Some Things You Should Know About: About Ari

Photo by Barry J. Holmes

How does one become a one-woman information machine? We're not quite sure.

We are sure that Arianne Cohen was a very tall, very bookish child in a region known as the Armpit of the World--which is not, actually, a bad place to curl up with books and plot an escape. She joined the swim team and paddled her way downstream to a Philadelphia training program at Germantown Academy, and was a nationally-ranked swimmer as a teenager.

At Harvard, she took 35 courses in 29 departments, which led to a junior-year situation known as Unlikely To Graduate Due To Lack of Major. She worked it out, and graduated magna cum laude. Ari's collegiate editorial column in the Harvard Crimson won the 2003 Society of Professional Journalists Mark of Excellence Award.

She developed her reporting chops as a news reporter for the Cambodia Daily Newspaper in Phnom Penh, and returned plus antibodies for dengue fever, and minus an appendix. Her work appears regularly in New York, Marie Claire, The New York Times, Popular Science, and Vogue, The Daily Beast and Fast Company, among others, and she is a contributing editor at Woman's Day.

She was, at one point, one half the country's tallest couple with her 7'2" partner. Then they broke up. She splits her time between Portland, Oregon, the best place on earth, and New York City, the center of the world.

1. Ari's favorite food is ice cream. In New York city, a half gallon of ice cream is 1.75 quarts and costs $7. This confuses Ari.

2. Ari goes running every 48 hours. Long shin bones and higher body weight are not conducive to long distance running, so she would describe her running style as "Mangled Deer."

3. Ari has a new office space, where she's very excited about the organizational possibilities, and has had to actively hold herself back from buying out The Container Store. In an attempt to improve productivity, she's banned internet in her office. Unclear how long this strategy will last.

4. Ari is pronounced "ahhhh-reeeee", like "apple." Thanks.