Jessica Bennett

“We didn’t consider ourselves real witches, but we used the moniker because of what it represented: a powerful woman,” said author Robin Morgan, one of the protest organizers, noting that the acronym — which stood for “Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy From Hell” — probably wouldn’t go over so well today.

Today, there might be no need to sneak around. Real witches are roaming among us, and they’re seemingly everywhere.

Witches are your millennial co-workers doing tarot card readings on their lunch breaks, and professional colleagues encouraging you to join them for a new moon ceremony aimed at “career success.” (This happened to me the other day.)

Witches are influencers who use the hashtag #witchesofinstagram to share horoscopes, spells and witchy memes, and they are anti-Trump resistance activists carrying signs that say “Hex the Patriarchy” (also the title of a new book of spells) and “We are the granddaughters of the witches you weren’t able to burn.”

Witches are panelists, they are podcasters, they are members of The Wing (which calls itself a “coven”), they are in-house residents at swanky Manhattan hotels, and some might say that one is even a presidential candidate, Marianne Williamson. (Alyssa Milano, of “Charmed” fame, recently fundraised for Williamson. Coincidence?)

“I think everyone probably is the son or the daughter of a witch,” said Augusten Burroughs, the best-selling memoirist, whose new book, “Toil &amp; Trouble,” tells the story of his own witchy coming out.

“‘Witch’ is a loaded word, but I do love it,” he said, noting that his husband thinks it needs some public relations help. “I mean, I didn’t choose to write this book. It just came. And that tells me that something has been unlocked. It’s time. It is the moment somehow for witches to come out — in all their vibrant diversity.”

Indeed, this fall, at least a dozen new witch books have or will hit the market — so many that Publishers Weekly has declared it “season of the witch.”

The books span personal narrative, including that of Burroughs, as well as “Initiated: Memoir of a Witch,” by first-time author and practicing witch Amanda Yates Garcia. (She calls herself the “oracle of Los Angeles.”)

Some of the books are political, such as Lindy West’s “The Witches Are Coming” (based on a similarly titled New York Times column), which is not actually about witchcraft but misogyny in the #MeToo era. There is “Modern Witchcraft,” by Wiccan high priestess Deborah Blake, which argues for witchcraft as a female-focused religion, and “Revolutionary Witchcraft,” by Sarah Lyons, a guide to the history and practice of politically motivated magic.

There is fictional witchery in “Hex Life,” a collection of witch stories written by female fantasy authors, and also plenty of self-help. “Bitchcraft: Simple Spells for Everyday Annoyances and Sweet Revenge” is pretty much what it sounds like; “Wild Witch: A Guide to Earth Magic” focuses on magic through plants and herbs. And for those who feel they may need some basics in horticulture to make use of those spells, not to worry: There’s “The Modern Witchcraft Guide to Magickal Herbs” by Judy Ann Nock, founder of a goddess spirituality group, and “The Witch’s Herbal Apothecary,” by master herbalist Marysia Miernowska.

“I initially was nervous to publicly call myself a witch,” said Yates Garcia, who performs energetic healings and conducts magic workshops in Los Angeles. “I was brought up practicing witchcraft — my mother was a witch — and even though it does have a lineage in my family, even recently, you couldn’t really say you were a witch.”

And yet it seems the time has come to come out of the so-called broom closet.

There is no perfect way of tracking witches in America, but we do know that Wicca — the religion that has its roots, at least partially, in 1950s England, with a retired civil servant named Gerald Gardner who once tried to hex Hitler — is more popular than ever, according to a number of studies.

Not all witches are Wiccan (some are pagan), and not all Wiccans or pagans practice witchcraft, but you get the point.

Additionally, Americans of all ages and genders are more spiritual than ever: According to a 2017 survey from the Pew Research Center that examined New Age beliefs, 60% of Americans believe in one or more of the following: psychics, astrology, the presence of spiritual energy in inanimate objects (like mountains or trees) or reincarnation. More than a quarter of adults in the United States say they think of themselves as spiritual but not religious.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that witchcraft is attracting people, particularly millennial women: Interest in spirituality tends to increase in periods of upheaval, said Helen Berger, a sociologist at Brandeis University and author of “Solitary Pagans: Contemporary Witches, Wiccans, and Others Who Practice Alone,” which came out in August.

“We’re in a period of great transition; we’re all very aware of it: There’s an increase of globalization, an enormous amount of polarization, and for many of these young people, this spirituality is speaking to them,” she said. “It’s giving them autonomy.”

And, of course, witches have long been linked to women’s issues, which are front and center in the present political moment.

“I often say, show me your witches and I’ll show you your feelings about women,” said Pam Grossman, author of “Waking the Witch: Reflections on Women, Power and Magic” and host of the “Witch Wave” podcast. “Witches reflect our fears and our fantasies about women with power.”

Indeed, many believe that midwives were persecuted for being witches. Women who liked sex were called witches. In the 2008 election, Hillary Clinton was called a witch. Women who proclaimed #MeToo were, as the president himself has put it, on a “witch hunt.”

There are less political forces at play as well: 1990s nostalgia in the form of leather chokers, Lilith Fair retrospectives (Lilith, before she was a symbol of female independence, was what you might call a witch) and reboots of TV shows like “Bewitched” and “Sabrina the Teenage Witch” and films like “Practical Magic” and “The Craft.”

For more than 40 years, W.I.T.C.H. has been more or less dormant. Yet over the last couple of years, Morgan said, she has received inquiries from young activists wanting to start their own groups.

Two years ago, a group of witches in San Francisco hexed City Hall in favor of a “healthier future”; last October, a Brooklyn, New York, occult shop called Catland held a public ritual to hex Brett Kavanaugh, at the time a Supreme Court nominee. Who knows what this Halloween will hold.

“I think the same way some women took to wearing ‘Nasty Woman’ T-shirts after Trump used that label on Hillary Clinton, women have embraced the ‘witch’ label,” said Nell Scovell, a television writer who was the creator of ABC’s “Sabrina the Teenage Witch” and an executive producer on “Charmed.” “These days, so many women feel powerless that it’s fun to think about flinging Bill Barr into a wall with the flick of a finger.”

This article originally appeared in

No Need to Stage a Hunt: We're Awash With Witches

Fifty-one years ago, a group of protesters calling themselves W.I.T.C.H. staged a Halloween “hex” on Wall Street. Dressed in all black, with long peaked hats, the women sneaked through the narrow streets of downtown Manhattan late into the night, making their way to the entrance to the New York Stock Exchange, where they oozed glue into the latches of its doors. The next morning, the male bankers couldn’t get in — and the Dow reportedly fell 13 points.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren said she would “persist.”

Sen. Amy Klobuchar has challenged voters to discount women “at your own peril,” while Rep. Tulsi Gabbard insisted that a presidential race with six women is not an anomaly but “what an election should look like.”

The women running for president are promising many things as they make their pitches to voters. They are being asked repeatedly how being women may affect their chances. But so far, none of them are emphasizing the “glass ceiling.”

In fact, the phrase “glass ceiling” was trending recently not because of anything the candidates had said but because of Nike. In an ad celebrating the World Cup-winning U.S. women’s soccer team, a narrator intones, over black-and-white imagery of the players, the “I believe” chant — completing it to say that women will “conquer more than just the soccer field, like breaking every single glass ceiling.”

The symbol remains intact. In politics, the phrase became associated with the aspirations of Hillary Clinton, who spoke at key moments of success and defeat about cracking the glass ceiling. But in this barrier-breaking field of female candidates, it is noticeably absent.

“Words have their moments, especially colloquialisms,” said linguist Robin Lakoff, professor emerita at the University of California, Berkeley, whose 1975 book, “Language and Woman’s Place,” helped create the field of gender linguistics. “Often, after a word or phrase gets a lot of use, people simply stop using it — because we like to sound original and this one seems tired.”

Which is not to say it is entirely verboten — or that metaphorical ceilings are not actually being shattered. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand tweeted the term this month as part of a pledge for gender parity in national security, while Marianne Williamson notes on her campaign website that the “proverbial glass ceiling” is one of the things holding women back.

Aside from the record-breaking number of female candidates for president — along with those serving in Congress — there are more women CEOs in the Fortune 500 than ever before (though, of course, that number is still just 33), and a recent study published in the journal American Psychologist found that a majority of Americans believe women are just as competent as men — if not more.

“It’s a pretty dramatic shift,” said Alice Eagly, a social psychologist at Northwestern University who led the work, analyzing public perceptions over 70 years.

Etymology of a Term

As a term, the “glass ceiling” dates to around 1978, when it was discussed by female workers at Hewlett-Packard and used onstage at a panel discussion about women’s aspirations by an employee of the New York Telephone Co. Each used it to describe the inability of white-collar women to rise beyond the mid-manager level in their jobs and the often invisible barriers preventing that rise.

The phrase gained traction in the mid-1980s, when it appeared in an article in Adweek (quoting the outgoing editor of Working Woman magazine) and then a headline in The Wall Street Journal (“The Glass Ceiling: Why Women Can’t Seem to Break the Invisible Barrier That Blocks Them From the Top Jobs”). The New York Times ran an article in 1986 — the same year it proclaimed that, architecturally speaking, buildings made of see-through glass were “getting good reviews”— about the glass ceiling for female politicians, quoting Betty Friedan, co-founder of the National Organization for Women.

“Our women tried to go higher, and I wonder whether they ran into a glass ceiling,” Friedan said then, recalling the unsuccessful campaigns of Carol Bellamy for mayor of New York, Elizabeth Holtzman for Congress and Geraldine Ferraro for vice president. “In corporations, women get to a middle level, and then there’s a glass ceiling — not overt discrimination, just a feeling that you can go this high and no higher.”

In the years following, the term continued to go mainstream — a kind of linguistic shorthand for a problem that could be difficult to pinpoint or describe.

By the 1990s it had been used to describe the experiences of Navy women, female lawyers, women in banking, older women, black professionals (women and men), women who worked on the campaign of George Bush and the plight of female journalists — as explained by The Washington Post’s board chair at the time, Katharine Graham.

More recently, it has been uttered by the likes of Priyanka Chopra, actor Brie Larson (who this year played Captain Marvel in a rare female-led superhero film) and Madeleine Albright, who wore a glass-ceiling brooch to the Democratic National Convention in 2016.

The ‘Highest, Hardest Glass Ceiling’

Still, nobody has used the allegory quite like Clinton, who has for years talked about the “highest, hardest glass ceiling” she was determined to crack. She spoke of it movingly in her 2008 concession speech, saying that while she was not able to shatter it, the ceiling now had “about 18 million cracks.”

Eight years later, when she became the first female nominee of a major party’s ticket, she leaned into the metaphor even harder. When she spoke by video to the Democratic National Convention a virtual glass ceiling broke onscreen; she accepted the nomination later in the week while saying, “When there are no ceilings, the sky’s the limit.”

And then, of course, there was the fateful night at the Javits Center in Manhattan, under a literal glass ceiling where confetti shaped like glass shards was supposed to rain from above as Clinton acknowledged victory.

“I remember thinking that the symbolism was going to feel so satisfying,” said Emma Gray, 31, who reports on women’s issues for HuffPost and remembers staring upward during a quiet moment at the Javits Center on election night. “We were under a literal glass ceiling and that ceiling was going to metaphorically shatter. And then it did not.”

The next morning, Clinton gave a concession speech, and Google Search results for “glass ceiling” peaked, higher even than their previous peak during the Democratic National Convention that summer. She noted somberly that while “we have still not shattered that highest and hardest glass ceiling,” someone would, eventually.

‘An Outdated Standard’

With six women in the 2020 race, perhaps the phrase seems “almost a little bit embarrassing, or maybe just irrelevant,” said Lakoff, the linguist, adding that “of course it’s not.”

Which is not to say that the candidates are thinking about gender any less. To the contrary, the less they talk about it, the more it might indicate they’re actually thinking about it more.

“There’s a worry that if you draw too much attention to these biases, to your womanhood, that it reinforces people’s doubts about it,” said Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at the Wharton School of Business, pointing to research from the corporate world that illustrated that point. “So if I were a female candidate in this cycle, which I realize is a strange sentence to say, I would be afraid that talking about the glass ceiling would only reinforce it.”

And, anyway, there are other terms to play around with these days — such as “glass cliff,” to describe the phenomenon of women and minorities being tasked with leadership during periods of crisis, which was recently added to Dictionary.com. (The “cliff” part is the idea that they’re being set up to fail.)

Or “motherhood penalty” to describe bias specifically against working mothers and “likability trap” to refer to the challenge female leaders face by having to prove they are tough and likable at once.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the 29-year-old congresswoman from New York, has opted for “shake the table” and “build our own house” to describe breaking barriers, while Rep. Ayanna S. Pressley, the first black woman elected to Congress from Massachusetts, has noted that “When it comes to women of color candidates, folks don’t just talk about a glass ceiling. What they describe is a concrete one.”

This time around, Klobuchar noted that the term itself isn’t just about winning the White House — it’s about running in the first place. The number of women in the race is “a testament to the progress we have made,” she said.

“There are still barriers, but the highest and hardest glass ceiling has so many cracks in it, it is well on its way to becoming an outdated standard.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/us/politics/glass-ceiling-female-candidates-2020.html" id="5eb0c216-12bd-31e9-a4f6-d64a9881c8aa">The New York Times</a>.

Who Still Calls it a 'Glass Ceiling?' Not the 6 Women Running for President

Sen. Kamala Harris is prepared to “break things.”

NEW YORK — People didn’t talk much about sex in the 1980s — at least not openly. So when a pint-size former Israeli sniper with a thick German accent began saying things like “premature ejaculation” and enter “from behind” on local radio — and later, television — people listened (closely).

Dr. Ruth banned the word “frigid” on her show. She schooled Conan O’Brien on why “blue balls” was sexist — it’s a phrase for which there is no female equivalent — and suggested they create a companion term for women: “blue lips.”

“It never caught on,” she said this week.

Now almost 91, Dr. Ruth Westheimer is the subject of a new documentary, “Ask Dr. Ruth,” chronicling her journey from German-Jewish refugee of the Holocaust — who taught herself English by reading romance novels — to the celebrity sex therapist we know today.

And today’s Dr. Ruth is very, very busy. She’s on the board of the Museum of Jewish Heritage (her pitch to donors: “You get good sex for the rest of your life”), teaches two college courses, attends opera and concerts and is active on Twitter. She has published more than 40 books — including two new ones, a graphic novel-style autobiography called “Roller Coaster Grandma” and a children’s book called “Crocodile, You’re Beautiful!” about embracing difference. “Ask Dr. Ruth” is in theaters now and will be available on Hulu in June.

On a recent morning at her home in Washington Heights, where she has lived for 50 years, Dr. Ruth was laced up in her signature Merrell sneakers juggling two phone lines, a ringing fax machine and questions from this reporter. She does not take calls before 10 a.m.

These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Q: What has changed in the decades you’ve been giving sex advice?

A: I get less questions about women’s sexual satisfaction. Women have learned they are responsible for their own orgasms. I also get less questions from men about premature ejaculation. Maybe more questions these days about desire, from people who say they don’t feel like having sex, and not having time. Especially the millennials say they don’t have time for sex.

Q: The millennials say that?

A: Some millennial person, a woman, said to me recently: “How can we have sex? We work so hard.” That doesn’t hold true for me. In the olden days, immigrants, for example, who worked in the needle trade, who worked in the garment industry, they worked much harder. They still had sex. Otherwise we wouldn’t be around.

Q: What did you say to her?

Q: Did you say “Get off your phone?”

A: That’s another thing! I’m very concerned these days about the art of conversation getting lost. We walk into a restaurant, and you see even families sitting on their phones. I’m not saying that there’s no use for the phone. You reach people fast if there’s an emergency. But we have to be aware of the art of conversation getting lost.

Q: How does that affect people’s sex lives?

A: You can’t have a couple not talking to each other for 24 hours then expect to have good sex. It doesn’t work. Part of a good relationship is a good conversation. “How was your day today?” “Do you have any issues?” “Did you call your mother-in-law?”

Q: Has conversation been helped or hurt by online dating?

A: There’s a term ... for when a person disappears. What is that term?

Q: Ghosting?

A: Right. I was looking for that term of ghosting. (She writes it down.) That’s terrible.

I’m not a disc jockey, so when I was on the radio I didn’t use any songs. However, one song I did use. A woman called in and said that she’s dating a man, and they love each other, for three years. But she never sees him on weekends. I said, “Is he working on weekends?” She said, “No.” I said, “Does he take care of aging parents on weekends?” She said, “No.” I said, “Is he married?” She said, “Yes.” So I made a sign to the engineer and I said, play the song, “Wash That Man Right Out of Your Hair And Send Him On His Way.” I told her to call me back in three weeks.

Q: Did she?

A: She did. And she did send him on his way.

Q: Ha!

Q: Do you think people are more knowledgeable about sex because of the internet?

A: No question that they do know more. But not always correct.

Q: What myths still need debunking?

A: I think that the most common myth to be debunked is the issue of size. Size does not matter. Except if it’s minuscule.

Q: Then what?

A: Then that’s a different story. I would have to talk to a urologist.

Q: What’s your view on pornography?

A: Very interesting that you ask that, because I’m going for the second time to do [an Oxford-style debate], and I’m going to debate pornography. What I don’t know yet is, do they want me to debate for or against. I can do both. For it, I would say that anything that would help a couple is perfectly all right. Just close the door so the children don’t watch it. If I would argue against, I would say, if people think that the erections depicted in pornographic movies are correct, that the orgasmic response of women is correct, then they have to take a course with Dr. Ruth Westheimer. Because it’s all exaggerated.

Q: I’m sure you read that article in The Atlantic about how Americans are having less sex.

A: I don’t believe in that. I’m not saying that they didn’t do a serious survey. But I don’t want to believe in that. Because in order to cement a relationship, in order to keep that spark alive, you do have to have sex. You have to be interested in the other person. And part of being interested in the other person is, among other things like going for a walk in the springtime with all the beautiful flowers, to have good sex.

Q: In the film, your son talks about being away at college, walking down the hall to his dorm and hearing his mother’s voice streaming from people’s rooms. What’s your advice to parents who want to talk to their kids about sex?

A: The child has to know that they can ask the questions without being embarrassed. If one parent is comfortable with the subject, then the person who’s comfortable should do it. The other should bring books home and say, “If you have a question, I’ll willing to answer.” With my children, I left books. I did not do the talk. They’d heard enough.

Q: What is your secret to longevity?

A: I’m lucky that I’m healthy and interested in what I’m doing, and interested in what other people do.

Q: Part of what makes your advice so palatable is that it’s delivered with humor.

A: In the Jewish tradition, in the Talmud, it says, “A lesson taught with humor is a lesson retained.” I could not tell you a joke, but I can use humor where it’s appropriate.

Q: Your tweets are very funny.

A: I talk, and Pierre [Lehu], my minister of communication, puts it on paper. That’s the secret. I’m not computer-literate at all. I just know what the computer can do. So I call Pierre, and I say, “Yesterday I was at the party,” and I let people take a picture to send it to Pierre. I put it on the Twitter. 96,000-something [followers] — 96,700, I think. You can find it out yourself.

Q: Yeah. I can look.

A: Because you are computer-literate!

Q: Anything else you want to say?

A: I have to go. Because this little lady has a lot to do.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/03/movies/dr-ruth-sex-millennials.html" id="070b1972-e379-3e84-aea0-7499942a90c4">The New York Times</a>.

Dr. Ruth to Millennials: 'Make Time' for Sex

(A Word With)

LOS ANGELES — Jennifer Aniston was trying to have a quiet weekend away.

It was just after her 50th birthday, and she’d boarded a plane for Mexico with six of her best girlfriends — most of whom have known her since her early days in Los Angeles, before Brad, before Justin, before “Friends” and before the tabloids, when they lived as neighbors on the same street in Laurel Canyon. (“We called ourselves the Hill People,” she said.) But a few minutes in, the pilot asked to speak with her. They had a tire missing, and they would have to return to Los Angeles.

As the pilot burned off fuel, Aniston spent the next four hours cracking jokes and trying to remain calm (she is terrified of flying), while fielding text messages from friends who’d read about the “emergency landing” — which hadn’t actually happened yet.

The women landed safely, switched planes and, the next night, gathered for a ritual they’ve been doing for three decades: a goddess circle. Seated on cushions, cross-legged on the living room floor, they passed around a beechwood talking stick decorated with feathers and charms, much as they had done for every major event of their lives. They had circled before Aniston’s weddings to Brad Pitt and Justin Theroux. They circled when babies were born, and when Aniston and Theroux had to put down their dog, Dolly. This time they set the circle’s intention: to celebrate how far they’ve come — and to toast Aniston’s next chapter.

“It’s so weird. There’s so much doom around that number,” Aniston said of 50, noting that the New Yorker in her (she spent most of her childhood on the Upper West Side) was slightly horrified at the thought of the term “goddess circle” appearing in a story about her. “Should we just call it a ‘circle’?” she asked.

We were sitting in the kitchen of her sunny, midcentury Bel-Air home, on a Tuesday afternoon in late August. She was warm and radiant, which is how glossy magazines often describe her, and also thoughtful, inquisitive and self-deprecating, which is not.

She asked about the meaning of my tattoo, which led to a conversation about my dog, which led her to ask Siri, “Hey Siri, what does a cockapoo look like?” (“I’m like a weird dog person, it turns out, like a dog lady,” she said, running her hand through her dog Clyde’s fresh haircut.) She is surprisingly unguarded for someone for whom the tiniest kernel of news can transform into a thousand stories.

But about that age thing: “I’m entering into what I feel is one of the most creatively fulfilling periods of my life,” she said. “Seriously,” she continued, pausing to knock on her wooden coffee table. “I’ve been doing this for 30 years and I feel like it’s just about to really bloom.”

This is the kind of thing actors say all the time in interviews. But in this case, it feels like more than a platitude.

Since “Friends” ended, Aniston has had critical success in smaller independent films, mixed reviews for mainstream movies, a lot of product endorsements, a couple of outright flops. But nothing has clicked quite like Rachel Green, the beloved runaway bride she played on “Friends.” She’s spent 15 years taking parts that had the potential to get her past that iconic role, that haircut, that “cloak of Rachel,” as she once put it — but they didn’t deliver. Perhaps the only way to do that may be to return to the medium that made her famous.

So come Nov. 1, she’ll have a homecoming of sorts as the star of Apple’s “The Morning Show” — a big-budget drama set behind the scenes of a news show that looks a whole lot like “Today.” Aniston plays Alex Levy, a serious morning anchor whose personal life is complicated and professional life is more so, compounded by the sudden firing of her longtime co-host (played by Steve Carell) for sexual misconduct.

For Apple, the show represents the shiniest bauble in its launch slate as it attempts to challenge the likes of Netflix with a streaming service of its own — and among the first shows to hang its premise on #MeToo.

For Aniston, who is the spine of the show as both a lead and an executive producer, it’s the chance to dig into a more sophisticated dramatic role that, as she put it, has everything: “children, guilt, power struggle, being a woman in the industry, going through a divorce, publicly going through a divorce, feeling alienated, being just a little bit of a screw-up.”

It’s a role that is asking her to draw on more of her personal life than ever before. And it may also be her best chance to finally get the world to see her as an actor, not just a star.

‘We basically just started over’

“The Morning Show” didn’t begin as a #MeToo story.

Three years ago, when Aniston told Michael Ellenberg, a former executive at HBO who oversaw “Game of Thrones” and “The Leftovers,” that “television is not not an option for me,” Matt Lauer was still delivering the morning news and Harvey Weinstein was gunning for Oscars. “I said to him, ‘I just want to be a part of something great, I don’t care where it lands,’” Aniston recalled. “Because God knows, the movies have been great and they’ve been horrible, so you just don’t know.”

When Ellenberg later phoned Aniston to tell her he’d acquired rights to “Top of the Morning,” a nonfiction book by the media reporter Brian Stelter that delves into the drama-filled world of morning television — and had also spoken to Reese Witherspoon, with whom he worked on “Big Little Lies” — the women immediately called each other.

“We were so psyched,” said Witherspoon, who has known Aniston since they played sisters on “Friends.” She noted that the two had wanted to work together for some time, but that it was rare to have “two very, fully fleshed out female leads in one project.

Aniston signed on to play Alex, a morning host akin to Ann Curry, who must traverse the cutthroat, ego-filled world of TV news as a woman in her 40s who executives declare is past her prime. She collides with Witherspoon’s character, a brash, younger field reporter who may be gunning for her job or could become her best friend, we aren’t yet sure.

Apple bought the show in a bidding war and ordered up two seasons. If the people who brought you the iPod were going to compete with Netflix and Hulu, Aniston and Witherspoon — who also serve as executive producers — seemed like a pretty good bet. “I just felt like this was exactly what we were looking for,” said Eddy Cue, a senior vice president at Apple overseeing the new service, who declined to name the price the company paid for the show but acknowledged that the draw of luring Aniston back to TV added to the appeal.

But then Weinstein happened. Charlie Rose was canceled. Matt Lauer was fired from “Today.” “And we basically just started over,” Witherspoon said. “We had to.”

Kerry Ehrin, a creator of the A&amp;E; series “Bates Motel,” was brought in to write a new script, replacing the original showrunner. The updated premise: Alex’s longtime co-host is fired after news of his behavior on the job (and in his dressing room) becomes public, throwing the show and her career into chaos.

Carell would be cast to play the disgraced anchor — whom Aniston described as a kind of lovable, cocky narcissist who, like so many powerful men before him, “just thinks everybody wants to sleep with him.” Witherspoon’s character would be positioned as a potential replacement to fill his now open anchor chair. “The Morning Show” would still tackle gender and ageism, but also tell a more complicated story of what happens when an idol falls. What does it mean for his unknowing co-workers and friends, like Alex? His ability to seek redemption? And, without knowing exactly of what he’s accused, whose side should we be on?

The ‘garage band days’

Now is the point in many of these interviews when the reporter asks the subject if she, too, has a #MeToo story.

Aniston says she does not, though she has certainly experienced her share of sexism in 30 years in the business.

“Agents,” she began, ticking off a list. “Studios. Finding out what this actor made versus that actor made.”

It’s our second meeting at her vast, modernist home, and this time we’re joined by Kristin Hahn, Aniston’s best friend of three decades and producing partner of two, who is also an executive producer on “The Morning Show.” The duo reflected on what it was like when they began in Hahn’s garage in Ojai, California, 18 years ago (“We call them the garage band days,” Aniston said) to try to make movies.

“It was so much harder …” began Hahn.

“ … to get our phone calls taken,” finished Aniston.

“Now actors are taken more seriously as producers,” Hahn continued. “But when we started, even though Jen had been on a TV series for eight years, it was still a little like, ‘Oh, isn’t that cute.’”

It was there in that garage that Hahn and Aniston, with Pitt, co-founded the production company Plan B, which was then called Bloc Productions, a name that had come to Aniston during a game of Scrabble, she said. They developed “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” “A Mighty Heart” and “The Departed,” on which Hahn was an executive producer.

When Aniston and Pitt’s marriage ended, Aniston and Hahn decided they would be the ones to leave the company: “It was the symbolic equivalent of, ‘I’ll move out of the house,’” said Hahn. Plan B went on to develop the Oscar-winning films “12 Years a Slave” and “Moonlight,” while Aniston and Hahn formed their own company, Echo Films, as a side project when Hahn wasn’t writing — she wrote the screenplay for the Netflix movie “Dumplin’” — and Aniston wasn’t acting.

“Our mission statement was, Tell strong stories about strong women,” Aniston said. “Flawed, complicated, messy. ’Cause that wasn’t happening.” (Currently in development: “First Ladies,” a political comedy for Netflix in which Aniston will play the first lesbian president opposite Tig Notaro, and “The Goree Girls,” a project about one of the first all-female country bands.)

As a producer on “The Morning Show,” colleagues described Aniston as “detail-oriented” (Hahn), “thorough” (Ellenberg) and precise — “involved with every set, with every costume, with every piece of casting,” said Witherspoon.

When I mentioned to Aniston later that many had noted her attention to detail, she joked that was “basically nice ways of saying ‘obsessive.’”

To research her role, she went behind the scenes at “Good Morning America” and spent time with Diane Sawyer, studying everything from her clothing choices to her caffeine habits, which involved toggling between Coca-Cola, Red Bull and coffee. On set, Aniston handpicked her character’s books (“100 Years of Bauhaus” on her coffee table, Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink” in her work bag), the sconces in her apartment (French modern), and her clothes (tailored; monochromatic; an occasional pop of color).

She hung photos of her real-life friends — the “Hill People”— in Alex’s dressing room and apartment.

There were times Aniston and Ehrin, the showrunner, had healthy disagreements — such as whether Alex, upset with her daughter, would actually say a phrase to the effect of, “I practically broke my vagina with that big head of yours,” using an expletive before “vagina,” to describe childbirth.

“I was like, that would just never come out of my mouth! Alex’s mouth,” said Aniston, becoming animated.

“And Kerry kept saying, ‘Trust me on this,’” said Hahn.

After two weeks of back and forth, Aniston finally agreed to try the line — and they got it on the first take. “It just flew out of my mouth,” she said.

So ultimately she thought Alex would say it? I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “But, mind you, I’m playing a person who’s a mother. I’ve never shoved anything through my vagina, you know what I mean? So it’s sort of like understanding where it comes from, you know, like tapping into all of the mothers that I know, and understanding how something that hysterical and vulnerable and raw is possible.”

Hahn leaned over to note that Aniston had, in fact, been there — in the room, at the foot of her bed — for the delivery of Hahn’s daughter.

“I could have actually done it if the doctor had let me,” Aniston said.

“I literally came back into consciousness hearing the doctor saying, ‘Uh, Jen, you’re in my light. I can’t really see,’” Hahn said.

“That’s what friends are for.”

‘There’s a similarity to my life’

You could say that the story of Alex Levy is also the story of Jennifer Aniston: one of being underestimated and overexposed, known for a thing that may or may not have anything in common with who you actually are, trying to reassert control over your narrative.

“Jen has lived in the public eye for so long,” said Ellenberg. To play the role of Alex, he says, “she’s drawing on real stuff in her life.”

Alex, who is declared by her male boss to have passed her “sell-by date.” Alex, whose smooth smile appears on billboards across the city but whose life at home is more complicated. Alex, who the world feels they know intimately, personally, but are nowhere near acquainted with.

“There’s a similarity to my life,” Aniston acknowledged. “I relate in ways of feeling like, when you don’t want to be seen, and you don’t want to go out of the house, and you want to just scream, and you don’t want to walk on a red carpet. I don’t want to stand behind a podium, I don’t want to have my photograph taken, I want to just cry today. You know?”

I asked if she could have played this role at any other point in her life.

“No,” she said firmly. “I didn’t have the experience.”

There is a saying that’s popular these days, translated into memes and posted on Instagram, that the freedom of aging as a woman is the ability to just care less (said with a punchy expletive).

Aniston sort of buys that, but she thinks the freedom may come more from working than age.

“It’s experience backing up ambition,” said Hahn.

As they are talking — and I’m preparing to leave — another member of the goddess circle, Andrea Bendewald, who is Aniston’s oldest friend and also plays Alex’s makeup artist on the show, walks into the house holding a book that the group is reading. It’s called “Lifespan,” written by a Harvard Medical School scientist, David Sinclair, who makes the case that the key to slowing down the aging process is to access the so-called “vitality” genes.

They are worried that mention of this book will make them appear like they’re obsessed with not aging, but perhaps what it signifies more clearly is that they are interested in longevity — the longevity to keep working, to keep taking risks, to redefine themselves.

“It’s taken time for me to get where I am and I put a lot of work into my craft,” Aniston said. “I’ve failed. I’ve succeeded. I’ve overcome. I’ve, you know, I’ve stayed around. I’m still here.”

That, in Hollywood anyway, is perhaps the most radical thing a woman can do.

(Fall Preview)

It's a New Morning for Jennifer Aniston

<h1>NEW YORK — “I should let you know I am not OK,” said actress Maddie Corman, 49. She was in gray jeans and a T-shirt, barefoot in a small studio on the first day of rehearsal for the play she has written and will star in, “Accidentally Brave.” “This is not one of those shows where I’m here to tell you that I was OK, and then I wasn’t OK, but now I am.”</h1>

Corman gestured behind her, where an image of her and her husband, director Jace Alexander, would be projected onto a screen. They would appear alongside an article from The New York Times highlighting the couple’s wedding 21 years ago.

At the time, a friend described a young Corman as “incredibly open and loving” — a rarity in the world of film, he said. “Oddly,” he continued, “she’s only become more so, which makes me fear for her at times, but I also admire her bravery.”

“Brave” was not what Corman set out to be. But 3 1/2 years ago, while driving to work on a “semi-terrible TV show,” as she put it, she got a phone call that can’t even be described as the kind of call nobody wants to get because it would never even occur to most people that this call would be possible. The police were at her house, her teenage daughter sobbed through the receiver. Her husband had been arrested on child pornography charges.

What do you do when your husband of two decades — father of your three children — is suddenly revealed publicly to have a shameful and disturbing secret?

If you’re Corman, at first you think there must be a terrible mistake. This was a man who, as she says onstage, “listens to NPR and makes bad jokes and sings songs at the piano and reads The New Yorker and plans for the future and who doesn’t flirt with my friends.” How can this be? she recalled thinking.

When the police made it clear it was not a mistake, she pulled over to the side of the road and threw up. She picked up her husband on a street corner in Brooklyn, after he was released on bail, and she asked him if it was true (yes, and he said he needed help) and if he had ever touched anyone (he swore he had not). Then she punched him, and she sobbed, and she called her kids and reassured them that everything was going to be OK, even though, as she puts it in the play, “I do not recognize the voice coming out of my mouth.”

Corman returned to the set of the semi-terrible show the next day, because she had to — who knew if her husband would ever work again — and she bummed a cigarette even though she didn’t smoke, and she somehow did her lines, and she kept wondering, do I tell anyone?

That question became irrelevant, because an article about the arrest would soon appear in The New York Post.

But this was just the beginning of a journey — “Oh my God, I hate the word ‘journey,’” Corman said during rehearsal, opting instead for “thing” — she would embark on, which is not yet over. Somewhere along the way, she began writing it all down, workshopping it with a friend, the director Kristin Hanggi, who reached out in one of Corman’s low moments and who seemed not to be judging.

Hanggi encouraged her to turn the writing into a one-woman play, which opens this month at the DR2 Theater. It is directed by Hanggi (“Rock of Ages”) and produced by Tony winner Daryl Roth (“Gloria: A Life”), who said she had “admired Maddie as an actress, and am now equally impressed with her writing.”

The title — “Accidentally Brave” — is a reference to the people, the many people, who kept telling Corman “how ‘brave’ I was,” she said. “I didn’t mean to be brave, but this is what I was dealt.”

Oh, and here’s what she calls the spoiler: Nearly four years later, after rehab, an ongoing 12-step program, couples therapy and much anguished wrestling with questions of ethics, family and the nature of forgiveness, she and her husband remain married.

At home on a recent morning in Harlem, where she now lives with her husband and their 15-year-old twin boys (her daughter is away at college), she sat cross-legged on her bed, her husband beside her, ticking off her list of fears about making their story even more public than it already is.

“I mean, a new fear pops up every day,” she said.

She is afraid she will hurt her children more than they’ve already been hurt. She is afraid of what people will say — not just about what her husband did but of her decision to stay with him. She is worried that, by virtue of staying, she is somehow undermining the women who have so bravely spoken up to say #MeToo — of which she is also one. (Last year, Corman was one of nine women who spoke out against playwright Israel Horovitz.)

“And then there are the technical fears: How is it all going to come together,” she said. “So it’s the fears of a writer, the fears of an actor and the fears of a human all combined into one soup.”

She paused. “But then I do remember that living it was scarier than doing this.”

In 2016, Alexander pleaded guilty to two felony counts related to possessing and sharing illegal and obscene performances of sexual conduct by a child under 17. He was sentenced to 10 years probation and had to register as a sex offender.

Shortly after, Corman and Alexander sold their family home in Dobbs Ferry, New York, where they had lived a town over from her father and a few houses away from his mother, actress Jane Alexander. They are now renters. “It’s a really small town,” Corman said of their former home. “Everyone, everyone knew.” Their children switched schools. Corman became the family breadwinner.

Her husband, best known for his work on “Law &amp; Order,” is now producing a documentary — working title: “Tsunami” — about the destructive forces of pornography.

“You’ve had the worst thing you’ve ever done exposed to the entire world,” said Alexander, who spent a month and a half in an inpatient rehabilitation facility and remains part of a 12-step program for sex addicts. “It was incredibly painful and incredibly destructive, but it allowed me to reinvestigate the way I lived my life.”

As for sharing that story with the world, he said, “Maddie has always said to me, a huge element of telling this story is service.”

But this play is not about the details of her husband’s crimes, or what may have led him there (the play hints at “what happened to him in his childhood”). “That is not my story to tell,” Corman said. Rather, “Accidentally Brave” is her story — “my own messy truth,” she said. While her husband, she said, has been entirely supportive of her doing it, she said he has not read the script.

Jessica Bennett

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