Jennifer Aniston

Monday

Julie Burchill

Jennifer Aniston and the allure of woo-woo

From our UK edition

There was a time when, whenever the gossip mags wrote about Jennifer Aniston, they’d always preface her name with ‘Sad’. Sad Jen Aniston – it became one of those three-part names, like Sarah Jessica Parker or Sarah Michelle Gellar, only condescending rather than smug. For someone who was allegedly one of the most desirable women on earth, this must have been extremely annoying, recalling the line purred by the courtesan played by Marlene Dietrich in the 1932 film Shanghai Express: ‘It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily.’ It took more than one man to change Aniston’s moniker to Sad Jen: Brad Pitt, John Mayer and Justin Theroux, for starters.

Thursday

Ben Domenech

Gaslighting for Kamala

Welcome to Thunderdome. Last night, something that a month ago was unthinkable happened: Joe Biden announced from the Oval Office that he would stand down as his party’s nominee and pass the torch to a new generation of Democrats in Kamala Harris. The speech was blatantly political with the normal Jon Meacham high-school civics elements instead of sounding the type of deeply personal notes that marked the better aspects of Biden’s career. It was delivered with a world-weary tone, the old man being put out to pasture by a party and their media allies who deliberately chose to knife him at his weakest moment, despite lauding his achievements as historic for the past several years.

Wednesday

Lynn Barber

The horrors of the ‘Upskirt Decade’

From our UK edition

The subject that Sarah Ditum addresses in Toxic is why the early part of this century was ‘such a monstrous time to be famous and female. It’s about how the concept of privacy came undone and why that was a catastrophe for women’. The concept of privacy was actually undone by a judge in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 2006. A 16-year-old girl was browsing through greetings cards in a shop when a man crouched down beside her and took photographs up her skirt. A security guard saw him and called the police. The whole scene was captured on CCTV, so there was no shortage of evidence. But the judge ruled that ‘the person photographed was not in a place where she had a reasonable expectation of privacy’ and an appeals court concurred.

Monday

Ben Domenech

Trump at UFC and Kristen Bell’s dinner party: two viral moments from two Americas

Viral moments from either side of the American divide come so frequently these days that they are forgotten just as fast — but a few stick in our memory as signposts on the wandering, treacherous road we find ourselves on as people who have to share a country. The first is from Kristen Bell’s Instagram, featuring a star-studded cast at dinner at Jimmy Kimmel’s $8 million Idaho fly fishing lodge, featuring Jennifer Aniston, Jimmy Fallon, Courteney Cox, John Mulaney, Olivia Munn, Adam Scott, Jason Bateman, Shiri Appelby, Snow Patrol’s Johnny McDaid, Bell’s husband Dax Shepard and, of course, Jake Tapper. https://twitter.com/coledelbyck/status/1677334337245642753 “Excited to join your new cult,” the CNN anchor commented on Instagram.

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