Bethany McLean
Vanity Fair contributing editor and co-author of All the Devils are Here and the national bestseller The Smartest Guys in the Room

Photo credit: Gasper Tringale
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About Bethany McLean
Bethany McLean is a columnist for Slate and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. She joined Slate in October 2010 and Vanity Fair in July 2008 after spending thirteen years at Fortune, where she was an editor-at-large. In early 2001, McLean was one of the first reporters to raise questions about Enron, with her story “Is Enron Overpriced?” She and fellow Fortune senior writer Peter Elkind exposed the Enron scandal and wrote the national bestseller The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron, which went on to become an Oscar-nominated documentary.
McLean has also written in-depth pieces about the credit rating agencies, Goldman Sachs, President Clinton’s global philanthropy, Australia’s Macquarie Bank, and more. Before joining Fortune, she spent three years as an analyst at Goldman Sachs. She graduated from Williams College in 1992 with a double major in mathematics and English.
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Speaking Topics
Fracking and Environmental Justice
Author of Saudi America: The Truth About Fracking and How It’s Changing the World, Bethany McLean shares her expertise on fracking with audiences. McLean shares her insights on the issues surrounding fracking as well as its causes and effects on other areas of our society – how low-interest rates are driving fracking, the shifting world of energy, and changing relationships between Russia and Europe. She discusses the issue of the development of fossil fuels not aligning with the math of the Paris climate accord, posing the question of what might be next for fossil fuels and how we can protect the environment in finding the answer.
Business Ethics
From her experience as an analyst at Goldman Sachs through her work at Fortune exposing the Enron scandal, Bethany McLean gives audiences a look into what it means for a business to be ethical. In her talks, she delves into the discrepancies between morality and illegality and offers insight into the corruption that occurs when the people at the top take on all of the reward and none of the risk. In these talks, McLean draws on her published works and her personal findings as a member of the business world.
The Financial Crisis (All the Devils Are Here)
Government Regulation of Business
Wall Street
Print Journalism
Enron (The Smartest Guys in the Room)
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Video
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Praise for Bethany McLean
Praise for All the Devils Are Here
The best business book of 2010.
— The Huffington PostPraise for The Smartest Guys in the Room
Well-reported and well-written.
— Warren BuffettThe authors write with power and finesse. Their prose is effortless, like a sprinter floating down the track.
— USA TodayThe best book about the Enron debacle to date.
— BusinessWeek -
Books by Bethany McLean
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Media About Bethany McLean
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and Availability
- 212 572-2013
- Bethany McLean travels from Chicago, IL