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Who

An object of both hatred and jealousy to New York media watchers, Kuczynski writes about all things shallow, like plastic surgery and high-end shopping, for the New York Times.

Backstory

The daughter of an American journalist and the Peruvian economist Pedro Pablo Kuczynski (who served as the country's prime minister in 2005-6), Alex got her start in journalism at the New York Observer after graduating from Barnard in 1990. She soon moved to the Times, where she covered media for years before moving on to more superficial fare like her "Critical Shopper" column for the Thursday Styles section.

These days, Kuczynski's writing mainly appears in the paper's glossy T magazine, but her reporting from the frontline of frivolity also turns up in mags like Harper's Bazaar, Elle, Allure and Vanity Fair. In 2007 she published her first book, Beauty Junkies: Inside Our $15 Billion Obsession with Plastic Surgery, which explored America's growing addiction to the scalpel as well as Kuczynski's own adventures in cosmetic surgery. Although she's admitted to getting her eyes done, liposuction, Botox, and Restylane, Kuczynski says she's sworn off cosmetic procedures and even nail polish since the publication of her book.

Personal

Kuczynski married investor Charles Stevenson Jr., a two-time divorcé who is 20 years her senior, in 2002. The couple live with their miniature Dachshund named Henry and the baby they had via a surrogate in 2008 named Maxime at 740 Park, the fabled building that's also home to Steve and Christine Schwarzman, Dave and Danielle Ganek, Tom and Alice Tisch, and David and Julia Koch. The couple also has a home in Ketchum, Idaho.

Family ties

Her brother, John-Michael Kuczynski, is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His most recent tome couldn't be further from his sister's area of expertise: It's called Conceptual Atomism and the Computational Theory of Mind: A Defense of Content-Internalism and Semantic Externalism. Kuczynski's stepfather, Thomas L. Hughes, is emeritus president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.