won a partial scholarship to Girton College.

Huffington entered Cambridge that fall. She lived in a single room, with a heater she fed with shillings. Her Greek-inflected English was better suited to the classroom than to the class prejudices of her fellow-students. "One day, I said something in a group like 'horseback riding,' " she said recently, "and I was literally laughed at, like, 'What other kind of riding is there? Donkey riding?' "

During a student-group fair, Huffington toured the chambers of the university's debating society. Since girlhood, she had possessed a spiritual impulse, studying Hinduism and fasting on the name day of the Virgin Mary. The Cambridge Union became another cathedral. "I just threw myself into it," she recalled. "I went to every debate. I must literally have sat there with my mouth open. I was so spellbound by the spectacle of great speakers and people being moved or angered by their words."

This may sound familiar. The slack-jawed outsider eventually became the society's president ("Starryanna Comeacroppalos" to her less kind peers), who became a conservative commentator and consort ("The Greek Pudding"), who became an Upper East Side socialite ("The most upwardly mobile Greek since Icarus"), who became a Republican political wife, a divorcee cable comedienne, a self-help writer, a progressive, an early environmentalist, a failed gubernatorial candidate, a blogger, an Internet mogul, and, through it all, one of the Anglophone world's most nimble and ubiquitous communicators. Her enduring infatuation with the power of chat has led her to rarely, if ever, turn down an invitation to talk, whether on CNN (so far this year, she's done "Larry King Live" a dozen times) or at the National Conference on Public Employee Retirement Systems (mark your calendar for May, 2009).

One afternoon last spring, Huffington, who lives in Los Angeles, was in Seattle, having agreed to serve as the key-note speaker at an annual Planned Parenthood benefit luncheon. (A fan of the cause, she waived her fee, and even, when a collection plate went around, got out her checkbook.) Long a regular on the conference circuit, she is often found in the sorts of places that require lanyards. Her vocabulary is full of business-book terms--"aha moment," "meme." When she hangs up the phone, she some-times says, "I'm jumping off." At night, she hides her BlackBerrys (she has three) in the bathroom.

Seated at a table of philanthropists at Seattle's Bell Harbor International Conference Center, Huffington produced a couple of hard-boiled eggs--food as fuel--from her pocketbook and deposited them on her plate. She is almost six feet tall, and has a tiny forehead, a peaked upper lip, and hair with the lustre of a copper pot. She is approachable, but, when approached, she assumes a default posture: hands clasped, one foot pointed in front, like a gymnast about to begin the floor exercise. Her comportment is flirty yet disciplined--wearing a ruffled blouse, as she did in Seattle, she could have been channelling a French maid or George Washington. Eventually, she ascended the stage. "Now trust me, I have two teen-age daughters," she began. "I would love it if abstinence was the way to go."

The cheek and the candor that characterize Huffington's public speaking also inform the Huffington Post, which Huffington, together with the former A.O.L. executive Kenneth Lerer, launched in 2005. The site--"an Internet newspaper"--comprises a news aggregator, six "verticals" (if the Huffington Post were a broadsheet, these would be sections B to G), and a group blog, to which around two thousand people contribute, including, famously, such friends of Huffington as Ari Emanuel, Alec Baldwin, Larry David, Nora Ephron, and John Cusack.