Who

The New Yorker's go-to guy for big media and business profiles, Auletta tells members of the press what to think about each other and their bosses. His wife is literary agent Binky Urban.

Backstory

A Brooklyn native—his dad owned a sporting goods store in Coney Island—Auletta's pitching arm landed him at SUNY-Oswego to play on the baseball team. When his athletic career didn't take off, he turned his attention to politics and headed to Syracuse to earn a master's degree in political science, later enrolling in a PhD program. He dropped out before picking up his doctorate and took a job on Bobby Kennedy's staff. After Kennedy's assassination, Auletta joined Howard J. Samuels's losing campaign for governor; when Samuels became chairman of Off Track Betting in the early '70s, Auletta became the agency's first executive director. He shifted to journalism in the '70s, covering the local political beat for the New York Post, Village Voice, New York, and the New York Daily News.

Auletta started contributing to the New Yorker in 1977 and in 1992, when Tina Brown took over as editor, he was given a regular column, "Annals of Communication." His meandering profiles of media and technology moguls have dissected the careers of Rupert Murdoch, Bill Gates, Harvey Weinstein, Ted Turner, Herb Allen, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., Barry Diller, Lou Dobbs, Carl Icahn, Dan Rather, Roger Ailes, Katie Couric, and Michael Bloomberg, among many others. Auletta's also published ten books, including the bestsellers Three Blind Mice: How The TV Networks Lost Their Way and Greed and Glory on Wall Street, about brokerage house Lehman Brothers.

Personal

Auletta's wife is super-agent Amanda "Binky" Urban. They have a daughter, Kate, who graduated from Davidson College in 2004. Auletta and Urban live on Park Avenue. One neighbor in the building—who has also made appearances in Auletta's writing—is Hallmark CEO Henry Schleiff.