The job market is booming. Inflation is falling. But you’d never know it by looking at President Biden’s poll numbers.
President Joe Biden has a lot to be proud of. Riding off a State of the Union speech earlier this month that felt like a victory lap, he and his Cabinet have been blitzing across the country to sharpen his economic message. The Biden administration has sought to contrast Republican threats to Social Security and Medicare with its own legislative work to invest in infrastructure and manufacturing, and bring down the costs of education, health care, and energy.
The image of the accelerating “Biden boom” that the White House has been trying to project is rooted in economic data: unemployment is now at its lowest level since 1969, January saw the seventh straight month of slowing inflation, the economy has continued to grow despite fears of a recession, and over 12 million jobs have been created since Biden took office two years ago.
But why doesn’t it feel that way? The average American is still likely to say the economy is in relatively dire straits, according to Gallup polling data, and large numbers fear worsening inflation, higher interest rates and unemployment, and the possibility of a recession in 2023. Some 80 percent of American adults think the economy is either in poor or fair shape, according to January data from Pew Research Center.
The short answer is, of course, inflation. Prices are still much higher at this point than they were two years ago, and news about expensive eggs and expensive housing are likely still putting a damper on our collective sense of an improving economy.
The White House and its allies face an economic and political conundrum: though inflation is still high, almost every major economic indicator shows that the economy is healthier than when Biden took office, but the general mood among Americans is still sour.
“The bad news of the economy (rising inflation, declining real incomes) has outweighed the good news (mostly consistent growth in GDP, low unemployment),” John Sides, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University, said. “Negative economic news is both more prevalent in news coverage and is also more salient to consumers, relative to positive economic news. So even in an economy with mixed signals, the bad news wins out.”
Still, the normally predictable relationship between Americans’ views on the economy and a president’s approval rating may be changing; the last decade and a half have shown some anomalies.
The link between presidential popularity and the economy
Sides, who has studied the relationship between political prospects and economic news extensively, uses the University of Michigan’s Index of Consumer Sentiment to analyze how down people are on the economy. The index, which measures how people feel about the general economic climate from a monthly random survey of Americans, tells an unsurprising story: though consumer sentiment remains way below the historical average, it has been steadily rising for three consecutive months, and is significantly higher than it was a year ago, matching the trend of cooling inflation. That matches up pretty closely with how people feel about Joe Biden as a president.
For most of the time that index has been collecting data, there was a straightforward correlation between presidential approval ratings and feelings about the economy: better economic news reliably translated into higher approval ratings. But Barack Obama and Donald Trump’s presidencies disrupted this relationship, Sides found. Higher consumer sentiment didn’t translate into a political advantage for either of them, despite the post-Great Recession recovery under Obama and the Trump economic boom.
Back in 2019, Sides theorized that much of this disconnect between the economy and presidential popularity was due to Obama and Trump’s low popularity and the growing polarization of politics — Republicans and Democrats were more likely to feel good or bad about the economy depending on which party the president belonged to. “In short, it’s hard for presidents today to get credit from the other party when they preside over a strong economy,” Sides wrote at the time.
Some of this is true with Biden now; his second-year approval ratings were among the lowest in presidential history. Republicans feel much more negatively than Democrats do about the state of the economy, according to a Gallup poll conducted in January: Among those Americans who felt inflation was likely to worsen, Republicans beat Democrats by more than 20 percentage points, while a plurality of Democrats felt unemployment was likely to continue to go down.
But unlike Trump and Obama, Biden’s approval rating has been more closely tied to visible economic indicators, like gas prices, and inflation in general. “Although Trump’s and Obama’s approval rating did not vary much despite economic swings, Biden’s certainly has,” Sides said.
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Courtesy of John Sides
But Biden’s approval rating is still much higher than Jimmy Carter’s when he dealt with high inflation in the 1970s. “So partisan loyalty among Democrats may be putting a floor underneath [Biden’s] approval,” Sides said.
Despite the hard evidence of an improving economy, Sides said Biden’s approval rating is still being held down by the lingering sense of economic hardships of the last two years. This makes more sense when you think about the kind of economic bad news we’ve seen over the last few years (inflation, rising interest rates, and isolated but flashy layoffs) compared to the good economic news (low unemployment, and cooling inflation). “Inflation is an everyone problem and unemployment is a some-people problem,” the economic columnist Annie Lowrey argued in the Atlantic last year. When things were bad during the Covid recession in 2020, everyone felt fear, but only some people lost their jobs. “The pain was uneven. In contrast, nobody escapes inflation, even if rising prices affect some people far more than others,” Lowrey wrote.
A similar dynamic is why gains in wages, which Biden and the White House have touted, don’t feel like that much good news. Though average wages have risen over the last few months, they aren’t keeping up with inflation, and wages aren’t rising equally for everyone.
That doesn’t mean Americans have stopped spending, though. And this is where Biden’s economic pitch comes in. For some time, the administration has been framing its economic plan as focused on “giving people a little breathing room” in the short run and setting up longer-term fixes to manufacturing supply chains and household costs.
Understanding the “Biden boom”
The president’s recent tours of Wisconsin, Florida, and Maryland demonstrate that message. The White House has been lauding a manufacturing boom that has created 750,000 jobs in areas like the construction of electric vehicle, battery, and semiconductor factories, and investments in infrastructure like ports, railroads, and bridges. The White House believes this will, in the long run, prevent similar periods of high inflation by making the country less dependent on foreign supply chains. It’s also taking place in many states with either historic but dying industrial economies, like Michigan and Wisconsin, or where the new, green tech fields are growing, like Arizona and Utah. At the same time, Biden has been touting the cost-saving relief that the Inflation Reduction Act will phase in this year, like caps on the price of insulin for seniors and lower premiums for health insurance, while attacking Republicans for past suggestions of phasing out entitlement programs like Social Security.
When asked about Biden’s seeming inability to get credit for good economic news, a White House spokesperson referred me to the president’s multiple recent references to “just getting started” and “finishing the job” on the economic recovery in the last two months. The spokesperson also pointed to National Economic Council Director Brian Deese’s recent comments that “it’s understandable that even as personal household circumstances for the majority of people have improved, the anxiety — the economic anxiety is real.”
This dual messaging might be crucial for Biden to get credit for the economic recovery before the 2024 presidential campaign really picks up.
“The American people are nothing but impatient,” the University of Virginia presidential historian Allida Black, who has advised Biden, told me. “They want results now, and I worry that the [president’s economic accomplishments] will take a while for them to be felt. I hope that they do not make the same mistake that the Obama administration made, which was to spend the money but not advertise how the money was spent.”
That might become a tougher challenge for presidents in today’s political climate. Speaking to the New Yorker, Biden’s recently departed chief of staff, Ron Klain, alluded to a larger problem across the world.
“We’re just at a place where, in democracies, we’re going to find that forty-three or forty-four [percent] will turn out to be a very high approval rating, just because people are polarized: the people on the other side are never going to say you’re doing a good job, and for the people in the middle it’s just easier to say, ‘Eh’,” he told the New Yorker’s Evan Osnos.
The better measure of success is elections, Klain said. And Biden will have another chance to prove his messaging and agenda are working next year.
In the biggest tabloid love triangle of the 2000s, there was never a right kind of woman to be.
In the Purity Chronicles, Vox looks back at the sexual and gendered mores of the late ’90s and 2000s, one pop culture phenomenon at a time. Read more here.
There was a moment in the 2000s when you could tell the world exactly what kind of woman you were trying to be by who you were rooting for in the Brad Pitt-Angelina Jolie-Jennifer Aniston love triangle.
Being Team Aniston meant you believed in the sanctity of marriage; that you aspired to an achievable, girl-next-door glamor; that you wanted to be cool in a “hottest prom queen of the decade” kind of way.
Being Team Jolie meant you believed that love was stronger than marriage; that you aspired to an otherworldly glamor; that you wanted to be cool in a “cosmopolitan global citizen with lots of tattoos” kind of a way.
It felt as though one of those women was the right kind of woman, and if we could all just decide who she was, then we would know what kind of woman we should be, too. But which one was it?
Nobody rooted for Brad Pitt in that love triangle, exactly, because that wasn’t what he was there for. Brad Pitt didn’t have to prove that he was the right kind of man; that was already assumed. He existed to choose the right woman, and to prove her rightness with his approval.
But if the past few years of headlines prove anything, it’s that in the long term, none of the women in this story ever really got to be right.
Pitt and Jolie divorced in 2016, and now their messy custody battle has been dragged into the courts, with Jolie alleging that Pitt behaved violently toward her and their children and Pitt’s supporters accusing Jolie of a smear campaign. Meanwhile, Aniston revealed in a December interview with Allure that she struggled with infertility throughout her marriage to Pitt. The stories are sad and disturbing, but they’re also oddly familiar.
When Pitt ended his marriage with Aniston in 2005 to enter a relationship with Jolie, he launched what would become one of the most potent and profitable tabloid narratives of the era. The storyline was set subliminally before anyone even confirmed the basic events, when Pitt masterminded a photoshoot with Jolie in W magazine that showed the two of them together presiding over a house full of children, while the press darkly implied that Aniston had chosen a nascent film career over kids. That story was: One of these women deserves to have Brad Pitt’s babies. (“I’ll have your baby, Brad,” said Eva Longoria’s T-shirt, while “Team Aniston” and “Team Jolie” shirts flew off the shelves.) In a way, that’s still the story we’re telling now: One of these women deserves to mother Brad Pitt’s children. Which one are you rooting for?
Questions about fatherhood, meanwhile, become significant by their absence. The issue of which woman Brad Pitt deserves to have kids with is rarely asked. Instead, we assume that he deserves whomever he happens to want.
The big question of this story is who is the winner, but you don’t need to struggle to win if you’ve already won. The only person involved to whom that applied was Brad Pitt. He needed no trophy of his own because his trophy was his whole life.
Aniston and Jolie never actually got to win. They were always on the brink of having won, always on the brink of having proven themselves worthy of love, always contingent. They were never allowed to have won.
As Pitt, Jolie, and Aniston return to their old tropes, each of them is trying to rewrite the narrative in their own favor, just like they did last time. To see how they’re doing it now, we’ll have to look at how they did it the first time around, and what they stand to gain now.
“Is Brad to be blamed here?”
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Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic
In 2004, the world seemed confident that Jennifer Aniston was a woman made for motherhood. She was just coming off Friends, where she spent the last few seasons playing a single mother who is also successful in both her career and in love. Sunkissed and golden and effortlessly likable, Aniston seemed poised to follow in her character’s footsteps. Only in real life, she would have Hollywood’s greatest male sex symbol at her side all the while.
In 1999, a year before Aniston and Pitt were married, the Globe announced that Aniston was “about to become a bride and a mother.” “Jennifer Aniston: Brad, Babies & a Breakout Movie” read the cover of People magazine when Aniston appeared — not pregnant — in 2002. She and Pitt would, W magazine reported in 2003, be having somewhere between two and seven children together. When Aniston hosted SNL in 2004, she appeared in a sketch hounded by paparazzi who shrieked in chorus, “When are you gonna have a baby?!”
Aniston was, as Guardian columnist Zoe Williams argued in 2022, an ideal woman for the post-feminist ’90s, which is to say she was most exceptional in how deeply, sweetly approachable she appeared to be. Williams argues you can see Aniston’s perfection for the era in her famous hair: “not too long (attention-seeking), nor too short (feminist/independent), not too blond (conventional) or too dark (vampy), not too shiny (airhead) nor in any way dull (frigid), [it] was the perfect, man-pleasing hair for the late 20th-century woman.”
Aniston was considered a little bit lowbrow, too, which made it all the more obvious that she was meant to be a mother. Aniston was America’s sweetheart, sure, but she was a TV actress in the era before people started talking about TV shows like they were serious art. If she wanted to put her career on hold to have a baby while Pitt was off making movies and trying to land an Oscar, who would it hurt?
Angelina Jolie was another story altogether. For years, she had been in many ways the Mary Magdalene to Aniston’s Virgin Mary, a wild child who seemed to be all sex appeal and taboo-breaking. Sure, she won an Oscar for Girl Interrupted, but then she followed it up by smooching her brother. In 2006, Vanity Fair would succinctly sum up Jolie’s image in this era as “a tattooed vixen with a taste for bisexuality, heroin, brotherly incest, mental institutions, and wearing her husbands’ blood.” Also her hair was long (attention-seeking) and dark (vampy).
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Ke.Mazur/WireImage
Jolie, unlike Aniston, did not seem born to be a maternal figure. If Aniston’s most iconic role of the 2000s saw her navigating single motherhood with a devoted team of friends at her side, Jolie’s saw her shooting up a mall to fully express her disgust with the idea of becoming a housewife in the suburbs.
Moreover, Jolie was a figure of worrying ambition. She had an Oscar. She didn’t seem likely to put her own career aside to raise children while her husband went off to try to win his own Oscar.
But in 2002, Jolie adopted her first child, Maddox, an orphan from Cambodia. As Anne Helen Petersen documented in BuzzFeed, she began to tweak her image, at first a little, and then a lot. She got herself photographed playing with her kid in the park, and she started to talk to the press a lot about her humanitarian concerns. She became a UN goodwill ambassador. At the time that she became involved with Pitt, Jolie was, as Vanity Fair put it, morphing into “a globe-trotting humanitarian who seemed to be channeling Audrey Hepburn.”
At the beginning of 2004, Aniston and Pitt began to tell the press they were planning to have a baby soon. Friends was winding down in January of 2005, and Pitt would wrap Mr. and Mrs. Smith in February of the same year. Their schedules were lining up. Everything was falling into place.
Instead, in January of 2005, Aniston and Pitt announced their divorce. In April of that year, Us Weekly published photographs of Pitt with Jolie and Maddox on a beach in Kenya, looking every inch the family unit. Pitt, clearly, had swapped one would-be mother for another.
Wild, sexy, unpredictable Jolie was tailor-made for a villain narrative, for the idea that she stole the hottest man in Hollywood from the beloved star of Friends. But her years of image reshaping meant that she also had a counternarrative ready and waiting for her to step into. She was a serious person with serious concerns, and it wasn’t her fault if she also happened to be so gorgeous there was no way Brad Pitt could resist her. For the first time, the possibility emerged that perhaps Aniston was not, after all, the right sort of woman.
As the divorce progressed, onlookers took sides (see: the above T-shirts). A 2008 item for Yahoo was able to work both sides of the story at once: Aniston “comes across looking a tad bit pathetic at times,” but Jolie was “a mastermind manipulator … willing to do whatever it takes to get her way.”
By the close of the decade, with three adopted children and three biological, Brangelina were no longer adulterers but saints. They were A-listers who gave the power of their wealth and attention to worthy causes, an Oscar winner and an Oscar hopeful and their gaggle of beautiful children. In the end, motherhood was to be the ruin of the Betty and the redemption of the Veronica.
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Getty Images
Aniston, childless and unmarried and with her biggest hit fading into the past, was painted as the loser, the spinster: poor pathetic Jen. Dark rumors swirled that maybe she hadn’t even wanted children, that maybe she’d picked her career over kids, but her fanbase didn’t believe it. Part of loving her became wishing she would finally find happiness, which meant true love and children. The perennial questions tabloids began to ask of Aniston was: When was it going to happen for her?
The question of Pitt and his culpability or lack thereof in the whole story was, noticeably, missing. In the narrative of the tabloids, Aniston and Jolie are the agents acting upon Pitt, while he and his golden beauty, his charm, his credibility all rest inviolate and whole. He was the trophy for whomever proved herself worthy of him.
“Is Brad to be blamed here?” demanded gossip site Koimoi as late as 2020, after alleging that Jolie “was a temptress on the set” of Mr. and Mrs. Smith. “Angelina is one of the most beautiful women in the world, it might be hard to resist.”
The moral of this story is: you can be a good woman, but if you’re not a mother, your goodness is sad. You can be an unruly woman, but if you are seen mothering in public, your unruliness has been tamed and we no longer have to worry about you.
To be a mother is to be a woman fulfilling her duty. Then we may consider you tamed, passive. We tell you that you win, but in fact you have been won.
“Brad has owned everything he’s responsible for from day one”
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Christopher Polk/NBC via Getty Images
Pitt and Jolie divorced in 2016, uncoupling the elements of Brangelina to be a portmanteau no more. At the time, there were vague stories about an altercation on the family’s private plane, but the story was difficult to follow and seemed to make little impact on Pitt’s reputation. What we knew then was this: Pitt, apparently, had been drunk, and he’d had some sort of confrontation with Jolie and with 15-year-old Maddox, which Jolie said had gotten “physical” and Pitt insisted had not. The FBI investigated and filed no charges.
In September of 2016, Jolie filed for divorce and demanded sole custody of their six children. Pitt countersued for full custody for himself. By the end of the year, they’d reached a provisional agreement in which Jolie would have full custody temporarily. Meanwhile, battle for control of the narrative played out in the press.
Jolie initially took her story to TMZ, which loves a scandal and knows no loyalties. But the print tabloids, who know where their bread is buttered, were immediately Team Pitt. “Her Plot To Destroy Brad,” screamed Us Weekly, in an article that claimed Jolie was running a vicious and untrue smear campaign. Meanwhile, People had “Brad’s Side of the Story.”
In May of 2017, Pitt sat for a soulful cover story in GQ and talked about “looking at my weaknesses and failures and owning my side of the street.” He had, Vanity Fair concluded, “won hearts and minds.”
Jolie, meanwhile, was keeping her side of the story close to the chest. She declined to comment on the circumstances of the divorce, but profiles about her increasingly dwelled on her rich-lady kookiness, the sense that her many foreign adoptions were the result not of an admirable global consciousness but rather of a white savior complex. Pitt won the day.
The story probably would have stayed vague and amorphous and easy for Pitt to talk his way through had he not chosen to drag it into the courts.
In February of 2022, Pitt sued Jolie over the vineyard they used to mutually own. They bought it together in 2008 and married there in 2014. Pitt claims that when they divorced in 2016, they agreed neither one of them would sell their shares without the other’s permission. However, in 2021, Jolie sold her shares to Tenute del Mondo, the wine division of Russian liquor company Stoli. Pitt’s suit says the sale undermines his own investment in the business.
Jolie, meanwhile, says the no-sale agreement never existed. According to Jolie, she tried to get Pitt to buy out her shares in 2021. When sales negotiations failed, she went over his head, talked to a judge, and got legal approval to sell her shares. Tenute del Mondo took over Jolie’s shares and promptly sued Pitt for mismanaging the vineyard, and then Pitt countersued them and sued Jolie for good measure too.
As for why those sales negotiations between Pitt and Jolie failed: The New York Times reported in October of last year that the sale fell apart because Pitt wanted Jolie to sign a nondisclosure agreement pledging never to publicly discuss what happened on that plane ride in 2016. When she wouldn’t do it, he refused to buy her out.
Now Jolie is publicly discussing the plane ride in detail for the first time as part of her countersuit against Pitt. She has also anonymously filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the FBI (first discovered by Politico in April) seeking more information on the FBI’s report on the plane ride from 2016 and its decision not to press charges against Pitt.
The redacted FBI report first leaked to the public in August 2022, and its contents are disturbing. The report describes a drunk Pitt describing one of his children (likely Maddox) as a “fucking Columbine kid,” grabbing and shaking Jolie, punching the ceiling next to her head, and pouring beer over her as she slept. The report says he menaced one of the children (again, likely Maddox) and injured Jolie when she prevented Pitt from attacking the child. It also states that the investigative agent has provided the US attorney’s office with “copies of a probable cause statement related to this incident.”
As the report’s story filtered out, Pitt went on the offensive against Jolie in the print tabloids. The story had already been investigated, he argued, and Jolie was only making it public now in order to hurt him. “What are the motivations of a person to take up court time and public resources in filing an anonymous FOIA request for material they have had for years?” demanded a “source close to Pitt” in People magazine. “There’s only one: to inflict the most amount of pain on her ex.” (Jolie’s attorneys maintained she was only trying to find out why no charges were ever filed against Pitt.)
In October, Jolie filed her countersuit, which made her accusations against Pitt more explicit than they were in the redacted FBI report. The countersuit alleges that Pitt choked one of the children and struck another across the face, and that in addition to pouring beer on Jolie, he poured red wine on the children.
“Angelina Jolie is on a smear campaign against Brad Pitt, hashing and rehashing the same allegations she’s made for years — allegations that have fallen flat with authorities — this according to sources close to Brad,” reported TMZ.
Pitt is the legal aggressor here: He sued Jolie. But his allies in the press continually argue that the reason their custody battle has made it to the courts is that Jolie is caught up in some sort of vengeful campaign to destroy Pitt’s life. In the popular narrative of this lawsuit, Pitt’s own culpability is erased, even as he loudly congratulates himself on his ability to own his mistakes.
“Brad has owned everything he’s responsible for from day one — unlike the other side,” Pitt’s lawyer told Page Six. “He’s not going to own anything he didn’t do. He has been on the receiving end of every type of personal attack and misrepresentation.”
This move is in many ways a return to the narrative of 2005. “It’s hard not to notice how the current moment is replaying early images we associate with Brangelina — Jolie as the bad influence, Pitt as the innocent charmer caught in the drama,” mused Angelica Jade Bastién in New York magazine. Back then, Jolie was able to turn her image around, to win the PR battle against a marginalized Aniston. This war, though, is different.
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Demetrius Freeman/Washington Post via Getty Images
In the early 2000s, Pitt and Jolie were at close to equal levels of fame, celebrity peers. Now, Pitt has far more power than Jolie. His acting career has flourished and he finally got that Oscar, while Jolie no longer seems interested in her own acting and hasn’t made a notable hit since Maleficent in 2014. Pitt’s second career as a producer has paid off with multiple credible hits (Twelve Years a Slave, Moonlight, Promising Young Women, She Said) while Jolie’s second career as a director has stalled after a series of flops and credibility-sapping misfires.
When Jolie turned her image around in the 2000s, she did so through the performance of motherhood: picture after picture of Jolie as a loving parent with her brood of children. For Pitt, such a performance doesn’t seem to be necessary. No one has photographed him with his children or indeed has any proof he has been in their lives since that plane ride in 2016, but that doesn’t seem to matter for this fight: Pitt can still earn glowing headlines from the tabloids just by remarking that he’s proud of his kids. Fatherhood or the lack thereof does not have the same iconographic power that motherhood does.
And in this era of Me Too backlash, Pitt’s side of the story gets an extra leg up from an internet army eager to burnish his claims. An NBC News study found that social media figures who built up a following bashing Amber Heard to their followers now have Jolie in their crosshairs, and that they’re calling Pitt and Jolie’s legal battle “the next Depp v. Heard.”
At the heart of Pitt’s strategy, though, is an attack on Jolie’s motherhood. Pitt, like Woody Allen before him, is claiming that his ex-wife is turning their children against him in a baseless bid for vengeance. “BRAD PITT SOURCES: ANGELINA HAS POISONED KIDS AGAINST HIM … She’s On A Hate Campaign,” declared TMZ in October. It went on to quote an anonymous source claiming Pitt has a “limited and strained relationship [with his kids], because of her campaign of alienation.” Pitt is saying that Jolie is not a good mother, that her love for their children is unnatural and manipulative. Angelina Jolie, according to Pitt’s current narrative, no longer deserves to have Brad Pitt’s babies.
The moral of this story is: You can be a good mother, but without power, that doesn’t mean people consider your story worth believing. You can be a good mother, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything if a man questions your goodness.
“I don’t have anything to hide at this point”
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James Devaney/GC Images
If Jolie’s star has fallen since the 2000s, Aniston’s has risen. Friends nostalgia only keeps growing, and HBO Max’s reunion special last May was a blockbuster hit. With the success of Apple TV’s The Morning Show, on which she both co-stars and works as a producer, Aniston now has another big hit — and since this one isn’t a comedy, she’s been able to expand the public’s perception of her range.
Now twice-divorced and still childless, Aniston is no longer America’s girl next door. She’s been promoted.
“At 50 years old, Jennifer Aniston’s brand is Boss,” declared Lainey Gossip in 2019, as Aniston posed for the cover of InStyle in heaps of gold jewelry, face stern. “She’s been a boss for years with her own projects but it was never actively part of her image then. Now? Boss is the message now. And it looks great on her.”
In interviews, Aniston has begun positioning herself as an ambitious striver who still has more to show the world. “I was the girl next door, the damsel in distress, the brokenhearted — your traditional rom-com themes. And at a certain point, it was like, ‘Can’t we do something else?’” she told the Hollywood Reporter in 2021. “There are still certain directors I’d love to work with, ones who have their pick of who they like, and sometimes I want to go, ‘I’d love to be part of that club.’” Wes Anderson, she thought, would be interesting.
Pitt, who Lainey Gossip calls “cunning as a Kardashian” in his subtle understanding of the publicity game, seems to have picked up on the shifting heat metrics. One of his hottest publicity moments since his divorce from Jolie came in 2020, when he and Aniston ran into each other backstage at the SAG Awards: Pitt there on the Oscar trail for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Aniston there for The Morning Show. Both would win trophies that night.
In photos they can be seen beaming at each other with delight and embracing. Then Aniston turns to walk away — and Pitt, gazing wistfully after her, keeps holding onto her wrist. The moment was so celebrated it instantly earned a name: The Hand Clasp.
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Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for Turner
“I’m already writing the fanfic in my mind and I’m not even sorry about it,” said Cosmo.
“I don’t think there is a person in the world that doesn’t want to be grabbed by Brad Pitt that way,” opined Blast.
“Now you must leave us to die in peace,” decreed the Cut.
As Bastien has noted, Pitt seems to frequently remind people of how much they like his exes whenever his image could use a little extra zhuzh; just last summer, he did a friendly sit-down with Gwyneth Paltrow. A moment with Aniston on her upswing makes for a particularly potent reminder of why the fantasy of Brad Pitt is so compelling: Here is a man who is secure enough in himself to date interesting women, and to remain good friends with them after it all ends.
But Aniston’s success can also be a reminder of what is available to women who do not win the motherhood races. She’s divorced (twice), and she’s still happy. She doesn’t have children, and she is still successful. In her 50s, she’s revitalizing and reimagining her career.
So when Aniston told Allure about her infertility struggles this fall, she did so from a place of strength, as the boss who doesn’t need a man and doesn’t need babies.
In the 2000s, she told Allure, there was a narrative “that I was just selfish. I just cared about my career. And God forbid a woman is successful and doesn’t have a child. And the reason my husband left me, why we broke up and ended our marriage, was because I wouldn’t give him a kid. It was absolute lies. I don’t have anything to hide at this point.” She doesn’t have anything to hide because she has the power now.
This entire story is, in the end, a story about power: who has the power to win America’s love. When Aniston was young and hungry and coming off a hit show, she didn’t have the power to keep the tabloids from rendering her pathetic, but she does now. Back then, Jolie had the power to salvage her image from a press intent on painting her as a homewrecker, but now, she’s lost enough standing that she’s falling prey to the same misogynistic rumor-mongering that took down Amber Heard.
In 2004, Brad Pitt had the power to render his own presence in this story invisible, unremarkable, hegemonic. He’s trying to pull off the same trick here. Mostly, it’s working.
The Supreme Court case that shaped US schools, the long shadow of Covid learning loss, the after-school care crisis, and the latest classroom culture war. Plus: What is homework for, anyway?
Everything that’s happening in a country eventually passes through the doorway of its schools — and so schools, like the rest of America, are going through a lot right now. An entire generation of students missed a year, even two, of normal education in the pandemic. As soon as they re-entered classrooms, what they were learning became the center of a relentless education culture war. All that is layered over the issues that have long plagued education in the US.
Where do all of those upheavals leave us? What lessons have the last few years taught the American education system – and what do we still need to learn?
In this issue of the Highlight, we take you inside some of the biggest issues in education. Schools are where the future is formed. What happens in them will matter for generations to come.
— Libby Nelson (Policy Editor) and Ryan McCarthy (Editorial Director)
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Gracia Lam for Vox
The other long Covid
The pandemic took young people’s present. What will it do to their future?
By Bryan Walsh
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Gracia Lam for Vox
America’s afternoon afterthought
The hours between school dismissal and the end of the workday are a mess. They don’t have to be.
By Rachel M. Cohen
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Jiayue Li for Vox
The racist idea that changed American education (Coming Wednesday)
A Supreme Court decision 50 years ago may have been shaped by the claim that poor children of color can’t learn. The case’s impact has reverberated for generations.
By Matt Barnum
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Jiayue Li for Vox
Conservatives’ war on emotions in the classroom (Coming Wednesday)
Social-emotional learning has been a basic — and uncontroversial — part of education for decades. So why are conservatives waging a war against it?
By Fabiola Cineas
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Jiayue Li for Vox
Nobody knows what the point of homework is (Coming Thursday)
The homework wars are back.
By Jacob Sweet
CREDITS
Editors: Marina Bolotnikova, Ryan McCarthy, Libby Nelson, Elbert Ventura
Copy editors/fact-checkers: Elizabeth Crane, Kim Eggleston, Tanya Pai, Caitlin PenzeyMoog
Art direction: Dion Lee
Audience: Gabriela Fernandez, Shira Tarlo, Agnes Mazur
Production/project editors: Susannah Locke, Lauren Katz, Nathan Hall