Notable Pairings

John F. Kennedy & Jacqueline Kennedy

Kennedy's political ambition and Jackie's cultural stewardship and irreducible personal elegance gave the White House a sustained sense that it represented something worth aspiring to. She turned the building into a cultural monument, and he was the project she was working on.

Queen Victoria & Prince Albert

Victoria's sense of duty and consistency in the monarchical role and Albert's ambition to modernize British institutions produced a co-regency in which stability and reform were both present, each enacted by the other party. She grieved him for forty years, which is its own kind of statement about the pairing.

Napoleon Bonaparte & Josephine de Beauharnais

Napoleon's relentless drive toward conquest and Josephine's social grace and warmth produced a pairing in which ambition and charm served each other, until the political requirement of an heir dissolved a marriage he continued to mourn. He divorced her and married an Austrian archduchess. His last word was reportedly her name.

Bill Gates & Paul Allen

Gates's competitive drive and systematic business execution, combined with Allen's curiosity and technical vision, produced the founding of Microsoft. Allen saw what software would become and brought Gates the idea. Gates built the company that got there first. Allen was forced out in 1983 and spent the rest of his life pursuing everything else he was curious about.

Larry Page & Sergey Brin

Page's focus on scale and relentless execution, combined with Brin's mathematical curiosity and delight in unsolved problems, produced a founding partnership whose product was both an engineering breakthrough and a business. Brin developed the ranking algorithm as a dissertation project. Page saw what it could do at a billion times the scale and built a company around it.

Michael Jordan & Scottie Pippen

Jordan's singular competitive drive and Pippen's selfless defensive excellence and willingness to subordinate individual recognition to collective outcome produced six championships neither would have won alone. Jordan was the reason opponents prepared differently. Pippen was the reason it worked when they did.

Abraham Lincoln & Stephen Douglas

Lincoln's argument that slavery was a moral wrong that no popular sovereignty could legitimate and Douglas's position that democratic procedure and interstate compromise mattered more than any single moral question defined the 1858 Senate debates. Lincoln lost the election. Two years later Douglas supported his presidency. The debate itself became the text that formed Lincoln's national reputation.

Margaret Thatcher & Arthur Scargill

Thatcher's economic restructuring, which treated the declining coal industry as an efficiency problem requiring resolution, and Scargill's framing of the strike as a defense of communities against deliberate state destruction created a confrontation whose terms were set by incompatible values. Thatcher won. Scargill argued this was the only possible outcome once she had decided to fight. Both were correct about what the other was doing.

Jay-Z & Beyoncé

Jay-Z's systematic construction of a business and cultural empire and Beyonce's insistence on using her platform to document and disrupt racial and gender injustice produced a partnership whose private difficulties became some of the most commercially and artistically significant music of the 21st century. Lemonade was a public reckoning. He answered it, at album length, in 4:44.