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Spreadumentarians,

We haven’t awoken to this many breathless text messages since Friday, October 2, 2020—the day that the world learned, via an overnight tweet, that Donald Trump had Covid. That was a biggie. But this past Monday morning, there was a similar volume of thrill awaiting in our inboxes as soon as the alarm went off: Nathan Fielder had made a secret documentary with Theranos scamstress Elizabeth Holmes, which screened at the Telluride Film Festival, where the response had been effusive. While we were sleeping, A24 had released the teaser trailer for You Can See Everything; by 7 a.m. EST, people we know had watched it between two and 24 times. The memes of Holmes—all bugged-out, effusive eyes, and Stepford smile—were crashing in.

The excitement felt dang good! And arriving just as pool-hopping, flip-flopping, beach-snacking season came to its official close, it couldn’t have hit at a better time. Buh-bye summer, a packed fall pop-culture slate awaits! We realized it was high time to get rolling on the Spread’s very own autumn preview, which we begin today with a sumptuous buffet of 19 hand-picked, all-new TV shows to gorge yourself on through Thanksgiving. Next week, a full feast of fall movies, followed by the handful of books that are about to burn up your nightstand.

As usual, we’ve also got you covered with a smattering of the week’s Spreadiest op-eds, profiles, essays, reporting, and features from the likes of Lauren Collins, Lizzy Goodman, Véronique Hyland, and Elizabeth Bruenig.

Hope you’re hungry,

Rachel & Maggie

P.S. Speaking of TV: Tonight at 11 p.m., unofficial Spread correspondent (we’re ironing out the contract!) Jia Tolentino will discuss America’s obsession with plastic surgery on the Daily Show. Prop those perimenopausal eyes open with toothpicks and keep ’em peeled!

P.P.S. We wouldn’t say no to you booping that ❤️ button.

The Spreadiest Shows of Fall 2026!

Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, September 17 (Netflix): Ryan Murphy does not sleep. This time his ghoulish anthology series is taking on the Victorian-era axe murderess, played here by Ella Beatty (as in Warren and Annette’s daughter). Also starring: Charlie Hunnam and Rebecca Hall (the parents), Vicky Krieps (the maid), and Bille Lourde (the sister). Also: Sarah Paulson as…Aileen Wuornos?

Youth, September 20 (HBO): Things don’t get much Spreadier than a Sharon Horgan half hour, and in this one she’s a recently divorced, crushingly sandwiched 50-year-old.

Line of Fire, September 21 (NBC): Hope Davis, fresh off of Furious (keep reading!), completes her comeback—and looks a whole lot like Hillary Clinton, no?—alongside longtime Spreadthrob Peter Krause (Nate Fisher forever) in an hour-long family drama that’s also a twisty crime thriller.

Brothers, September 23 (Apple TV): True Detective pardners Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson reunite for a comedy that turns the subtext (dang do these two sound alike…and look alike…) into text in a half-hour, eight-episode limited series.

A Different World, September 24 (Netflix): The reboot of the beloved ’80s sitcom stars Maleah Joi Moon, who won a Tony for playing Alicia Keys in Hell’s Kitchen, as she sets out to carve her own path at a fictional HBCU.

My Sad Dead, September 24 (Netflix): Created by everybody’s favorite moody Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín (Jackie, Spencer), this miniseries follows a middle-aged doctor with a “sixth sense.” When her niece arrives for a visit, literally all hell breaks loose.

American Horror Story: 13, September 24 (FX/Hulu): The gang’s all here—Sarah Paulson, Evan Peters, Emma Roberts, Billie Lourd, Gabourey Sidibe, Jessica Lange, Mena Suvari, Frances Conroy—and some colorful newbies, too. Please welcome John Waters and Tig Notaro to the franchise!

War, October 1 (HBO): A legal drama starring Sienna Miller (hot) and Dominic West (hot) at the center of a high-profile divorce case.

East of Eden, October 1 (HBO): Zoe Kazan’s big-budget, seven-episode adaptation of the Steinbeck novel stars Spreadgoddess Florence Pugh, Spreadcrush Mike Faist, and Plazababydaddy Christopher Abbott.

Carrie, October 7 (Prime): An eight-episode limited series based on the pig-blood-soaked Stephen King novel—and subsequent Sissy Spacek classic—about a socially stunted teenager who wades into the horrors of high school only to find that she has telekinetic powers!

Below, October 7 (Netflix): When a sea monster surfaces in a Newfoundland fishing village, Josh Hartnett (forever Tripp Fontaine1 to us) and Mackenzie Davis (an actress with a middling profile but incredible taste in work: Halt & Catch Fire, Tully, Station Eleven) must rise up and save the day. While the description sounds a whole lot like Widow’s Bay, we’re assured this is a six-episode limited thriller.

Crystal Lake, October 15 (Peacock): Potentially too terrifying for your Spreaditors to actually sit through but starring the superbly Spready Linda Cardellini, this Friday the 13th prequel has eight episodes, so you can make more than a week of sleepless nights out of it. So thoughtful of them.

Phony, October 20 (Hulu): Spread deity Connie Britton and one of our very favorite nepobabies Sam Nivola—please give our best to your mom (Emily Mortimer) and pops (Alessandro Nivola)—team up for a half-hour mystery comedy: When high -school-age Sonny wakes up after a car accident, he can’t help but wonder: Has his mom been replaced by an imposter?!

Nocturne, October 30 (AppleTV): A crime thriller that sounds pretty Mare of Easttown to us—here’s hoping—features Liev Schreiber as a former homicide detective who retires to Pennsylvania only to find a serial killer is on the loose! There are several sights for sore eyes among the cast, including Zazie Beetz, Chrissy Metz, and Rory Culkin.

The Body, November 11 (Netflix): A psychological drama about a high school dance team that begins having prophetic visions, causing the whole town to, like, freak the f*ck out!!!!!!!!

The Good Daughter, November 12 (Peacock): Rose Byrne and Meghann Fahy (double swoon) play sisters in this dark drama about surviving violence and processing buried trauma based on the Karin Slaughter novel.

The Altruists, November 19 (Netflix): We are already seated to watch Julia Garner soar once again in another ripped-from-the-headlines limited series about a fraudster (or two), this one about the collapse of FTX. Anthony Boyle plays founder Sam Bankman-Fried; Garner is his girlfriend, business partner, and Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison.

Dig, November 23 (Peacock): Ta-ta to Pawnee, because we’re going to Greece with Amy Poehler! Maggie has been poppin’ bottles since this half-hour archeology comedy starring and cocreated by her parasocial bestie was announced.

The Murder of JonBenét Ramsey, No date yet (Netflix): Are we shocked that this tawdry real-life tale is being broached? No, this is America. Are we surprised that it will star such a sterling cast as Melissa McCarthy, Clive Owen, Alison Pill, Garrett Hedlund (Country Strong Forever—are we right?), and Margo Martindale? Yes, yes, we are.

Psst, Paid Subscribers: You will never again be left holding the remote, aimlessly scrolling with that “…now what did my Spreaditors say I should watch?” feeling, because at the bottom of this issue we’ve provided a link to a handy-dandy printable/downloadable version of this fall TV preview. Enjoy!

Everyone else: Help us help you have the least boring fall ever. Pay for a subscription to the Spread, why don’t you?

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The Spreadiest Reads of the Week!

Calling Gloriaaaaaaa

So much ink has been spilled on the passing of Gloria Steinem that we began to wonder: Are we the only two lady writers/editors who weren’t invited to the woman’s Upper East Side triplex? If we had to pick two winners to savor—and we do, right?—we’ll highlight Rebecca Traister’s piece, which has real insight and great access (they spent a lot of time together) and deals head-on with the complexity of Steinem’s legacy as feminism’s best saleswoman, who used her movie star looks to her advantage and, yes, committed the occasional spectacular fuck up—but who also did a helluva lot of good. And of course, you don’t want to miss Steinem herself: Did she know her last essay would be published in the New Yorker, just days after her death? Her closing piece of advice, on the question of what to do in these crazy-making times:

“Treat every woman as a full human being, an equal human being, whether that means encouraging your mother to do what she’s always dreamed of doing, or not expecting your girlfriend to cook you dinner. Only with actions from each of us will we see equality as a true fact of life.”

Read “Gloria Steinem Loved Women” here.

Read “Gloria Steinem’s Final Essay” here.

Woah, Anne Carson on Rosalía?

“Total adoration pours towards her from the seats. You could stroke it like an animal prancing and preening through the arena.”

Read it in the London Review of Books here.

“Would My Marriage Be Better If I Stopped Writing About It?”

If you posed this question to our husbands, their answers would be a resounding OF COURSE IT WOULD. It’s not easy to be a private citizen attached at the hip to a professional oversharer. Both of your Spreaditors have had to resist the urge to spin minor domestic contretemps over toothpaste tubes and daycare pickup and major disagreements over [REDACTED] into yarns that would be both plentiful and easy to write but are also part of how we earn a living. We get where Shannon Keating is coming from with her essay, which ponders whether her habit of self-exposure is a compulsion, a choice, or just a way to pay the bills. Sort of. Reading her lay it all out there, we did have to wonder whether Keating is really questioning her editorial choices in the name of her relationship, or just doing what she’s always done: making hay out of a buzzy headline.

Read it here.

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Spreadestials,

Back-to-school season has always been sick season. In 2026, as a review of this week’s best journalism shows without question, it’s also measles season. And therefore also the season of spending hours upon hours reading about people in the thick of it. Last week, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro announced two “measels-associated” deaths, as the viral disease rips through Lancaster County. While there have been at least 2,777 confirmed measles cases in the US this year, New York Times Opinion contributor and M.D. Rachael Bedard has deemed Shapiro’s declaration hasty and ultimately unhelpful in the larger war against MAHA’s anti-vax effort, since the cause of both deaths—including a newborn baby whose mother had measles while pregnant—is being contested. Bedard’s op-ed is a wise critique of the political theater on both sides of the vaccine misinformation rats’ nest, one that we—as people who tend to come out swinging in our self-righteousness—took to heart: Sometimes the more strategic move in such heated situations would be to slow our roll. “In a polarized environment where vaccine-hesitant Americans lean Republican, [Shapiro’s] approach was geared toward the wrong public: affirming to liberals and alienating to the very people he needs to reach.” (Speaking of Shapiro, we’ve been looking for an opportunity to start lobbying SNL to cast Nick Kroll to play him during his inevitable presidential run. What do ya say, Lorne? And while we have you: Thanks for being a paid subscriber, Lorne! All the rest of you: Be like Lorne, if you’re not already!)

The Atlantic dispatched staff writer Tom Bartlett to Pennsylvania to track down the Amish parents of the baby who died, revealing the very human grief—and total absence of political ideology—hiding beyond the politics. And the New Yorker jumped into the conversation with a careful, expertly calibrated feature on “The MAHA Custody Battle”: a harrowing and empathetic account of a family that is quite literally ripped apart when the mother—herself a MAHA “micro-influencer”—refuses not just vaccinations but necessary medical treatment for her three children, one of whom has a genetic spinal disease. Scared shitless, the father, who has an online following of his own, eventually fights back. When author Ruby Cramer says that she believes the mother was trying to do right by her children, it lands.

If that’s not enough grab-you-by-the-throat MAHA parenting content for you, you’re in luck—and you also should probably go talk to someone: Yesterday, the New York Times Magazine hit publish on Elizabeth Barber’s “Why MAHA Rallied for a Mother Seeking Alternative Treatments for Her Son’s Cancer,” which touches on all the politics and the heartbreak, but also one villain after another in Oklahoma politics—from gubernatorial candidate Mike Mazzei to a state senator to a Moms of Liberty leader—that enabled a mother to keep her son from standard leukemia treatment. The story is fiercely reported, expertly told, and very much worth sticking with until the end.

Whew. If you’re looking to read just one, well, pick your poison,

Rachel & Maggie

P.S. We just heard the jury for the Lindsay Clancy trial is deadlocked again. Bless these people. All of them. Clancy, of course, but also these jurors, lawyers, admins—all of the people who’ve had to live and relive this hell on earth around the clock for what must feel like an eternity.

The solution is coming from inside the building.

Anna Wintour has certainly courted controversy before—who can forget the “Desert Rose” of 2012 or, for that matter, last year’s Sánchez-Bezos-pocalypse? But we can’t remember her ever being caught in a shitstorm quite like this one, with John Galliano announcing this week that, despite Wintour’s best efforts to rehabilitate his legacy, he will not be the subject of this year’s Met Gala show. Hoo boy, the talkers be talkin’. is one of many to declare this “the end of Anna Wintour’s reign as the most powerful woman in fashion,” pointing out something we’d missed earlier: rumors that Galliano has also made other public anti-Semitic and anti-Asian remarks, even after he’d dried out and mea culpa’d. Lauren “a voice of a generation” Sherman ponders (in a notably well-wordsmithed post: turns out Puck does have editors when they need them!): “You could argue that Galliano’s transgression should preclude him from this sort of iconic exhibition treatment, or you could suggest that atonement is a principle of civility. You could even assert that museums and artistic institutions exist to platform this sort of emotional and intellectual complexity… I have said that I’d suspected that [Anna] believed it was the right thing for her to do.” And Robin Givhan argues that, done right, a show could have successfully examined “Mr. Galliano’s profound failings closely and without hesitation — not as unfortunate asides to his career but as something central to it.” It could even have helped “people understand how antisemitism takes root and grows in the mind of someone like Mr. Galliano.” But it can’t do that if it’s attached to the most outrageous pay-for-play fashion party of the year. Put the Met Gala out of its misery, says Givhan, which is pretty close to shouting, Off with her head!

Our favorite solution came from the plucky IG account of Condé’s own less-shiny star, Allure. Yes, yes, yesssss, let’s do a Met Gala about Dolly Parton! Think of all the sub-themes to explore: Americana, Nashville, country music, WIGS, Southern conservatism, religion, drag queens… rhinestones! Imagine what Rihanna, Beyoncé, Sabrina Carpenter, Ru Paul would wear! We cannot think of a better antidote to the hatred with which the name John Galliano, like it or not, will be forever tainted.

May we also humbly suggest that Miss Piggy be the night’s celebrity “host”? Angelica Jade Bastién just did the legwork for this idea, proclaiming the porcine dream “our last female movie star”1 in the mold of Mae West, Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Crawford, and Bette Davis, women whose “lives and cinematic work played out ideals about femininity and its expectations in American culture writ large.”

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Sparkling Spreadswans,

In the immortal words of Goldie Hawn, “buh buh buh buh buh.”1 Like Cate, above, we have gone Overboard (and perhaps a little bit cuckoo) on the domestic anarchy of summer break. One of us has Covid which, yes, still a thing. The other of us is recovering from a self-tanner mishap. (Whatever, we all have our crosses to bear.) You know you’re in a dark place when an innocent House & Garden headline (“Is there any such thing as a house that feels too ‘lived-in’?”) has you spitting at your iPhone. Anyone who wants to see “too lived-in” is invited on our house tour! Then British Vogue had to go and ask human thigh-gap Dree Hemingway—a woman with the physique (if not the acting chops) to play Daryl Hannah!—to “test drive autumn’s best jeans,” like that’s some kind of service journalism! Absolutely none of which would normally phase us. All to say: Our motors are shot, our senses of humor have evaporated, and our asses sure as sh*t don’t look like Dree’s. Can we trade us in for a new model?

Nevertheless, we still managed to rustle up some enthusiasm for this week’s reads!

Have at it,

Rachel & Maggie

Trump’s “Human Printer”

“He doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.” After Jon Ossoff’s (arguably sexist but also, sorry, utterly delicious) burn about Trump’s latest one-name-only female acolyte, we were thrilled to see Spread-fave Doreen St. Félix do the deepest dive. Who’s that girl? Slate, WaPo, and the New York Times have already told us that Natalie Harp is the Ivanka-coded executive assistant who left an anchor gig at One America News Network to be paid $150,000 of your tax dollars per year to literally follow Trump around printing out memes for him to read and posting some of his most racist and oddly capitalized rants on Truth Social. In St. Félix’s description she’s also a character from Yesteryear: raised to believe in American exceptionalism, to think (as her own liberal brother puts it) that slavery was normal “back then,” homeschooled, evangelical, and traumatized by the “cardinal sin” of her father’s suicide. A cancer survivor who credits the “Right to Try” act passed under Trump I with saving her life—though the timeline on that doesn’t quite track. And, perhaps most crucially, a religious zealot in the church of Donald J. Trump. In a letter to the president, Harp wrote, “You are all that matters to me. I don’t want to ever let you down. Thank you for being my Guardian and Protector in this Life.” Well, now you know.

Read “What Natalie Harp Carries” here.

Mother Load

Lindsay Clancy is top of mind as the jury for her case goes into deliberation today. In the New Yorker, Jessica Winter argues that the conspiracy theories surrounding Clancy and the sympathy for her defense come from the same place: anger and grief about how women’s medical and mental-health crises get dismissed. The “she was framed” crowd and the “justice for Lindsay” folks may loathe each other, but they’re twin flames, she maintains, both driven by the sense that doctors, courts, and even husbands failed to listen. In Slate, Shannon Palus widens the lens to include another hot-topic tragedy: the death of Hayden Panettiere. Both women described, in public and in detail, the pain they were in, and the struggle when “maternal instinct” failed to kick in. Panettiere wrote in her memoir that she “felt nothing” holding her newborn daughter; Clancy spent months describing her breakdown to doctors and in Facebook groups. Visibility is an important first step but in itself is not a solution. Even when these women were heard, it didn’t save them.

Read “Why People Want to Believe the Lindsay Clancy Conspiracy Theories” here.

Read “Our Summer of Complicated Mothers” here.

9 to 5? Of course. Steel Magnolias? Yes ma’am. The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas? Damn Straight. Joyful Noise? Sure. Now: Justice for Straight Talk!

The tributes to Dolly Parton—actual angel on Earth—have been rightfully pouring in. We especially loved this fly-by-the-seat-of-her-cargo-pants reel from comedian Cameron Esposito; h/t Spreader Annie. And Xochitl Gonzalez’s breastacular ode is just right. In approximately zero of those tributes, however, have we spied a mention of one Dolly role that sits near and dear to our hearts: “Dr.” Shirlee Kenyon in Straight Talk, a 1992 clunker of a film that Rachel watched dozens—hundreds?—of times as a child. Rated PG on the VHS box but extremely adult in spirit (James Woods is the love interest 😬), the movie stars Parton as a talented call-in radio shrink à la Dr. Laura Schlessinger. Except here’s the thing: Shirlee ain’t no doctor—she’s barely got a high-school diploma to her name. Will she be found out? The movie may not be very good on a technical level, but Dolly manages to deliver a performance shiny enough to captivate eight-year-olds from Mississippi and presumably beyond with her Dollyness, zinging lines like “Get down off the cross, honey. Somebody needs the wood.” Don’t believe us? Watch the trailer here, or rent it for $2.99 because as not-a-doctor Shirlee would say, “Money is made to be spent. What good’s it doin’ at the bottom of my panty drawer?”

Divorce Capital-Style

We’ve been on the divorce essay beat for a while now, so take it from us: Congressional reporter Annie Karni’s September Vogue piece about her compulsion to tell everyone in her orbit that she’s getting divorced is a tight little banger of the genre. (And no, we don’t just like it because we are chronic oversharers—what, we’re supposed to just stand there in proximity to other human beings in…silence? We are not Rosey the Robot!) Karni writes movingly—and with restraint, no more than a raised eyebrow toward her ex—about the history of her marriage and its dissolution before getting to the laugh-out-loud stuff: She finds catharsis in telling Chuck Schumer that her summer plans include getting divorced! She blurts out to Steve Bannon that she’s splitting up! She unspools to Nancy Mace! It all adds up to a hopeful story about connection and personal metamorphosis, and feels more like an episode of The West Wing than we’ve experienced in Trump’s Washington thus far. Why not treat yourself to some rose-colored glasses every once in a while.

Read “Some Personal News” here.

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Spreadgang,

Earlier this week as the world woke to the tragic news that Hayden Panettiere—for us, forever the curly-haired tomboy from Remember the Titans—was found dead at 36 in a South Carolina apartment, our minds went to two separate places: First, to the 11-year-old daughter Panettiere lost custody of in 2018 after suffering severe postpartum depression, anxiety, and addiction to alcohol and opioids. Second, to the reason we know so much about that very personal business: Panettiere’s memoir, released by Grand Central Publishing just this May. This Is Me: A Reckoning was an instant bestseller, and of course it was: It was full of revelations about Panettiere’s addiction, her mental health, and her sexuality, launching a raft of stories about the vicious trap of child stardom (themes that re-emerged this week).

The struggling book business relies on these hits to stay afloat. Stars bring millions of ready-made fans hungry for an “untold story”—the bigger the trainwreck, the better. And they do the publicity slog for free. As literary agent Kate McKean wrote in Bustle in 2025, celebrity memoirs “are the closest thing to a sure bet in an industry in which there are no guarantees.”

But lately it feels as if some of the widest-read celebrity memoirs aren’t just inside-baseball tell-alls by people who have walked through fire and come out the other side. They’re cries for help from people who are still very much in crisis, often published just before (or even after) the person succumbs to the very issues the book reveals. Matthew Perry’s Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing was an immediate No. 1 on the New York Times list when it was released in November 2022; it hit No.1 on Amazon again when he died, just one year later. Virginia Giuffre did not live to see the release of Nobody’s Girl, which debuted at number one when it came out in October 2025, six months after her suicide. (Giuffre had been working with a writer on the book before her death.) Lisa Marie Presley’s book is a slightly different story: It had to be finished by her daughter Riley Keough after her sudden death, and was released the following year. It’s hard to imagine that any of these people seemed exactly robust when they were inking their book contracts.

How much do publishers—or celebrity agents, negotiating deals on stars’ behalves—know about the fragility of the people whose books they agree to publish? What do they see? Are red flags being ignored? And what responsibility do they have to the people whose personal tragedies will inevitably make them a pile of money? At 7pm tonight, just as this issue pops up in your inbox, the New York Times will release its weekly book list. Will This Is Me (which has been mentioned in every write-up about Panettiere’s death that we’ve read) be back on it?

Oddly, this isn’t even the book story of the week! Natalie Portman theorists, keep reading. We’re getting there…

Rachel & Maggie

Usha is not going to make it better.

Kate Andersen Brower attempts to answer one of the great existential questions of our time in Vanity Fair: “What [in the everloving hell] Is Usha Vance Thinking?” (brackets ours). Unfortunately Brower’s write-around leaves us head-scratchin’ harder than ever, because we just cannot compute such a woman. Usha, she argues, is not some nice feminist who’s been brainwashed, hoodwinked, or bamboozled—an explanation that is somehow easier to accept than the reality: that she is the architect of JD’s success, a woman whose personal politics are ambiguous but whose marital ambitions are not. Yes, a person can be raised by a molecular biologist mother who “helped establish a pilot course on race, ethnicity, and gender in biology and medicine” at UC San Diego, yet still mold JD Vance out of wet Ohio clay into the political opportunist we fear today. At Yale, Usha made spreadsheets of all the things he needed to know (including that elitist snack, Greek yogurt) to ascend to the 5 percent. (Apparently in today’s billionaire-verse, we’ve had to cast a wider net than “1 percent” to get anywhere close to regular, run-of-the-mill wealth.) Usha’s Yale Law friends have a secret Signal chat to compare notes on how the crazy just keeps getting crazier. Somebody send us a link: We have thoughts! Read it here.

If you’re seeing a paywall here, you’ll want to upgrade! (If you’re not, we love you so much and cannot get over how brilliant and gorgeous you are.) What’s behind it?

Long answer: A multimillionaire meno doctor. A Bari Weiss shocker! Why your kid is throwing therapy-speak in your face. A personal breakup rant disguised as a book essay? And the not-novel novel with no characters and no names that’s about Natalie Portman but also totally isn’t.

Short answer: Good stuff you don’t want to miss!

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Treasured Spreaders,

If you’ve seen the cover of Elle’s September issue, you know that Emily Charlton is certainly taking a victory lap: Yes, in her final magic trick at Dior before being banished to Coach, everyone’s favorite PR high priestess somehow landed the fashion house’s name—in the form of a gold crown, haloing a naked Rihanna—slapdab across the magazine’s logo. It’s the most egregious example of advertiser jockeying we’ve seen maybe…ever? (Though 2024’s GQ cover-slash-commercial for Beyonce’s whiskey brand, SirDavis—a joint venture with Moët Hennessy, mmmhmm—was a real, uh, trailblazer of the genre.) Perhaps in a post-Devil Wears Prada 2 world, with the industry’s cards splayed on the Milo Baughman dining table, the thinking was…what do we have to lose? Depressing as this corporate back-scratching feels, even more surprising was the accompanying cover essay (Rihanna doesn’t do interviews) about the pop star, penned by the National Book Foundation’s 2025 Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community awardee, Roxane Gay. Gay really understands the assignment here, arguing that the fact that Dior created a new fragrance, J’adore Intense (“honoring women for ‘daring to luxuriate unreservedly in pleasure’”) just for RiRi is no small thing: “In 2015, she became the first Black ambassador for the brand. And in this cover shoot, you can practically smell Rihanna through the page, especially in the raw, undone images where her hair hangs in loose curls past her shoulders, she stares at the camera, inviting the viewer closer, but not too close.” We look forward to reading about this assignment in Bad Feminist 2. Also, did we mention that Rihanna looks incredible?

Meanwhile, Vogue’s September issue announces what’s in for fall, and—drumroll, please—it’s… unabashed nepotism FTW! The Shards stars Kaia Gerber, daughter of Cindy Crawford, and Homer Gere, son of Crawford’s first husband, Richard Gere (wait, is that what once-removed means?), skippin’ to my lou in Chanel. We’ll concede: They’re great to look at, and Kaia was pretty good in the 2023 comedy Bottoms. In something of a jinx moment, the Hollywood Reporter happened to publish a good hard look at industry royalty this week. According to recent findings from a film industry data analyst, 70 percent of this century’s top films involved a “nepo baby creative” in a principal function (writer, director, or one of the top three actors in the film). And now we know that when Rachel wasn’t called back from her Real World audition in 2002, it wasn’t for lack of charisma or talent—it was a bloodline thing!

Happy International Lefthanders Day!

Rachel & Maggie

P.S. Kudos to the Atlantic for hiring Spread-beloved writer Danyel Smith—she of the P. Diddy piece we mention often around here—away from the New York Times Magazine. Can’t wait to see what you come up with over there, Danyel!

P.P.S. Yes, we are all caught up on Furious and it sure is nice to have a weekly show to anticipate—especially a Liz Meriwether-created complex crimefest starring Emmy Rossum as the law enforcement and Lola Petticrew (Say Nothing) as a serial killer! We liked Roxana Hadadi’s review. Or, for those only-speak-Rotten-Tomatoes people: a) are you sure you’re in the right place? b) you’ve got a 98 percenter here!

Because we were out last week—one of your Spreaditors enforcing the Vacation Code of Conduct, the other haunted by a salmonella poisoning in the house—we offer you a game of catch-up:

The Final Word on Yesteryear? In a New Yorker Q&A with Rachel Syme, debut novelist and lightning rod of the summer Caro Claire Burke answers almost all of our lingering questions surrounding Yesteryear, most crucially what Anne Hathaway’s1 role was in the writing of the actual novel. (We say almost because no one will explain to us what Burke is trying to say by giving Natalie an earth-shaking orgasm once she submits to Old Caleb in “1855.”)

Kids These Days: In the New York Times Magazine, Spread pal Lizzy Goodman delivers the profile we didn’t realize we urgently needed: Shania Freakin’ Twain, who at 60 has become a Gen Z icon. We haven’t had this much fun with a magazine article all summer. Less fun: In “The Horrible Rise of the Makeout Police,” Faith Hill connects the latest installment in public-shaming videos involving PDA to young people’s reaction to constant surveillance: Avoid cringe at all costs. Go ahead and smooch with abandon at that concert, she advises.

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Welcome to Spreadlandia, where two veteran editors read it ALL to winnow out only the best: juicy yarns, big ideas, deeply personal essays, and hot goss—aka, the full Spread. Plus: original interviews, podcasts, and more. Come hungry!

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Spreadrules Squad,

We spent hours this week committing to memory Chelsea Handler’s EPIC list of rules—an etiquette guide for the ages she created to keep a passel of nieces and nephews in line when she treats them to luxury vacations all over the world. At first, we wondered if outing her own flesh and blood as a bunch of rude, ungrateful bozos had permanently imploded those relationships. Then we realized this is something Handler reposts annually, in honor of family-vacation season, that originated in her 2025 book, I’ll Have What She’s Having. So presumably the Handler family has worked through it. Or it’s just that these trips are so good, they’re worth the occasional public flogging on the world stage so your famous aunt can keep her followers fed. Anyway, while some of Chelsea’s rules can’t be topped—for obvious reasons, we’re partial to “you cannot speak to your mothers the way that you do”—there are a few that we had difficulty relating to, particularly those pertaining to humane treatment of household staff.

We thought we’d create a list of our own: 20 tenets, geared not so much toward millionaires whisking extended family off to Majorca than toward hardworking, unstaffed Spreaders sharing Airbnbs with toddlers, teens, in-laws, and assorted “friends.” (To be clear, we know that suffering through sandy toes and stinky towels are Champagne—er, prosecco—problems.) With Rachel soaking up the Cape Charles sun this week and Maggie soon off for a heavily SPF’d stay on Block Island, we polled a handful of loyal Spreaders for their vacation pet peeves. Help us help you help everyone enjoy this “vacation”!

Also, if you ever needed irrefutable proof that you have, in fact, turned into your mother: Here it is.

The Spread Rules of Engagement for Family and/or Shared Vacations

20. Hang up that soggy towel—you’ll be using it all week. And do it right: A lump on the line does not dry.

19. Kids, do not claim all the best seating—especially the corner seats in the sectional—leaving the adults nowhere to sit.

18. Do not leave a roll of toilet paper with one tiny square. Do not leave ¼ inch of coffee in the pot for the next person. Be a human being.

17. After we ask you to make a packing list so you don’t forget anything and you don’t and you therefore forget many things, do not take the [charger/contact lens solution/toothpaste/hairbrush/fill-in-the-blank] that we did remember to your room and not return it.

16. Do not kick off your shoes right inside the door where everyone who walks in will trip over them. (Adults: Specify a place for shoes upon arrival.)

15. Put the key back on the hook. Put the remote back on the coffee table. Put your skateboard back in the garage (not, say, right behind our car where we will drive over it and possibly you).

14. Adults are not your sherpas. Everyone shall carry something to and from the car—and not just your own (soggy, sandy) towel.

13. If you haven’t washed the sand off your feet, we will be able to see the sand on your feet. Wash your feet and tell the truth.

12. There will be walking. If you are young and strong, just walk. No commentary.

11. Do not groan EVERY time it’s time for sunscreen. We like putting it on you even less than you like having it done. Can we all just grin and bear it?

10. No wet or sandy hands in the chip bag! Also: Close that snack bag/box/container. Friends don’t make friends eat mushy Oreos.

9. If you didn’t cook it, don’t critique it.

8. Under 21s: Don’t expect a $13 mocktail just because we’re ordering ourselves a $16 cocktail. Similarly, people of any age but particularly children should not ask for $8 drinks every time we buy ourselves a $3 iced coffee.

7. Do not demand spending money if we already gave you spending money. Also: Do not “demand,” period.

6. Please don’t watch that iPad without headphones. Even if you think we can’t hear it, we can. We hear everything.

5. If you break something, the correct first response is, “I’m sorry.” Not: “I am pretty sure it was like that.”

4. We love you but please do not talk at us when you can plainly see that we have not had our coffee yet.

3. One-size-fits-all rarely looks good on anyone. Some people are indoor cats, others beach bums, others want to rent bikes and adventure. Normalize not being together 24-7.

2. Do not leave your furry hair ties, soggy underpants, and other detritus in the shower.

And the number one Spread rule for family or shared vacations—a classic that our parents said to us, and that your kids will say to their kids one day:

Do not say, “I’m bored.”

Together we can be the change. Or at least commiserate about the fact that nothing is ever going to change but at least in a month everybody will be back in school.

Cheers!
Rachel & Maggie

P.S. On a more positive note, we also gleaned some strong survival tips in our research:

• Always have an ABCD (after beach cold drink) waiting for the drive home. Who doesn’t like everyone better after a cold, fruity post-beach sip?

• For rainy days, pack an over-the-door Nerf basketball net—to be put up on a hostess-approved door and used only during waking hours.

• Remember, when you need to get away from your getaway, there is always the Spread!

On that note, on to this week’s reads!

Ripping off the emotional estrogen patch. Doctor/journalist Keren Landman attempted to push back on the growing fantasy that MHT (no longer known as HRT, get with the program!) is a wonder cure for, well, everything—as well as a potent symbol of autonomy and control for women in a world gone wobbly. The hordes were not thrilled, to the point that the Vagenda’s stepped in to back Landman up: Like it or not, the only real proven benefits of hormone therapy are relief of hot flashes and night sweats, while keeping your bones from disintegrating. All very good things. But not quite the fountain of youth we’d like to believe. Read the perfectly reasonable story that started the kerfuffle here.

Naked and Unafraid: Firebrand writer Lauren Oyler profiles firebrand artist Florentina Holzinger in the New Yorker, and we gotta say: well matched! One scholar describes Holzinger’s work as “feminist decadence.” She’s buck naked a lot of the time, and almost everyone in her shows is, too, including opera singers, elderly women, and performers with disabilities—expanding our ideas about what bodies are allowed to do onstage. Her opera “SANCTA” (2024) featured nude roller-skating nuns, unsimulated sex, and a scene where someone sticks a finger into an open wound. The scene was so graphic, one viewer—a violinist—fainted, breaking both his nose and his instrument. Read it here.

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Sun-kissed Spreaderiñas,

Believe it or not, your Spreaditors do not agree on everything. But if you asked us to name the one person with the best job in the magazine biz, we would answer immediately and in unison, like the twins in The Shining: Brock Colyar. New York Mag’s reporter-with-the-mostess has brought us such Spread-beloved fare as “The Big Little Penis Panic,” “It Must Be Nice to Be a West Village Girl,” and “The Cruel Kids’ Table,” aka, “The Cultural Ascendancy of the New Right.” Not to mention the current cover story, “It’s Humiliating. It’s Exhilarating. It’s a Line,” about those patient and possibly unhinged souls lined up 100-deep on NYC sidewalks in pursuit of Froyo transcendence. Ever since Brock volunteered to spend a month in the bowels of the city’s pre-vaccine COVID-era underground nightlife scene, landing their first cover story—and a nightlife column called “Are U Coming?”1—while they were still an assistant (rare!), they’ve been in the business of defining the zeitgeist. And when they put their finger on a thing, they have a way of bringing it to life with a blend of humor and generosity that is both kind (or at least fair) to their subject, but also to their reader. Brock is the rare insider who shares the view from their perch without making you feel bad about being all the way down on the ground. All this, at the tender age of 28! Don’t bother trying to hate them for it—they’re too lovely.

Don’t worry, we’ve also got your reads of the week.

To make sure maximum eyeballs enjoy Brock’s Spread debut, we are lifting the paywall this week! Come one, come all, to the bonanza. And show a little ❤️, why doncha?

XOXO,

Rachel & Maggie

Brock: Oh my gosh, so nice to meet both of you. I feel like I’m meeting like my long-lost aunts or something.

The Spread: You are, you definitely are. We’re huge fans! And now that we are aunties, we can share that your story about waiting in lines made us feel like oldsters. When we walk past line-waiters, we’re like, “What is wrong with these people?” Did writing it turn you into a line person?

Brock: Not necessarily, it’s too embarrassing. But there’s only so far you can take a conversation with a line person because [why they’re doing this] seems so obvious to them. It’s not so much, “I’m joining in the crowd.” It’s, I’m trying to see for myself if this is as good as other people say it is. At least I’m not at home. Or: I just wanted dessert. The obviousness of their answers started to warm my heart. I just thought, Well yeah, you’re doing better than me tonight, why am I looking to take you down?

The Spread: How would you describe your beat? In some ways it’s so broad, and in some ways it’s so clear, like, “Oh, that’s a Brock story.”

Brock: Back when I had the nightlife column, I would say my beat was subcultures. I was doing it through the prism of nightlife, but it was stories taking readers into corners of the city they would otherwise not know about, and that I would otherwise not have access to if I didn’t have the privilege of having this job. Often I tell people that I write about young people, which again is so vague. It’s hard to define, but when it’s a story I want, I know it. I loved the lines one because, in the same way as the West Village girls story, it was about young people, their consumer habits, and also the lived landscape of New York City—and the internet.

The Spread: “The Cruel Kids Table” story about young conservatives celebrating Trump’s second inauguration—we wrote about that twice in the Spread, it was just so vivid. But also, as your aunties, we felt protective. Like, had New York fed Brock to the wolves?

Brock: Yeah, some of my editors were a bit concerned they were sending me there. I have to tell you, I look back at it as one of the great experiences of my life. Being at the inauguration—there was something freeing about it. I was there to do a job. I could just throw myself into doing this thing. I had some dark moments in my hotel room, crying and drinking, really overwhelmed by everything I had seen or that people had said to me that day. They talked about my gender and my presentation a lot in front of me, but a lot of the people hated me more for being a journalist than for being queer. So I didn’t feel uniquely targeted. Many of the people in that story are still sources that I talk to somewhat regularly, just to figure out what’s going on in their world.

The Spread: How did they react to the story?

Brock: I’d say it was 50/50, and I could not have predicted which ones would have been mad. In trying to be really transparent with these sources—and not make any of them so mad that they’d really go after me—I told them ahead of time: Some of you are going to think that I’m just a lefty hack who came into your world and tried to tear it apart. And other readers will think that I overglamorized you, and that it makes you all look kind of fabulous. And that is just how it split. Some felt really glamorous about it, some felt like I was an asshole.

The Spread: Reading your stories, it always feels like you develop empathy for the people you’re covering. Were you able to develop that for the young conservatives?

Brock: I grew up in a small town in the middle of Tennessee. I have MAGA people in my family, I talk to them all the time. There were people in this field who were upset with me just for going there and talking to these kinds of people. I find that so ridiculous. In order to get anything out of young MAGA people like that, I couldn’t just go around these parties throwing a recorder in their face and questioning them about their take on trans rights. I had to maybe have a cocktail, talk about where we were both from, how they were dealing with the weather. Small talk. Often we’d talk about the excesses of the left—that was an easy thing for me to complain about, that they also wanted to complain about. I think that lent a certain amount of—I’m trying not to use the word “empathy,” but… humanness.

The Spread: It’s not every assistant who hits the ground running, writing cover stories. Did you have a champion at New York—somebody who was like, “This kid can report a cover story”?

Brock: I was the assistant to [New York editor-in-chief] David Haskell, but previous to that, I interned for Stella Bugbee when she was running the Cut. It was kind of the height of #MeToo, and the Cut was doing such interesting work, and I was a Rebecca Traister superfan. Stella really took me under her wing. Then Carl Swanson, who was an editor here for a long time, really taught me so much about how to have fun on the page and just how to write. Before that, in college, I was an intern for Peggy Orenstein when she was reporting her book Boys and Sex. She’d interviewed me for the book—I’m a character in it—and we quickly bonded. I was really into feminist-y journalism at the time, and had just done an internship at Ms. magazine. Peggy taught me how to scene-report. She would ask me to go to, like, a frat party on Northwestern’s campus and find some boys and take them back to their room and interview them about their masturbation habits and what categories of Pornhub they liked most—to just be fearless and ask all these ridiculous questions. So I’d be on some frat house floor, passing around a bong with my recorder on the table, and a bottle of vodka that I would bring that Peggy would pay me back for, and talk about how they jerked it. That taught me everything, really.

The Spread: As ex-New Yorkers who still identify as New Yorkers, we rely on you to tell us what’s actually happening. People are talking about this sort of “New York-aissance” happening under Mamdani, and the post-Knicks high. Is that just a media fantasy?

Brock: I think it’s a little bit half-and-half. There’s certainly some excitement here. I went out and watched the World Cup games on the street over the weekend, and there was something kind of thrilling about it. It feels vibes-y again, but not to the extent that the media is telling us. Because what’s also happening is—and here’s the less generous view of the line people—the city just feels completely impossible: You can’t get a reservation anywhere, the lines are bananas. When I wrote the West Village girls story, my neighborhood, Greenpoint, had not quite been touched; now it feels like Greenpoint is all lines and West Village girls. The influencer-ification and same-ification just continues to creep farther and farther out.

The Spread: It’s very difficult to translate “vibes” into a magazine story. What’s your process of collecting feelings and ideas, and then translating them into stories? Are you like Tina Fey with her little notebook?

Brock: I take a million notes, and I talk to everyone. When I’m working on a story, I am at every dinner, every drink, every five-minute run-in with everyone I know, bringing it up in the most annoying way possible, and just collecting everybody’s feelings about it, and then I can form my own. The most helpful thing is the magic whiteboard in the middle of my kitchen, the main room of the house. Everything goes on it. I have to look at this whiteboard every day, and after we’ve spent a month together, I can spin a story.

The Spread: Every micro-generation in New York has their It Girl reporter, and you’re so the one of this micro-generation. Are you in touch with your forebears—people like Vanessa Grigoriadis?

Brock: Yes and no. I mean, I know many of them. I have drinks with Candace Bushnell every five months or so. I’ve been trying to talk her into doing a podcast together.

The Spread: While we’ve got you, can you decode this reel for us? We’ve both watched it like 20 times. Is it trying to tell us something, or is it just a nice thing to look at?

Brock: I think this is just a nice thing for the girls and the gays to obsess over. It almost feels like you’re about to choose your avatar in some kind of game. Like the Harry Potter sorting hat: It makes you want to figure out who you are by the end of it. I’m watching it for the second time in a row right now. It’s hard to stop.

The Spread: As Chronic Overthinkers, we were trying to layer in ideas about how these clips were from Charlie Rose, and—speaking of the sorting hat—we know he’s been sorted into the “bad” category. Plus all the women look kind of hesitant or guarded. So we thought maybe the reel was saying that all these women were on to him—like they knew? But you’re saying, no, it’s just that they are famous beautiful women, and this is a good backdrop?

Brock: I think this is just the kind of thing that guys I know are sharing and saying, like, “mama,” “mother,” whatever. People are just commenting with a diamond emoji, you know. Mark Guiducci is thumbs-upping a comment that says, “this is cinema.”

The Spread: Thanks for reigning us in. Our readers know that we’re both Southerners—Rachel’s from Mississippi and lives in Virginia, Maggie’s originally from North Carolina though she lives in the godless North now. Do you feel like your Southernness is one of your strengths?

Brock: I’ve often said that my Southernness is a bit of a superpower, especially in an industry of Yale-educated rich kids who have never had a conversation with someone who didn’t agree with them politically. Also the accent—do you know how I kept myself safe in DC? I went really hard on an accent I don’t have anymore, but it threw people off. Even just telling people I was from Tennessee, I instantly gained favor with them—telling them, “Oh, my brother’s MAGA,” or whatever. So I put on my accent, the same way I put it on when I go home, and that helped.

The Spread: Growing up in the South, you do learn how to be nice to just about anyone. Going back to that idea of you being the “it” person of your generation: You bring real kindness and generosity to your subjects, whereas previous generations of people doing jobs like yours were notably snarkier. Is it how you do the job, or does it reflect your generation, something in the culture?

Brock: I think it’s me, and just how I grew up. It’s funny though—something I’ve always appreciated about you guys is that I feel like you are my rare readers who see where I’m trying to be a nice person, trying to be a generous person, because I think the standards of journalism are sometimes so low: The Twitter response to my stories is only focused on the bitchy parts. When I had the nightlife column, I was upsetting people on a weekly basis, and everybody was acting like I was being a total bitch, just blowing up their spot over and over again. It upset me, because that was never what I was going for. It would be so easy to have gone after the line people as a bunch of tourists and lemmings. But that wouldn’t be very interesting.

The Spread: We are happy to be your closest readers. Feel free to give us a heads-up when your next story is coming.

Brock: My head is down on my book for a little while—

The Spread: Oooh, a book?

Brock: It’s called Gender Bender. It kind of came out of the essay I wrote about pronouns years ago. Every chapter takes on a different queer topic, whether it’s asexuality, or gay sex, or pronouns, or furries. I want to do something like Crazy Salad,2 but for queers—trying to say something about this generation and the way it’s talking about gender and sexuality, which I don’t think anyone has really done in a way that wasn’t totally activist-y.

The Spread: Can’t wait. Do you have a pub date?

Brock: I think late next year is what we’re working toward. Today I’m working on my chapter about furries, another topic I thought I would come away from feeling really disturbed by. Instead I’m like, oh, there’s sweet people who want to dress as animals. It’s OK.

Thank you, Brock! Your stories are so good, we would even wait on line for them. Spreaders. hope you saved your appetite: On to this week’s reads!

Why Don’t You Put on Your Sunbonnet and Read a While?

OK, But When Will Claude Be Able to Do the Laundry? Persona non grata to the Burden Bellas—aca-scuse-us: no other Strangers stans around here are also big Pitch Perfect fans?—Jessica Winter’s latest considers the new wave of family-targeting AI assistants aimed at siphoning off (and we appreciate the honesty here) mothers’ cognitive loads. Experts aren’t convinced this is the key to marital equity (shocking, right), and yet: Rachel is still considering a Skylight, so please share a review if you feel passionately, preferably before school starts on August 12. Read “The A.I. Gender Gap Meets the Parenting Gender Gap” here.

D.A.R.E. to Read: Though its headline sells it as a Weeds-ian romp, “The Accidental Cartel Queen” is a depressing-as-hell cautionary tale in which journalist Julia Lindau traces South Carolina waitress Chelsie Marie Anderson’s descent into a precarious existence as a drug dealer on the run in Mexico. Honestly, despite its extremely Spready headline, this is the kind of harrowing fare that only serious crime-story fans among us should throw themselves into. Anderson’s two daughters are still in South Carolina. Read it here.

And you thought it was only dudes: Longevity bro Bryan Johnson’s 30-year-old girlfriend, Kate Tolo, is joining him in monitoring every bit of her body’s input and output, so to speak, which she argues will give us useful science to understand womankind. Or maybe just rich-white-young womankind? Read it in WSJ here.

Mrs. Submissive Went To Town, Riding on a Pony… Somehow, we’d managed to avoid the teachings of The Surrendered Wife, which has—according to today’s New York Times—been saving marriages, bolstering the patriarchy, and/or wreaking havoc on women and feminism since 1999, depending on how you look at it. Author Laura Doyle believes that though women are naturally controlling, they can subvert those impulses in favor of “respecting” their husbands (no nagging, sex whenever he wants it)—et voilà: long-lasting, happy marriages for all! Unshockingly, MAGA loves it. More shocking: Women across the political spectrum insist it worked for them too. Read “Women Are Too Controlling, She Wrote. Her Message Still Resonates” here.

Brother, May I: We never miss a Daniel Bergner joint, and his recent New York Times Mag story is by far the bravest thing we’ve read all week. For a story about sibling therapy, he spoke to a half-dozen practitioners about the zeitgeisty and growing therapy trend and researched much literature on family dynamics. He also went to therapy with his own younger brother, Bob, and lived to write about it. It’s worth a read for anyone who has siblings, is partnered to someone with siblings or is parenting siblings. Read it here.

Can patterns of behavior pass from one generation to the next… like country homes and beer money? An actual Guinness decided to shake off “ancestral trauma” (duels, addiction, lots of deaths “under mysterious circumstances,” growing up gay in a religious household) by way of a “family constellations therapist” in British Vogue, and since this was as close as we were getting to a fresh drop on BritBox this week, we read it. Read it here.

“Our Beth” Because this is actually a Little Women Fan Blog, we’d be remiss not to mention Sarah Chihaya’s Vulture piece about becoming preoccupied with Beth March’s death as she stares down her own after being diagnosed with multiple system atrophy-C. We are really not being flippant when we say that we hope she’ll also treat herself to “The One Where Monica and Richard Are Just Friends,” the Friends episode in which Joey Tribiani takes Beth’s passing real hard. Read it here.

Department of Tardiness: We couldn’t believe it either when Pete Hegseth issued his testosterone decree within moments of us sending out last week’s issue all about manly man-juice and the ways they’re getting their hands on it. Honestly, we don’t want to be this timely.

Five-star weekend: In what may be the most tasteful second wedding of all time, Paulina Porizkova married a nice man in Italy. Excellent setting, very good dress, perfect makeup, a minimum of pretension, and a strong photo caption game (take note, brides: these things can be amusing!).

Amy Alert! We don’t know how to feel about the fact that the only media entity following Amy Griffin as hard as we are seems to be Billy “grab ’em by the p*ssy” Bush, whose podcast has devoted considerable airtime to keeping the saga alive—asking a lot of questions that no one else seems willing to, with a decidedly anti-Amy slant. (Interesting, because Bush is a Bush, and thus a cousin of Barbara, one of Amy’s great allies.) Close readers: As of today, he claims to have found the real Claudia, as well to know the identity of the Mr. Mason. He also maintains that a journalist he knows is working on a big, multipart story on Griffin, which hopefully involves some legit fact-checking since BB is decidedly a rogue agent with big conspiracy theorist energy. We would like to request that this alleged article be delivered in a respectable publication, in time for our August summer vacation reading. Chop chop.

Stop scrambling for the perfect weekend-hostess gift: Good Hair Day Pasta is here. (Shout-out to Spreader Anna who so generously put this on our radar—and in Rachel’s kitchen.)

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Spreaderific Sisterhood,

Does anything besides the fact that E. Jean got PAID this week actually matter? Not really. But in between our whooping and hollering and general merriment, we couldn’t help but notice that we’d been flooded yet again by (mostly) male “maxxing” content. Um, lucky us? In the New York Times, Spread-beloved pontificator Kate Manne, PhD, cast her expert gaze on a thing we talk about quite a bit around here: the fact that men are now up against the looksist pressure and perfectionism that’s always been placed on women. On Reddit, dudes commonly blame this amplified need to be chiseled on women (of course) who are just so darn picky and mean, rejecting “mid” lookers on dating apps. In truth, Manne points out, the call is coming from inside the house. Trad men are doing this to impress the people whose esteem and opinion has always mattered most in their eyes—other men—in order to “increase their masculine status.” Think about it: If the looksmaxxers of the world really cared what women think, they wouldn’t look like that.

Masculine status, you say? The New Yorker‘s Zach Helfand serves up the headline of the week, “Rope-A-Dope,” in a somewhat late but, true to style, exceedingly complete look at the end-of-days pro-doping competition the Enhanced Games, aka the Steroid Olympics—an event cofounded by Aron D’Souza (best known for orchestrating Peter Thiel’s takedown of Gawker via a Hulk Hogan-shaped Trojan Horse) that took place in Las Vegas in May. Lots of detail here about, say, the swimmer’s lats that “oozed out of the sides of his swimsuit” (male-on-male gaze alert!), but our takeaway (and the Times’s) is that all this theater is really a ploy to promote Enhanced’s budding direct-to-consumer peptide/testosterone business. Because that’s the water we’re swimming in, so to speak.

Somebody say peptides? A team from Bloomberg Businessweek got deep into the (optimized) bowels of that billion-dollar gold rush, hunting down a peptide-testing entrepreneur outside Prague who drives a purple Ferrari, wears socks with his sandals, and goes by the name “Magic.” Now that’s some reportin’! There’s been much talk about the “gray market,” but what even is that, really? (Gray goods are legal but unauthorized; black goods are definitely illegal.) The story tracks the legal loopholes—it’s not illegal to buy an unapproved peptide, and no one’s looking too closely at who’s selling raw materials; a “for research only” sticker on the side of a vial apparently buys a hell of a lot of leeway—that bring Chinese “research chemicals” to a wild array of places, starting with the maxxers’ bloodstreams, obviously, but also to a meeting of the “California Peptide Club” at a San Francisco mansion, and to the prescription pad of a w-i-l-d doctor in Michigan, who is Rxing untested peptides like they’re going out of style. We can’t help but think that, under a less hokum-loving presidential administration, this woman would be doling out pills in an underground bunker—not being photographed by Bloomberg Businessweek.

On a sweeter note, when academic Sebastian Langdell wanted to get fit, he briefly tried life in the bro lane, but the Peter Attia of it all just made him feel empty inside. (Also: so much bad advice!) So he sought out “visions of fitness that avoid overemphasis on masculinity” from people like cartoonist Alison Bechdel, novelist Laura van den Berg, and poet Hanif Abdurraqib. (Non-insane fitness enthusiasts are largely women. Huh.) “These artists weren’t going on about perfect blood panels or maximum efficiency or tracking immense protein intake,” he writes. “They cared about feeling alive in their bodies, sleeping well and having the stamina to do meaningful work.” If anyone has tips on where to find that kind of fitness influencer, keep us posted.

OK can we please get back to talking about women?

Rachel & Maggie

P.S. Already head-boppin’ at the mere suggestion of this week’s headline?Break free from the chain and treat yourself to Naomi Fry’s “The Summer I Surrendered to Wilson Phillips.”

P.P.S. If you’re happy to be here in Spreadlandia, let us know by hitting that ❤️ button, sweetpea.

Still ahead: A Brock Colyar special (with a free link!). The latest chapter in the Alice Seybold saga. The dick pic’s 1970s predecessor. Rebecca Traister goes full scorched earth. Paid subscribers, this one’s for you….

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Glorious Spreadmaids of honor and dishonor,

When the football player called last week in his hour of need—things were going south between his beloved and the mothers of her godchildren, he said: could we help?!—we rose to the challenge. Far be it from your Spreaditors to point out to a tearful and garishly dressed giant that we are, ahem, slightly too seasoned to play flower girls. After all was said and done, when we emerged into the light outside of Madison Square Garden in the wee hours of July 4th we had the scoop and were ready to dish! Then we remembered that we had signed away the rights to our story in that NDA. Rachel’s burner phone had been confiscated in a body cavity search. And that b Selena Gomez had driven away in the Chevy Chevelle we won in the wedding raffle. Thus our report has been heavily redacted. We’ll leave it to you to fill in the blanks…

Per the football player’s self-destructing Signal message, we entered through a secret underground passageway to find that Madison Square Garden had been transformed into an [adjective] princess forest, where the trees were hung with [number] carats of [endangered gemstone], the moss underfoot was flown in from [planet], and Kristin Chenoweth was singing “Taylor the Latte Girl” from atop a [number]-foot [noun] made of [edible noun]. During the ceremony we dutifully dropped our petals and our demure eyelids, trying not to make direct eye contact with the groom’s brother, who kept mouthing the words to [song title] and pointing at [family member]. Afterward, we were led—in our assigned dresses in shades of blush (Rachel) and bashful (Maggie), the better to complement the bride’s [adjective] [noun], which cost upwards of [number] [currency]—to our place of honor between [celebrity] and an ice sculpture of [other celebrity], both of them crying. Already, our services were badly needed: [D-lister] had just buttonholed [A-lister], Karlie Kloss had just backed into the champagne-glass tower (oops), and [mid-lister] was trying to pick up the bride’s married cousin, who had on the same dress as [WAG] (the horror!). By midnight we’d lost [Spreaditor’s name]‘s shoes, the [gemstone] encrusted [nouns] we stole from the bathroom, and all sense of [abstract noun].

That’s when we woke up in a cold sweat, and remembered that we’re actually not Swifties much less Kelcinators. But it was fun while it lasted! We proceeded to spend America’s entire 250th birthday hoovering a well-balanced—hell yeah—spread of T&T circus coverage from bed. Highlights from the buffet: “In Defense of Taylor Swift’s Bad Taste” in Mother Jones (lol—glad somebody’s having fun over there), “Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s Marriage Plot” by New Yorker political scenester Tyler Foggatt (sure why not), “Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s American Royal Wedding” by Spreadfave Amanda Hess (part of the entire vertical the New York Freakin’ Times stood up for the extravaganza), and a scathingly delightful post from new-to-us-writer ’s , “Taylor Said Let Them Eat Cake.” We were officially stuffed.

Now pass the Pop-Tarts,

Rachel & Maggie

“Hey, do you have five minutes (to bang)?”

Never thought we’d get our sex tips from the New Yorker, but hey, who else is giving us extended access to the president and CEO of “The Billionaires’ Vagina Club,” aka Stanford-based, waiting-list-only OB/GYN Dr. Sallye Greenwald? She’s on a mission to extend not her clients longevity per se, but their “sexspan.” (Orgasms in your eighties? Doable!) What are the Priscilla Chan Zuckerbergs of the world getting from their lady doctors that the rest of us are not? For starters, an hour or two of her time per visit. Full body MRIs. Thousand-dollar GRAIL bloodtests that may detect cancer years before it appears. For Olympic athletes, Greenwald has used ovulation meds to make sure they’re competing on days 9 through 14 of their cycle, when energy peaks. For college-age daughters, she’s freezing eggs when they’re nice ’n’ fresh, at 21. For the peri-meno set, she’s stacking forms of HRT to a degree that your Spreaditors found destabilizing. The story’s writer, Melanie Thernstrom, is a Greenwald patient (and married to a private equity player—yes, we looked it up, no we’re not sorry): she’s on an estrogen patch, a ring, a cream, oral progesterone, and testosterone cream. And then there are the sex tips Greenwald doles out—which brings us back to our headline. Stop aiming for “swinging from the chandeliers” sex (if in fact anyone does aim for that; who outside of Greenwald’s demo even has a chandelier?) and go for five-minute get ’er done sex, with silicon lube and a vibrator—which will get you an orgasm and a nicer day in your relationship. Married straights: Skip the fireworks and “stick to super-heteronormative, vanilla, white-picket-fence sex that has data behind it.” #Toldya.

Read it here.

Vagina Monologues

Sadly, because of our essential role in the royal wedding, we were unable to make it to a performance by the three-woman band that goes by the name Ménage àh Twats “dressed in glittery vagina costumes,” singing “a parody to the tune of Lorde’s Royals: Night sweats, hot flash, never getting good sleep / Dry puss, moustache, feeling like a crazy / We don’t care …” Such was the lineup at Menopunkapalooza, a music festival in Portland (of course) that was star-studded with purple-haired, face-melting riot grrrls from bands like Built to Spill and Calamity Jane, plus medical professionals dispelling fake news about HRT—and about which, we feel, the name really says it all. The Guardian took things up a notch with what may be the headline of 2026: “It affected my confidence in my pussy’: gen X punk legends rage at menopause festival.”

Read Lisa Tozzi’s piece here. And prepare yourself: The festival founder has a documentary in the works with icons of the punk rock/culture scene talking about menopause. Viva la Revolution!

Mother, May I?

Rachel Aviv revisited a host of her haunting New Yorker explorations of mental health and found a throughline: Many of the stories focused on mothers and daughters. Looking back at the ones she wrote before becoming a mother herself, she began to see things differently: Whereas before, she tended to identify more with the daughters, now she was starting to see things more from the mother’s point of view. Her new book on mother-daughter relationship revisits stories we’ve loved over the years, and takes its title from one of these complex intertwinings: You Won’t Get Free of It is a line from an Alice Munro story—and Aviv wrote the definitive article on Munro’s betrayal of her daughter. Also in this book: Aviv’s own story of being hospitalized for an eating disorder at six years old—the youngest child, she was told, ever to be hospitalized for the disease. That started a relationship with intense therapy, and a dance with her own mental health, that no doubt explains the empathy she brings to such an endlessly complex beat.

Listen to her talk with NPR’s Tanya Mosely here.

Order You Won’t Get Free of It from the Spread’s l’il Bookshop here.

Read Melanie Thernstrom’s [DRINK!] New York Times review here.

The egg factory is open for business

Someone alert the middle-aged punks (we’re sure the Silicon Valley billionaire vag’s are already in the know): The long-accepted biological wisdom that mammals (including us) are born with a fixed number of eggs—the whole reason we face infertility and menopause, and need loud concerts to reclaim our hot flashes and top-dollar docs to treat our dried out bits—might be… wrong? In Scientific American, Starre Vartan reports that since 2004, biologist Jonathan Tilly has been arguing that ovaries harbor “oogonial stem cells” or OSCs capable of generating new eggs well into adulthood, maybe even after menopause. Skeptics call the methods shaky; believers say they’ve watched these cells form actual follicles in human tissue. Nobody’s produced a viable human egg from an OSC so far, but at the University of Edinburgh, researchers are growing lab-based “organoids” engineered from a patient’s own OSCs, in the hope of turning back the clock on our eggos.

Read it here.

GLP-Infinity and Beyond

A week off for your Spreaditors yielded another pile-up of GLP-1 fare, again ranging from the medically exciting to the socially exhausting: Elle’s Katie Berohn reports that—in addition to decreasing the risk of heart and kidney disease—Ozempic and her kin may also decrease your chance of breast cancer and its recurrence: “A retrospective analysis of more than 110,000 women between the ages of 45 and 80 with a BMI above 25 showed those who took GLP-1s were about 30 percent less likely to develop breast cancer than those who weren’t taking the drugs.” Which, dang, girl! Meanwhile, shock jock Caroline Calloway couldn’t wait to tell us about her journey down to a paltry BMI of—beep beep boop (calculator sounds)—19.8 over in hipper-than-thou Byline. The crux: “First Ozempic will make you skinny and then being skinny will make the world kinder to you if you’re a woman. And then after that, if you have a hedonistic brain chemistry that skews always towards addiction like a fucking heat-seeking missile, GLP-1’s will subdue you in a way that feels like peace.” This, of course, precipitated the kind of finger-shakin’ we like to see from the New York Times’s marm-in-chief Jessica Grose (complimentary)—the kind of thing it is exceedingly comforting to find in our inbox at dawn’s first crack. “[Calloway’s] uncomfortable candor is a useful illustration of how the widespread availability of GLP-1s has further warped the way mainstream American culture views women’s weight,” Grose writes. Then things get interesting: “For women who were already employed or partnered when they started taking a GLP-1, [Harvard economist Rebecca] Diamond found that very little changed, suggesting that the ‘obesity penalty’ for women is largely a first-impression prejudice. ‘The markets that respond are the ones where someone forms a fresh impression of a woman’s body weight: a prospective partner, or an employer considering an applicant who is not employed,’ Diamond explains. If weight is just one piece of information balanced with other factors, it has less impact.” Thanks, Mom! Can’t argue with math…right?

Read “Could Ozempic Lower Breast Cancer Risk?” here.

Read “The Drug That Made Me Want Less” here.

Read “The ‘obesity penalty’ is all too real” here.

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Spreadkittens,

Because we are us, we have been known to lay awake in bed, asking life’s big questions: Would we be friends with Olivia Wilde? Is Penelope Cruz the most beautiful woman on God’s green Earth? Should we add Edward Norton to our hall pass shortlist? (And should we call him Ed?) Is Seth Rogen actually significantly shorter than his IMDb-listed five feet eleven inches? Last night, we got answers to all of these pressing queries and many more from a screening of The Invite. And—not actually a spoiler—every last one of them was a big ole YES. Because its trailer is perfect (a word we use sparingly; off the top of our heads, only the Jarhead, The Social Network, and Like Crazy previews clear the bar), we’d been managing our expectations for the film, a chamber piece starring Wilde, Rogen, Cruz, and Norton, and directed by Wilde, in which an elder-millennial couple in San Francisco (Wilde and Rogen) invite their sexy upstairs neighbors (Cruz and Norton). Y’all: Hilarity really does ensue. While the movie is far from flawless (especially in the last 20 percent IOHO), it’s an excellent send-up of our own milieu. See: The scene involving Rogen searching for a corkscrew in drawers Wilde would literally never have put one in. We guffawed till we cried. Not that that’s a comment on our own marriages or anything! Anywho! The movie opens in select theaters Friday, with a wider release on July 10, and we hope you’ll see it sooner than later so we can all go together to buy Cruzian platinum wigs before summer’s end.

We’re dedicating this issue to ways to spend the other 2,230 hours of your summer, and don’t worry, we’re staying in our lane: You won’t find a single hike or road trip game on this list—just the basic sustenance of 26 new movies and shows. To be clear, we’re not guaranteeing these are future Spreadie Award Winners™, we’re just saying they are summer entertainments, and not the worst way to wile away a few hours of AC, maybe with a frozen watermelon mojito or three?

We’re taking next week off but we’ll see ya back here, same time, same place, the week after July 4th!

Cannonball!

Rachel & Maggie

🔑 KEY 🔑

⚡: Out now

🍿: In theaters

🎥: Movie

📺: TV (Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV, HBO, Peacock, etc.)

Watch it with a fellow Spreader (or a Spreaditor—hey, we’re free!). Aka movies about women on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

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Serious Spreadvestigators,

Talk about a summer blockbuster. The Amy Griffin Detective Agency (that’s us) is happy to share its latest briefing. Kick off your fisherman sandals and crack a fridge ciggie: this one’s a doozy. The Spread’s favorite billionaire, MDMA expeditioner, pal-of-Oprah, and seemingly disgraced—wait, maybe not!—memoirist has re-entered the chat with the full force of her power as the venture capitalist wife of maybe the richest man in New York.

When we last left this saga, a woman filing as Jane Doe had sued Amy Griffin, claiming that the recovered memories of sexual abuse Griffin described in The Tell were actually her own experiences, and that Griffin had obtained them through an elaborate ruse: a man named Dominique Price—who, oh so randomly, turns out to be a guy best known for extensively smooching a fellow contestant on Season 2 of Temptation Island—allegedly posed as a talent agent/producer to extract her story under false pretenses. The suit also named Griffin’s ghostwriter Sam Lansky and publisher Penguin Random House.

Jane Doe filed her suit in March, while Amy was sitting front row at Schiaparelli at Paris Fashion Week (she and designer Daniel Roseberry are tight). For three months, things on this front have been suspiciously quiet, with nary a blip from our “Amy Griffin” Google notifications. But you had to know the crisis PR and law firms were whirring hard behind the scenes. On Monday, Willkie Farr & Gallagher—which legal eagles out there will recall as the white-shoe law firm that just represented Blake Lively in her deathmatch with Justin Baldoni—retaliated, unmasking Jane Doe’s identity and filing both an “anti-SLAPP” motion (to ask the judge to throw out the Doe suit) and a defamation lawsuit accusing Jane Doe of painting her as a liar and a trauma-thief.

We spent the last two days slow-reading both filings and texting each other every three minutes to bring you, in no particular order, the six biggest surprises revealed in Case 2:26-cv-01811: Griffin v. Altum, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada on June 15, in the year of our lord 2026. We would like to acknowledge that this very fine read is for people who have been following this case closely—because we know we’re not alone out there!

First, a little context: The Tell makes an inordinately big deal about a dress that Amy loaned to a girl in middle school named “Claudia”—we later learn this is because Amy suspects Claudia was also abused by “Mr. Mason,” the teacher who allegedly raped Amy. In the book, Amy writes that she tried to corroborate her recovered memories by reconnecting with Claudia, but that ultimately, Claudia denied being abused. Jane Doe says she is the real “Claudia,” and that Amy stole her story.

Griffin’s filing says that’s bunk: That Jane Doe is not the character she calls Claudia in the book, and that while she and Jane Doe did go to school together, they have never met as adults.

1. Griffin denies Jane Doe’s allegation that they met in a coffee shop in Palm Springs in late 2019—a meeting that Jane Doe contends is portrayed in the book as the meeting with Claudia. According to Griffin’s filing, she met the real “Claudia” in April 2023, in a coffee shop thousands of miles from Palm Springs, along with ghostwriter Sam Lansky (his presence will come as a surprise to readers of The Tell, which positions this encounter as a somewhat delicate discussion: one woman telling another—who she hasn’t seen in thirty years and never knew well—that she believed she had been raped.)

2. And then there’s that fateful borrowed dress… a crucial detail of which, according to the new filing, Jane Doe has got wrong: “[Jane Doe’s] reliance on the story of Claudia borrowing Griffin’s floral dress to plead her case only shows her hand.” In the book, and in Jane Doe’s later filing, the dress is described as “floral.” Now Griffin says that, in reality, it was pink, a detail that was deliberately changed in the text to protect Claudia’s identity. They say that if Jane Doe was really Claudia, she should know that.

3. Griffin alleges that she had finished a draft of her story before Jane Doe alleges she was even contacted to share her story. The filing says: “Simply put, Mrs. Griffin could not have stolen in April a story she finished writing in March.”

4. Griffin has real beef with the New York Times, for the September 2025 story that started The Tell’s unraveling, “The Billionaire, the Psychedelics and the Best-Selling Memoir”—which the filing calls an “investigative hit piece.” (We had plenty to say about it here.) Griffin blames reporters Katie Rosman and Elisabeth Egan for introducing Jane Doe to The Tell in the first place; text messages show Jane Doe had never read it until the reporters Amazon’d her a copy on June 28 of last year. Griffin’s lawyers accuse the reporters of going into the story determined to discredit The Tell, claiming they “methodically and deliberately elicited information” to bolster a “sensationalized theory…fueled by suggestive journalism and seized upon by an avaricious plaintiff to shake down a wealthy defendant.”

5. Rosman and Egan allegedly knew that at least one part of Jane Doe’s story did not hold up. In his affadavit, Price maintains that before last September’s bombshell story was published, Rosman reached out to him to verify the phone call between himself and Jane Doe—the call in which she says they brokered a deal to tell her story. Price says he told Rosman that he’d never heard of any of this—not Amy Griffin, not The Tell, nada. (Curiously, it does not say that he’d never heard of Jane Doe herself…) If Price did speak to Rosman and said what he said he said—we know: it’s a lot—it’s not clear why the Times reporters didn’t mention that he failed to corroborate Jane Doe’s story.

6. This one blew our minds, so to speak. After describing Amy’s process of recovering her memories via MDMA, the filing drops in a brief but curious detail: “An expert in MDMA therapy has since reviewed Mrs. Griffin’s memories and concluded that they were recovered before the drug took effect.” (Italics ours) Hang on, isn’t the whole premise of The Tell that she unlocked buried memories by taking these drugs? We can’t help but wonder if this clause is intended to boost the legitimacy of her traumatic memories, just in case she ever does have to go to court to defend them. Because, as your own Spreaditor Maggie reported here, MDMA experts are happy to tell you that the drug doesn’t work the way she says it does in The Tell.

The filings reveal that, to date, Jane Doe has shared no proof that she ever met with Amy or with the guy from Temptation Island. No phone logs, no text messages, no emails, no travel records indicating she traveled to Palm Springs.

And while the Price affidavit looks good for Griffin, what would have really helped her case was if the real Claudia—even anonymously—had gone on the record. If she’s out there, will the real Claudia please stand up?

Also up for grabs: So far the response online has been anti-Amy—will that tide turn yet again? Will Griffin sue the Times? Will Jane Doe produce evidence and fight back? Will this mess slip away from the discourse entirely? And in that case, what are we doing with all this free time?

Love ya more,

Rachel & Maggie

P.S. We would like to apologize for the preponderance of heteronormative female hotness in this issue. It just shook out this way, we promise!!

Beef, Season 3

We all saw the smoke wafting from Call Her Daddy host Alex Cooper’s Unwell empire, but Vanity Fair writer Clara Molot motored right on up to the barbecue. The surprise was that the girlboss-centric outfit turns out to be a sausage fest thanks to Cooper’s husband and business partner, Matt Kaplan, who, in cahoots with chief brand officer T.J. Marchetti, runs her company day to day. The story paints the workplace as a first job for many of its employees—most of them young women—as a couple of hot-headed men run amok, dropping f-bombs, evaluating female bodies, inquiring about staffers’ sex lives, and causing panic attacks. According to the piece, Cooper at times just stands there watching the action. Because we’re feeling extra, uh, legally minded these days, we’d like to quote from a letter that Kaplan’s—and Justin Baldoni’s!—attorney, Bryan Freedman, addressed to VF publisher Conde Nast: “If the Story so much as suggests any sexual impropriety on Mr. Kaplan’s part, I will make it my life’s mission to ensure Vanity Fair’s days are numbered.” Did someone say smoke? Also, speaking of Unwell, last week the brand joined Substack with a “magazine”—hey, why not—called Unsaid, which we guess makes us…sisters?

Read the story here.

Tonight We’re Gonna Party Like It’s 1855

Yesteryear fever is burning up our feeds like a raging case of cholera with a typhoid chaser, and gosh do we relishhhhhh a monocultural moment like this. (Our hot take: Yesteryear is the new Gone Girl, Natalie Heller Mills is the new Amazing Amy, the Angry Woman is the new Cool Girl. Also: We did like the book, including its controversial ending—not, it would seem, a very popular POV—and we would love to get into it with you on a slower newsweek. Amy Griffin does not sleep!) Publications desperate to get in on the craze are going to great lengths: Take the usually discerning Vulture, which ran an extremely long, absolute nothingburger of an interview with Ballerina Farm, aka Hannah Neeleman, who supposedly inspired Caro Claire Burke’s novel. British GQ shot Amanda Seyfried—Mother Ann to us, always—in Neeleman drag for its summer issue. Which led us to think about how Seyfried, not ole Annie Hathaway, would be the Natalie of our dream casting. But then we began to wonder whether even with access to Hollywood’s best beauty “tricks,” both of these millennial lionesses might be a liiiiittle too, uh, seasoned—at 40 and 43, respectively—to embody Natalie, who we meet at college? Perhaps Anya Taylor Joy (30) or, playing against type, Saoirse Ronan (32), who’s done the straight woman thing for decades but who we know can flash a sinister streak (see Atonement!). Not that we’ve spent a lot brainpower on this or anything!

Generational Energy

In a Paris Review essay about love, loss, family, and Florida, Greta Rainbow—a friend of the Spread who it must be said is significantly cooler than we are—writes about a jaunt to a séance in the self-appointed Psychic Capital of the World, a village in Florida called Cassadaga with her mother and her Mimi. It’s an ideal bedtime read if you ask us, ultimately more about the power of observation (Greta’s) than the power of psychics.

Read “A Diary from the Psychic Capital of the World” here.

Hassle and Flow

Olga Khazan really seems to relish being the Atlantic’s resident grump on the social science beat. (Remember when she tried to change her personality? We never bought that her heart was in it. ) This week she tackles friendship in the Atlantic: she’s long questioned the axiom that relationships are the best thing for our well-being; now, to her delight, research has caught up. Recent studies have proven that difficult relationships—often with members of one’s own family—can wear a person down beyond irritation and into depression, anxiety, and worse health overall. The scientific name for these people? Hasslers. What’s more, one researcher asserted that women are more likely to be hassled (sure) but we’re also more likely to do the hassling (also, honestly, sure). The upshot, though? Unless the hassling reaches Baby Reindeer levels, most people are healthier being hassled than being lonely. And there you have it—another point for the optimists among us!

Read “There’s a Name for People Who Drain You” here.

Single and Fabulous

Speaking of Gone Girl! In this week’s New York, Emily Ratajkowski is doing a different kind of boob trick than that time she was “handpicked” by Ben Affleck for a David Fincher film back in 2013: This time she’s “breastfeeding” what has to be a babydoll while wearing a leather Gucci jacket and pants. (Her real-life son is 5. It’s called acting, people.) The photo is the opposite of Carrie Bradshaw’s experience with the mag. It accompanies an essay headlined “Mother F*cker”—pretty good—about coming back into one’s own sexually after having a kid and also a divorce. Emrata, as we’ve learned, can write, and in this essay there’s clever excavation of the trope of the single mom and some delightful turns (at the start of her journey, she envisions herself as “Erin Brockovich of Canal Street”). A relatable tale this is not. See photo above.

Read it here.

No Other Choice

Another abortion story that anyone who doesn’t think abortion is healthcare should read: Jayme Serbell writes in Vogue about the non-choice choice she faced during her pregnancy with twins—abort one fetus or both would likely die. After the birth of the healthy twin, she continues to grapple with the duality of life and loss. But, she writes, “I’m not afraid to say the word abortion out loud, because to me it’s not some scary, terrible thing. An abortion saved my son’s life.”

Read “The Abortion That Made Me a Parent” here.

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From the Department of Expectation Management: Contrary to this issue’s subject line and the above photograph, this newsletter has nothing to do with basketball. We’re just feeling the vibe!

Speaditarians,

“Misophonia got ya down?” asked one Spreadspouse recently, as he flagrantly crunch-slurped a bowl of peanut butter Puffins in the glare of her white-hot and perfectly justified rage. Was she imagining things or was he really leaning into it, just to send her over the edge?

Misophonia is a condition that has a lot in common with the human condition, writes Sloane Crosley in the New Yorker, and—just throwing a little gasoline on the fire here—we believe, even more to do with the female condition. “Who among us has not experienced an inability to ignore repetitive tapping, clicking, chewing, smacking, and sniffling?” she writes. Well, sure, if the “us” here is female. Most men we know are not bothered.

The affliction is very on trend. It has its celebrity complainants (January Jones is still a celebrity, right?) and even got its own day: World Misophonia Awareness Day will be here before you know it, on July 9! It has become acceptable to deliver noise complaints via violently worded novelty mugs (“If I can hear you chewing, I have fantasized about your death”) and T-shirts (“Chew louder—I dare you”). Yet, while we estimate that 50 percent of our friends think they suffer from it—all women: hmm!—misophonia still isn’t an official diagnosis, partly because it defies categorization. Is it an audiological condition, or a psychiatric one? Or are you just being pissy?

Turns out not being able to sit in the same room with your fellow Spreaditor as she slurps her tea, or feeling enraged by upstairs neighbors who stomp around in five-inch heels (remember Carrie Bradshaw’s miswritten-as-male buildingmate Duncan Reeves?) is mere “amateur suffering.” For those with the real-deal neurological condition, repetitive tapping, clicking, chewing, smacking, sniffling, gulping, slurping, sighing, crunching, phlegm-clearing, and coughing—oh god, just writing this list!—doesn’t just make you mad. It provokes a full-blown chest-tightening, heart-racing, sweaty fight-or-flight response. Real misophonia can end marriages, upend childhoods, and leave people tortured, often in secret, because they fear judgment or ostracism. It’s “an actual, severe, life-altering condition, 24/7,” argues one sufferer. And the rest of us regular old irritable folk who just can’t possibly peaceably coexist with other people who chew? We trivialize it by claiming it for ourselves.

To be honest, Crosley’s story left us wondering if we might be big old babies or, worse, intolerant dicks. People with actual misophonia are often consumed by shame. They’re telling themselves, “I’m bad, I’m broken, I’m terrible.” They’re not going around mad at everybody else for… human-ing.

Popping our chill pills,

Rachel & Maggie

Erika Kirk’s Bigger-Tent Party

If you’ve finished Yesteryear and find yourself missing your time wading in an ocean—Shannon, what’s an ocean?—of contradictions around ideas about femininity, Christianity, and the American project mixed with a heaping fish soup of self-righteousness, look no further than Atlantic staff writer Elaine Godfrey’s second pilgrimage to San Antonio for Turning Point USA’s annual Women’s Leadership Conference. (If you haven’t finished Yesteryear, you too should read this dispatch; it’s a model of the reporter-in-a-foreign-land genre, packed with laugh-out-loud observations from our woman on the ground.) A lot has changed since last year’s convening, which occurred a week before founder Charlie Kirk was assassinated. For starters, Erika Kirk is now CEO, bringing to the project a shot of girlboss ambition. And whereas previous conferences were explicitly political, all out pro-Trump machines (two years ago, the speaker lineup included Lara Trump, Candace Owens, Megyn Kelly, and Alina Habba, Esq.!1 and you know how that movie ended), Godfrey hears not one single mention of the midterms or even, uh, voting, from the dais. Instead, she writes, the vibe was more you-go-girl Christian empowerment, reaching out to housewives and single, working women alike. One woman she interviewed captured the (previously radical for these parts) sentiment thusly: Womanhood “can be a little bit nuanced.”

Read “A Disorienting Weekend With the Women of Turning Point” here.

“Totally Normal Person”

Teny Geragos is the common thread between the defense teams of P. Diddy, the Alexander brothers, and Harvey Weinstein. At 35, this very reasonable-seeming, measured woman has the seriousness and credibility that Trump attack dogs like Alina Habba, Esq.!—DRINK!—lack, which has quietly made her the face of a post-#MeToo legal era: the woman who famous men call when they’ve been accused of sexual misconduct. Geragos is the kind of gal who can sound somewhat empathetic to the violence suffered by Cassie Ventura—which, after all, was never up for debate—and in the next breath describe Combs beating Ventura in a hotel hallway as him “not being his best self.” She argues that the work she does emphasizes the power of women—who, after all, are the ones whose stories everybody believes (!!). She doesn’t want to be the one to call the men she defends victims but if the Italian loafer fits… “Nobody is more powerful in a courtroom or in the government than a woman.” Says the woman who helped get Diddy off on the worst of his charges, and won Weinstein a recent victory.

Read it here.

GLP-1s are coming for us—whether we want them or not.

What do you do when you’ve publicly declared yourself proudly fat, and your doctor tells you the only way to cure your health problem is to go on a GLP-1 and lose 50 pounds? One of our favorite Vogue voices of recent years, Emma Specter—she of the “68 Thoughts I Had While Watching Office Romance”2 listicle, a format that we cannot resist and sometimes boldly rip off—has made her bigger body part of her journalistic project. In 2024 she published a memoir about accepting her shape and overcoming what she calls her former “soft anorexic” disordered eating. Then along came a “forever period” that lasted two years. It was endometriosis (which btw affects one in ten women, and one in two Spreaditors); the fix, her doctor told her rather flippantly, was to go on Zepbound. Specter is conflicted on multiple levels: worried about being a shill for Big Pharma, worried about letting down the fat liberation movement, worried about being a 32-year-old who relies on her mother to pay her bills because the meds cost $400 a month, out of pocket. Worried about unconsciously trying to present herself as a “good GLP-1 user”—unlike the thin people who use them to get even thinner. Worried about reabsorbing “the messages I’ve worked so hard to shed about body size being inherently tied to worth—which I fear I might if I keep losing weight.” On the other hand, this shit works. That perpetual period? Synced right up.

Read, “I Didn’t Want Weight Loss to Be the Thing That Cured Me. It Did Anyway” here.

Still spitballing here: Maybe “Fathtrescnence”?

We have been on the New Dads Are Depressed (NDAD) beat for a while now, so when we saw the Cut headline “Postpartum Depression is Coming For Fathers,” we said what we always say in response to the topic : Sure, but do they have to call it “postpartum depression”? Can’t we reserve some distinction for the birthing parent? And then we read the piece, by Emi Nietfeld, which is so excellent we forgot about our nomenclature beef. So excellent even that it should be passed out to “secondary” parents as enthusiastically as mesh undies and squirt bottles are handed to their partners. When Nietfeld gave birth to her child, she happened to have an absolutely blissful postpartum period; her husband, on the other hand, spiraled. Inside her tender, first-person framing, Nietfeld interviews a handful of depressed and anxious new dads (one had the kind of intrusive thoughts we’d previously only heard new mothers cop) and gets into the wild and persuasive brain science that can accompany new fatherhood. According to USC psychology professor Darby Saxbe’s research, “New fathers’ brains experience similar shifts to moms’ brains, including losing gray-matter volume in areas associated with executive functioning, visual processing, attention, and empathy — even though they’d never been pregnant, never given birth, and never breastfed. The men who spent more time with their infant and more time as primary caretaker experienced more changes.” Sounds like filling out the mood survey at the ped appointment should be a family affair.

Read it here.

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Spreadpanions,

The New York Times Opinion section is stirring the pot again—not that they ever really took a breath—and this time it’s a spring fever kind of thing, with Magdalene J. Taylor, a senior editor at Playboy who has written about how people should be having more sex and about how dating apps were getting worse for the section in the past, summoning the ghost of Pamela Paul for the job. Her piece, which attempts to serve as a sort of rallying cry for “hetero-optimism” in the face of so much “heteropessimism,” initially ran with the headline “Being Straight Is Great, Actually.” Presumably that title was too over-the-top for even Opinion Editor Kathleen Kingsbury, and it quickly changed to the “There’s Nothing Wrong With Wanting Men.” (Was this better?) In addition to pouncing on the headline(s) and the timing—this little doozy landed right at the start of Pride Month—the internet fray has jumped all over Taylor’s text, which mixes together some “progressive” stats about how women now often earn as much as their husbands, dutifully checks boxes about the manosphere and the fall of Roe, and then takes a hard 180 in the fourth act, when the writer gives herself up. Turns out she is in love with “one such man.” Engaged, in fact, and everything is coming up roses. She would like everyone to experience such hombre y mujer bliss! Turns out it’s pretty sweet to be a straight gal in a straight world.

Much as we love a counterintuitive take, is this really the time to be reveling in the state of gender relations in America? Also, where even were we—had Modern Love taken a wrong turn? We’re still scratching our heads. Best thing we can come up with for now is a warning label: “The author is deliriously in love. It is not recommended by the medical establishment that she operate heavy machinery, including keyboards linked to millions of close-reading subscribers.”

Anyhoo, as women who are married to male men who we do like, and who shudder in this newsletter weekly about the misogyny seeping in through the doors and windows—citing the likes of Dame Helen Lewis’s current Atlantic cover story, for example—our wedding gift to Ms. Taylor is this: Twenty percent off a paid subscription to the Spread! In the name of lurve, we will of course extend it to those of you who have not yet ponied up as well. The code is SPREADOPINION. Congrats!

Rachel & Maggie

P.S. While we’re talkin’ choices made over at the Gray Lady: Did y’all read the sad-sack Styles story about Glamour magazine this week? Its raison d’être is, ostensibly, that the formerly robust and powerful brand has been reduced to an e-commerce operation. There’s very little industry context or even Condé Nast context—despite the fact that the company also just diminished and/or folded Teen Vogue, Allure, and Self. The result feels like they’re just kickin’ the ole Glamour girl while she’s down. Editors, if you’re hard up for assignments to keep that team of investigative media reporters busy, here’s what we’d like to know: Can a brand—not a Substacker but, like, a media company—actually survive on affiliate links? We need the facts!

P.P.S. We almost forgot (because we thought it was a bad dream) that in four weeks the Slate Culture Gabfest will end its 18-year run. As longterm fans, we hope someone is organizing them a Stephen Colbert-style send-off, and that our invites to said send-off are in the mail.

P.P.P.S. If you like the subject line on this newsletter, you’ll love this reel.

Mawwiage Problems

A new book by the marriage historian Stephanie Coontz is a Spready event indeed. Coontz came to the fore as a public intellectual during a different culture war—or maybe just an earlier battle of the same war we’re in now: During the ’90s push for “family values,” Coontz, a single mother herself, tried to cool the panic about divorce and single motherhood. Now, in For Better and Worse, she argues that we’re living in a new moment. Marriages are increasingly built around emotional fulfillment and personal choice, but they’re being dragged backward by “earworms”—internalized refrains, gender scripts from a previous era. In the Atlantic, Honor Jones (whose marital musings have been Spread Canon since this 2021 story1) processes the book through the lens of her own divorce, gently critiquing the oversimplification of Coontz’s argument (women “need to imagine better”" while men “need to rinse their cups”). In New York, Jessica Bennett delivers the full profile, traveling to Coontz’s home in Olympia, Washington, to bring the historian to life—from the antiwar stunts of her youth to her own reluctance to marry. In the end, we’re left with a deeper sense of how Coontz’s own marriage is genuinely hard-won, not just theoretically enlightened.

Read Jones’s “How to Save a Marriage” here.

Read Bennett’s “America’s Marriage Says We’re in a Tug-of-War With the Past” here.

The Parade of Bling-Emblazoned Panties that the Chic Bon Vivants Are Buzzing About at the Design-Forward Eatery

For those outside the biz: Per industry tradition, when an editor leaves a title after years of service, the staff makes them a personalized faux-cover or other magaziney artifact celebrating their work at the place. Lately, there have been several such artifacts popping up on Instagram. Our favorite is a full tribute issue to outgoing T editor Hanya Yanagihara, which features the A Little Life author’s banned words list2, and IOHO it bests even Graydon Carter’s much-discussed inventory of outlawed terms. Read to the bottom of this newsletter: In service to you, we squinted REALLY HARD at the Instagram post for a LONG TIME, to collect the full list of terms.

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Spreadmates,

On Saturday morning, we needed A MINUTE. And so, like all self-respecting mothers who need a minute, we made an announcement to our families perhaps a little too enthusiastically: We needed to use the bathroom! In truth, we needed an emergency reading chamber. The New Yorker’s Jessica Winter had published a piece on Strangers author Belle Burden. The headline alone told us this was a five-alarm Spreadmergency. Had the socialite-turned-memoirist been less than forthcoming about the money involved in the dissolution of her marriage—a marriage to a man so cold we have at times wondered if he was an actual sociopath—that is the subject of her super-duper-bestselling, group-text-sweeping account of financial peril?

Apparently we weren’t the only ones locked in the bathroom: The online reaction to Winter’s piece was swift and ferocious. Some of our favorite women on the internet were mad as hell. Winter missed the point of the book altogether, they said. Pawing through Burden’s financial documents to verify her side of the story? Mean-spirited and misogynist. Why were women being attacked for sharing their truth? And who says Belle Burden owes the world every last decimal on her tax return, anyway? (Firestarter Caitlin Flanagan, on the other hand: “I knew the husband was going to get his side of the story.”)

For those late to the Belle ball, there’s a lot going on here: Despite a belabored metaphor about a family of ospreys also nesting on Martha’s Vineyard, Strangers struck a chord with readers for its emotional honesty—a good faith that is at least in part earned by Burden’s seeming frankness about her Standard Oil + Cornelius Vanderbilt privileged upbringing. The matter-of-fact register in which she describes her country-club circumstances seems like a breath of fresh air, especially in the wake of Amy Griffin’s less-than-forthright description of her own pedigree (among other things!) in last year’s super-duper-bestselling memoir, The Tell. (Supplemental reading: Maris Kreizman’s “The Rise of Ragebait Lit,” out in Bazaar yesterday.)

But the thing that really makes Burden’s memoir stand out among the dozens of other personal tales of divorce published these past few years is how deeply it focuses on the finances in particular. That, plus a clever narrative trick: Burden drops the bomb on us (that her husband dropped on her) at the beginning of the book. After twenty years of marriage, he’s abandoning her and their children. Boom, done deal. Except there’s a prenup—and it’s missing, and her future hinges on it. As Burden retraces her marriage, looking for clues as to why and how he could have done this, the book’s momentum is propelled by that money mystery: Where is the prenup, will it be found, what havoc will it wreak? Will he follow it to the letter, forcing Belle and her children to move from their home (a prospect that is legitimately destabilizing, even if the next home, too, is all Schumacher upholstery and Maestro Bath faucets)? The book works so well because Burden is both a skilled writer and ostensibly willing to give up the goods, describing in detail her many trusts, and how she’s used them to buy properties that she then (foolishly) put in both of their names. It reads as if she’s giving us the whole enchilada.

But some of the numbers Winter delivers—that Belle did not—would make a gecko blink: In the divorce settlement, Burden got $50,000 per month in child support (which does not include the kids’ education, insurance, or other programmatic expenses); she’s the beneficiary of five trusts, some of which she receives hundreds of thousands from annually, but the bulk of which—to the tune of $45 million—will be accessible to her once her stepmother dies. Of course, this is none of our business. Except she made it our business by establishing the posture of an open book.

Did Burden do anything wrong? Is eliding some context wrong? Nah. But when your memoir is structured as a financial thriller, its hat hung on a kind of exotic one-percent transparency, we’re going to stick our neck out and say: It’s awkward.

Rachel & Maggie

P.S. In our preorders: New novels coming up next week from Ann Patchett and Maggie O’Farrell, and later this summer: Kathryn Jezer-Morton’s examination of social media’s affect on families, The Story of Your Life.

Two sides sides to every story (even divorce stories).

Is the Burden effect making a very un-Atlantic-y essay the most-read story on the Atlantic site? Those looking for a man to finally take some responsibility for the role he plays in a marital dy-nam-ic may find some satisfaction in Chris Jones’s divorce essay (adapted from his forthcoming memoir, Legs Hearts Minds), a sort of reverse-Strangers in which the spouse being crushed by a plummeting anvil is a man (but, don’t worry, the one at fault is still… a man). Jones recounts the terrible night, a decade ago, when he got clonked on the head by the dual realization that his marriage was over and his best friend was colluding (not sleeping) with the enemy, just months after he lost a plum gig at Esquire. The twist: Jones emerges from this triple whammy not full of rage, but rather newly aware that his rage—and tendency to view everything in life as a competition—was the problem in the first place. File under “I’m the problem it’s me,” next to Daniel Oppenheimer’s essay in the New York Times Magazine about no-bullshit therapy for manly man men.

Read “The Night My Marriage Fell Apart” here.

We thought “catching print” was about magazines!

Seems like every week we bring you another tale about how men are beginning to face the kind of aesthetic pressure that women have been under since the dawn of time—and how they’re crumbling to absolute bits under the weight of it all. It’s possible that in all our talk of looksmaxxing and peptides and longevity and testosterone shots, we’ve been burying the lede when the real issue is, same as it ever was, penis size. Cue Brock Colyar, breezing in with a comprehensive but also—true to form—empathetic look at an anxiety that afflicts Roganites and Fire Island boys alike. We’re going all the way here, folks: the reality of the micropenis (rare!), online Viagra prescriptions (rampant!), porn addiction (which is, after all, the only place straight men actually see other men’s junk, leading to their, ahem, inflated expectations). We’re talkin’ ligament-cutting procedures, the burgeoning dermatological field of “girth enhancement,” the across-the-aisle trend of ridiculing men based on their size, and—this one hit home—the freedom women feel to rate and LOL about less-endowed partners. We can’t joke about a woman being a “dog” anymore, so why are we allowed to giggle at a guy’s “tiny porcini mushroom”? Catching print, btw, is “the art of assessing a man’s penis size through his pants.”

Read “The Big Little Penis Panic” here.

“Death by FOMO is a pretty depressing epitaph.”

Two years ago, Peggy Orenstein wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times about the “teen sex trend” colloquially described as choking. The practice was rampant and dangerous, she explained, and the culprit was—of course—porn. One of your Spreaditors literally wept after reading it, for the children and for all of us, and we have yet to watch a single episode of Euphoria, you know, just in case. Now, the Spread’s philosopher queen Kate Manne is doing a Home Edit on our psyches—organizing our big feelings with her brilliant, methodical brain. In “How Sex-Positivity Lost Its Way” over on , she calls “choking” what it is—strangulation—and writes about the perceived tension between what’s consensual and what’s ethical, and how consent and misogyny are not mutually exclusive. This is a woman unafraid to go out on a limb, and we will join her there: “Some practices are just too unhealthy for our bodies, and others for our minds, representing a troubling symptom of misogynistic enculturation. And some are plausibly both: strangulation is an act which cuts off the oxygen and blood supplies to a woman’s brain, and simultaneously robs her of her voice. Indeed, strangulation is the ultimate act of male control and domination.”

Read it here.

Paid subscribers are scrambling over this paywall to find a tale of gambling addiction; twin rants from our favorite op-ed writer (keywords: mama grizzlies); the sure-fire T.V. hit that Tim Cook is denying us all; and a look into our Spreaditor future… catch you on the flip side!

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Cherished Citizens of Spreadlandia,

We bring you good tidings from the magazine multiverse, whose best and brightest gathered last night (at a mall, natch) in Manhattan for the National Magazine Awards, aka the ASMEs.1 The good news is we did not have to negotiate a shared custody agreement or hire a welder to solve the problem of which Spreaditor would get dibs on our Alexander Calder-designed Ellie statuette, because we do not have an Ellie statuette. No need to storm the palace gates on our behalf. The newsletter award went to Bloomberg News’s FOIA Files, by senior investigative reporter Jason Leopold—mazel, Jason!—the kind of guy who relishes filing a Freedom of Information Act request (or, as the news junkies say it, a “foyah,” like the entry to your office building, only with a New Yawk accent) so much that he hosts a podcast and writes a newsletter about them. The only thing we like that much are Levain Caramel Coconut Chocolate Chip Cookies, which FWIW also make an excellent consolation prize for friends and spouses who do not win awards.

How do you compare a Spread to a FOIA Files, or, for that matter, a Secret Strategist full of insider shopping tips to a Today in Tabs full of piss and vinegar and internet jargon? That, friends, is the very apples-vs-oranges essence of the ASMEs, a forum in which the New Yorker’s Goliath can be defeated by the tiny New York Review of Architecture, and where the Spread, a baby birthed at our respective kitchen tables that has no infrastructure, no full-time employees (not even us), no HR department—departments, ha—competes against newsletters powered by the Atlantic, Harper’s Bazaar, and New York Magazine. When we say it was an honor just to be nominated, we’re for real.

We walked in on a high. Immediately upon arrival in New York, we experienced a one-two punch of Spreadlebrity sightings: Ezra Klein on the A train (taller than expected!) and, moments later, designer Rachel Comey on Bleecker (shorter than expected!). Our Venn diagram was 🔥🔥🔥.

As for the event itself, ASME night always leaves us feeling jacked up on Journalism.2 Where else are a couple of Spreaditors going to find a room full of people who, like us, get fired up about stories that take two long years to percolate (like Olivia Carville’s reporting for Can’t Look Away, a documentary for Bloomberg News about the legal battle to prove social media is addictive) or that take big swings on subjects that are almost impossible to wrap your arms around (like Rafia Zakaria’s “Water Pressure,” about the burgeoning water crisis in Karachi, Pakistan—which illustrates how the people most devastated by climate change are ones the least responsible for it)? Where else do we get to cheer on little engines that could like The Bitter Southerner, the scrappy indie out of Athens, Georgia, that defeated Mother Jones and the Yale Review for General Excellence in Literature, Science, and Politics? To partake in loose talk about recent blephs, old-school diva writers (in new-school establishments), and the newsletter superstars that no one actually likes (it’s not us, we’re pretty sure)? To speculate about the James Murdoch acquisition of New York Mag (confirmed this morning, after a moving speech last night from EIC David Haskell, who spoke about working for a company that revolved around journalism as he accepted the evening’s biggest prize: General Excellence, News, Sports, and Entertainment) and take bets on who’ll land the plum slots open at GQ and T: The New York Times magazine? And to commune with folks from places like Poetry and Racquet, and feel a little guilty about the fact that as hard as we try to read everything for you, there’s still so much great work we never get around to.

Far be it from us to look a gift horse in the mouth but… it did not escape our notice that not one single solitary “Spready” (i.e., explicitly woman-leaning) story, package, series, pod, newsletter, or magazine went home with an Ellie. Hopefully you know by now that we don’t believe women only read stuff made for or about women. But since these stories are our bread and butter—and since, in this day and age, almost all publications make something in this vein—it does seem striking that the powers that be still don’t tend to view that kind of content as “the best.”

Well, we know different. So in this issue, we’re sharing the 10 Spreadiest finalists from the 2026 ASME Awards. Plus the six best new things we learned this week because, onwards and upwards!

Thanks, as ever, for being the only award we need: loyal people who click open these emails and actually read them.

Hope you’re hungry!

Rachel & Maggie

P.S. Going into last night, we wondered how many Devil Wears Prada 2 jokes we’d have to endure. Turns out, only the ones that were made by… us, several of which were about this irony of ironies: Last week, we won a Deadline Award for Bustle’s “The Vanity Project,” a package coedited by our very own Rachel Baker and featuring two stories by one Maggie Bullock.3 Eagle-eyed industry types know that, in the movie, the Deadline Awards—a roundtabled affair at New York’s Harvard Club—is the unnamed awards ceremony during which Andy Sachs and her Vanguard colleagues get shitcanned at the tip-off to the Devil Wears Prada 2. Rich, right? Still, we’d like to thank Nigel and our nondescript and utterly unnecessary Aussie boyfriend who people seem to love from Colin from Accounts for this honor. (“The Vanity Project” was also up for an ASME, for personal service, but was ultimately relegated to bridesmaid for the most servicey-service-serving outfit in all the land: Wirecutter, for a hardcore guide to data security partially written by friend-of-Spread Jon Chase—congrats, buddy!)

P.P.S. Gee, wouldn’t Shein buying Everlane make a great backdrop for The Devil Wears Prada 3? Here for it! (We can’t stop.)

What’s after the paywall? So glad you asked! First: We rejudged the year’s ASME finalists with one criteria: Spreadiness. Second: Six fresh-n-fruity reads of the week. (An explosion of clowns! A millionaire feline! And one makeup-lovin’ priest)

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Spreademists,

How often have you heard the word masculinism, a mirror term for feminism? It’s been bumping around academia for decades but feels relatively new to your Spreaditors—two people who, as you know, keep our eyes trained on this space like Trader Joe’s shoppers pouncing on the last tote bag. Well, gird your loins: Masculinism, the movement, is the star of a sweeping Atlantic cover story that dropped today. In it, the one and only Dame Helen Lewis makes the case that—more than race, religion, and the price of beef—masculinism is the true ish of modern conservatism, the superglue sticking Trump’s toupee in place, the peanut butter at the center of the whole New Right sandwich. Online, her story is called “The Men Who Want Women to Be Quiet,” but Lewis’s title (read to you by Lewis herself—in her dulcet English tones, whatta treat!—in the audio version) is “The Men Who Don’t Want Women to Vote. Or Work. Or Have Opinions.” That sounds like hyperbole or satire but, remarkably, the men she interviews cop to exactly those beliefs. Lewis writes about the usual tentpoles of the manosphere grifter ecosystem (Tate, Rogan), but the men she’s really zeroing in on here are ones we’ve heard less about: educated types who hold real clout in major institutions (like, say, the US government) and are in some ways more worrying. They have both the sophistication to spout ten-dollar words and the ability to make their wacko beliefs sound almost… sensible. One, Douglas Wilson, the pastor whose denomination counts Pete Hegseth as a member, is fond of saying out loud that he would like to repeal the 19th amendment.

Masculinist rage is of course fueled by men’s real and/or perceived loss of power. But while we have talked ad nauseam about “working-class economic anxiety,” Lewis argues that the true animus is far simpler: Who took men’s power away? Women! How do we fix it? Put ’em back where they belong!

A few fun data points to keep in your back pocket when you corner your friendly neighborhood wine mom (more on her in a minute) at the school fundraiser:

• 83 percent of Republican men under 50 believe society is too “feminized”

• College-educated Republicans are more likely than non-college-educated Republicans to hold that view

• Gen Z men in 30 countries are far more likely than Boomer men to say feminism has gone too far and hurt men

Keep reading, friends—many of this week’s stories turned out to be variations on this theme. We keep trying to believe that the manosphere is a terrible moment that will pass. Lewis’s story makes it clear that we ignore, or underestimate, these forces at our own peril.

Wine? Someone say wine?

Rachel & Maggie

P.S. This coming Tuesday night your Spreaditors will ascend the sparkling escalators of Brookfield Place mall in New York City to attend the National Magazine Awards—aka the ASMEs—where we’ll chin chin our fellow nominees and sit shoulder to shoulder with the industry elite (if you’ve seen the recent documentary The Devil Wears Prada 2, can you please suspend disbelief for us just this once?). Who will take home the top prize for best newsletter in all the land? Watch this space!

A Tale of Two Moms

The New Yorker’s Jessica Winter digs into the cultural trope of the Wine Mom, which for a hot second meant just a mom who needed a lil break—perhaps over a cool glass of pinot gris—before being co-opted by the right as a shorthand for whiny, white, liberal, book club-frequenting suburban gals, aka uppity types who won’t even give moms.gov a chance! Wine Moms belong to the sisterhood of Karens, AWFULs, and in Winter’s reframing, they—we?—are an important and potentially decisive voting bloc for the midterms. The Wine Mom’s secret weapon? Her kids’ school: “What appears simply as a P.T.A. meeting or a group of parents waiting outside the school gates at dismissal can double as a wellspring of political organization and mutual aid,” Winter writes. “That’s partly why Moms for Liberty was able to take over school boards so quickly after the pandemic, and it’s partly why a center-left counterstrike dominated by mothers could so quickly take them back. The left-leaning Pipeline Fund, which started in 2018, helped Democrats in Florida pick up fifteen school-board seats in 2024, and plans to back candidates in school-board and other down-ballot races across twenty-one states in the next midterms.” But while we are organizing our own communities and harnessing every modicum of optimism we can muster, history is not on our side here: Winter points out that the last time the majority of white women voted for a democrat was when Bill Clinton was first elected. That was 1992.

Meanwhile, over at WSJ magazine, we’re treated to a proper introduction to yet another mommy archetype. The Cool Girl has grown up, trading her enthusiasm for chili dogs, beer, and poker for a nonchalant style of parenting. She is now: the Beta Mom, the antidote to the helicopter parent. She is not played by Anne Hathaway in the movie version, but rather Emily Ratajkowski or Zoë Kravitz or—duh—Jennifer Lawrence. Beta Mom does not juggle multiple extracurriculars, stalk the ever-loving shit out of her children via Life360, or wring her hands over whether they’ll get into a good college—hell, maybe there’ll be no point in college by then anyway, ever heard of AI?? When you ask her, Do You Know Where Your Children Are? she ostentatiously answers that no, she doesn’t, but that she’s confident they’ll be home by curfew. Beta Mom is chill as hell, and she is aspirational. The actual story is less catty than we’re being—perhaps author Rachel Wolfe is less of a basketcase than your Spreaditors—and also positions the Beta Mom as something of a crusader against screen zombification. A Beta named Sophie Jaffe persuasively puts it this way: “I would rather them be out, making memories, than sitting on their videogames.” BRB—calling the doc to double our Lexapro.

Read “The Political Power of the Wine Mom” here.

Read “The Era of the Tiger Mom Is Over. Enter the Beta Mom.” via Apple News here.

Why stop here? Sashay over this pesky paywall to read about the injections that are turning man-mush into titans (sperm be damned); Ezra’s little helper; the real families rocked by the deaths of Rob and Michele Reiner; a survival theory about Gisele Pelicot; and real life Showgirls!!!

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Dear Spreadswans,

Drumroll please, and welcome to a Very Special Issue inspired by the doubleheader of The Devil Wears Prada 2—which opened on Friday and is already breaking box office records—and by last night’s Bezos-stravaganza. Let’s start with the movie, shall we?

Rachel Baker: Honestly, I had a blast. I went with a ton of women in our age demo and we all yucked it up big-time. The only downside is that grinning for two hours really weakened my recently Botoxed lip flip. But I guess it was worth it.

Maggie Bullock: Everything you just said is problematic but please, do keep going.

RB: One thing that struck me: I couldn’t believe a broad rom-com—and one with very little rom—for a mass audience was positioning such micro, even run-of-the-mill dynamics from our industry as high-stakes plot drivers. Like, needing to pacify Dior because they’re an advertiser? Or witnessing bitchiness in the Condé caf? Are these really plot drivers for a movie that cost $100 million to make? That’s any given Tuesday.

(And how can the Spread get a piece of that? If you readers want war stories of dwindling features budgets and advertising favors, we’ve got whosits and whatsits galore.)

Which leads me to my other take: That at times it felt disconcertingly real—too real.

MB: Agree, it was super surreal to sit in a movie theater watching publishing economics play out for a mass audience. Sure, this storyline will track for the many generations of ex-magazine editors that made group outings to the movies this weekend. But I kept squinting at the other faces in the audience, trying to figure out... do “real” people care about this? And all those cameos: I guess they know “image architect” Law Roach, but… Jia Tolentino?

RB: Apparently! Global opening weekend box office was $233.6 million.

MB: Here’s my pathetic truth: I felt sucker punched from the first scene. I went in expecting a romp—you told me it was a romp!—and immediately got sucked down by the depressing fact that the demise of an industry we both love is now the backdrop for a rom-com.

Believe me, I know how ridiculous it is to take a colossally silly movie this personally. I started to wonder if I’d skipped an estrogen patch. Was this hormonal? But no, I think the grieving process is real. Sometimes it hits me anew.

RB: I think it helped that I knew the premise—that Andy was about to accept a prestigious journalism award when she and her colleagues at a Serious Paper are all shitcanned via text.

MB: Others have noted that in the early aughts, when I got into this game (and when I was hired at Vogue in an Andy Sachs-adjacent role), this job was Hollywood’s official answer to “aspirational career for modern Mary Tyler Moore kinda gal.” 13 Going on 30, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, and more recently (and more wryly) Trainwreck. Surely Mindy Kaling has done one, or did she rise up the ranks too late—mags were already dying?

RB: Never Been Kissed (sorta), Bridget Jones (though she worked in TV), Ugly Betty…

MB: Twenty years later, our entire field is a cautionary tale. Though as Michelle Goldberg points out, TDWP2 does a great job of driving home how much the people in this field truly love the work: “It turns out that some women do, in fact, dream of labor, at least the kind that comes with a sense of mastery, agency, and glamour.” Preach, Michelle.

RB: Yes, and the teenage girls in my screening absolutely loved the movie—the idea of having that drive and passion for something you get to do everyday is still aspirational (also a rare privilege). It’s why we’re hanging on by making this newsletter, after all!

MB: Robin Givhan wrote about this: The movie actually addresses our current, psychotic moment, in which magazine folk are relying on mythical tech billionaire saviors to keep these publications afloat (maybe as vanity projects for their pampered spouses). Then three days after the movie comes out, along comes the Bezos-Sánchez three-ring Met Gala circus.

Did I enjoy seeing Kate Moss1 looking the best she has in years? I did. Was it fun to wait up to see if Rihanna’s late arrival would throw off the whole timing of the event, per usual? It was.

But the timing of the movie and the depressing sponsorship made the whole exercise of last night’s red carpet spectacle feel more forced and manipulated than ever. People are complaining that it’s out of touch2, cartoonish, tacky, costumey, whatever—not to mention a gauche display of wealth—but that’s always been true, and especially in the last few years. But the cross-promotion of it all made the event itself feel fake. Like, did the Met Gala even happen or was that entire thing an AI figment? A Hollywood sleight of hand? I could picture the famous people walking up the steps, only to sneak behind a scrim and exit back into their cars on the other side, with no actual party taking place.

RB: The Gala is a commercial for the movie and vice versa. It doesn’t feel great, and it undermines both propositions. Though I’m still interested in the Met Gala for the cultural conversation—I guess?—the whole venture feels 100 percent cynical, whereas last year it felt just 90 percent cynical.

MB: The movie is pretty cheeky about the tech oligarchs, who are embodied extra douchily by Justin Theroux (thank you). And the movie was endorsed by Anna, who put herself on the cover (also a movie subplot!), yet also masterminded the whole Met Gala buyout with Bezos and Sánchez. This was the most interesting thing to me about last night: What are these people actually thinking!? I was staring at a clip of Anna, Lauren, and Nicole Kidman lined up to greet guests. I would give all of my future earnings (if you believe this movie, it ain’t much!) to know what each of them was really thinking about the others at that moment.

Rachel: Who actually boycotted this event, other than Lauren Santo Domingo, the (and this description gave us a good laugh over the weekend) “Tom Brady of Fashion”?

RB: Rama Duwaji and Zohran Mamdani wisely declined. Also, Meryl was, of course, noticeably absent—you know she hates this kind of thing and must have negotiated many moons ago that she would not be showing up. But her daughters, Louisa Jacobson (whose look was among my favorites of the night—she is hot) and Grace Gummer (in blinding Gabriela Hearst—and you know I love gold!), represented the family well on the red carpet.

MB: Does it make us feel better or worse to know that TDWP author Lauren Weisberger is now… a trawler? Reading between the lines of this essay that Vogue published, she made enough off this book and movie deals to live on a boat and homeschool her kids. And now that all parties have kissed and made up, she’s writing about it for the very publication that once regarded her persona non grata.

RB: You mean trawler literally and metaphorically, right?

MB: Well the old Voguey in me would say yes. But I mean, she actually lives on a boat.

RB: She made all the money but that cold war with Vogue couldn’t have felt good. She’s handling it gracefully, I think, but would it have been fun for her to write a much spicier version for, say, Town & Country? It would.

MB: Agreed but—and I hope this is a safe space, though I think Auntie Brock told us we can’t use that phrase anymore—the original book was great IP and a truly ballsy act, but as a book it’s not… great. The movie is what made it iconic. And really punched up the writing, too.

RB: For sure. My girl Aline Brosh McKenna is the sparkle behind the enterprise. And of course I love that her former work wife from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Rachel Bloom, got to play one of Andy’s friends in the movie.

MB: Oh dear. That character really shivved me. She’s the chubby-ish friend in the bad blazer who lost her real job in journalism and is now slogging away on other people’s memoirs for a living and... I felt seen. In the “crouching behind my desk shoveling Peanut M&Ms down my gullet” way.

RB: I was so annoyed when that character told Andy she could make $50K for writing a Miranda tell-all! Like, if that book is worth $50K, the book industry is worse off than magazines.

MB: If I’d had a rotten tomato, I would have hurled it at that moment. And then—spoiler alert, but only sort of—in the end, when Miranda tells Andy that $350K is nothing to sneeze at. To be clear, $350K is nothing to sneeze at. But if even Miranda Priestly thinks that’s a windfall for a writer, we’re all fucked.

RB: It’s kind of like how Dakota Johnson’s character is said to make $80,000 a year before taxes in Materialists. I’m curious what the focus group calculus is on these numbers.

MB: Right? I couldn’t tell if $80K was supposed to be... decent? Needy? Or mid? Rachel! Should we write a Miranda Priestly tell-all?

RB: I’m not getting out of bed for less than $500K for that baby—a high-risk, multiyear endeavor and we’ll have to split it!!

OK, small potatoes: I wish there was some kind of makeover scene in the movie, specifically one that resulted in lobbing off a few inches of Anne’s extensions. They were not my favorite!

Bigger potatoes: All in all, I think the movie—sans Met Gala curdling effect—really succeeds. It is knowing and clever and contradictory and fun—just like the best fashion magazines have always been. And it’s a sequel to a popcorn movie? Groundbreaking.

For the movie not to have been a little depressing about the current state of the media, it would have needed to be a prequel...which...what are you doing later? Shall we write a treatment?

MB: I’m less convinced, and not just because this movie took me to a stupidly dark place. Was it funny? I’m just not sure. The viewers around me were not laughing their asses off, though there were occasional hoots. The question remains: Will it give us what we really want, which is iconic zingers, other than Miranda’s ice-cold “You’re not a visionary—you’re a vendor”?

RB: I like Emily’s “Have they heard of Christmas?”

Um, breaking news in my inbox: The Wall Street Journal is reporting that James Murdoch is likely to buy New York magazine.

MB: OH JESUS.

RB: And there you have it.

Thank you for joining us for this Very Special Issue. We’d like to thank our parent company, Scheinhardt Wig Company.3

Rachel & Maggie

And now: What to read when you’re sick of thinking about Anna Wintour-adjacent properties…

NO MORE MR. NICE GUY: Cruelty has been so normalized that it barely registers anymore, writes Joel Stein in Town & Country. Quentin Tarantino trash-talking actors on a podcast? It’s just content. When it comes right down to it, though, performative positivity (influencer culture, relentless five-star reviews) and performative cruelty are both forms of the same thing: dishonesty. To read it, support print, buy the issue! Or read “Mean is the New Peptide” on Apple News here.

“SHOOTING AND CRYING” is an Israeli expression for soldiers who commit violence, then perform remorse about it. Anastasia Berg takes the phrase as the title of her philosophical afterburner to the Jia Tolentino/Hasan Piker “microlooting” brouhaha that got everybody’s panties in a twist last week. (They played coy about the ethics of stealing—as long as what you’re stealing is bits and bobs from the unethical Man, aka Whole Foods.) Enough with the ironic tone around morality, writes Berg. Either stop doing the thing you say is wrong, or offer a genuine argument for why it’s fine. Read it here.

LIKE YOUR FRENCH GIRLS, JACK: Speaking of, Hanya Yanagihara has joined the ranks of Olivia Nuzzi—who thought we’d ever write that?—as a journalist we’ve seen naked (in art).

IMMORTAL COMBAT: Right after we invested most of a Saturday morning on “The Feud of the Century” (talk about a headline that no Spreaditor can pass up!), Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni killed the audience for Reeves Wiedeman’s epic feat of celebrity reporting by settling their suit—just in time for her to hit the Met. Dwight Schrute’s prayers have been answered! Read it here.

TWEENAGE DREAMS: In an instant Spread classic, New Yorker writer Anna Weiner profiles Mira, a smart, sweet, unfamous 12-year-old girl living with her parents and sibling in the San Francisco suburbs. “The Life and Times of an American Tween,” which arrives in the tradition of Susan Orlean’s iconic 1992 Esquire profile, “The American Man at Age 10,” is wise, hopeful, and at times breathtaking as Weiner reports from the front lines of shopping trips and sleepovers and quietly weaves in her own stunning insights on this tender age circa now. Read it—please!—here.

PAGING ARETHA FRANKLIN: Given the demo in which we reside, the chatter we hear about hormones is mostly of the perimenopausal variety. But in the Atlantic, Andréa Becker—author of last year’s Get It Out: On the Politics of Hysterectomy–turns us on to a different conversation, one that is widespread among twentysomethings, with mounting and, from some vantage points, nefarious implications: the push for “natural womanhood,” which means without hormonal intervention in the form of the pill, the patch, the morning-after pill, or an IUD. Ovulation, its devotees insist, is womanhood and it’s glorious. Which begs many questions, including: Then what are we when we stop ovulating? Read it here.

WE ARE SEATED: Fur is flying between the gurus: Dr. Jen Gunter is calling out Mel Robbins for her “paid advice,” and we say: Let them!

INSERT JORDAN CATALANO’S BAND NAME HERE: What if you were so freaked out about producing your own spawn that you shelled out big-time, like $50,000 big-time, for the best genetic testing—“embryo optimization”—on the market, only to learn that it’s all bologna, that the technology isn’t advanced enough to deliver on such a promise, at least not yet? Read it here.

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1

Theme? The GOAT doesn’t do themes.

2

Somebody say tone deaf?

How we make the big bucks.

3

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Spreadsweets,

In case you’re losing sleep wondering whether we were off last week for Coachella recovery or because we’d caught airmono from all the airkissing at Milan Design Week, we’d like to set things straight: We were working asynchronously. We knew we couldn’t look Spreadlandia in the eye again without having wolfed down every high-pitched syllable of Lena Dunham’s Famesick or mainlined the full season of Beef 2. (Between hits, we also squeaked in a spring break trip to—drumroll please—Colonial Williamsburg! Please see Maggie for recommendations on the best ye olde ghost tours and turkey legs, plus a short history of the printing press, because you can take the girl out of the Hearst cafeteria but….)

Now that we’re back, we can confidently say it first-hand, to your face: Famesick is excellent—especially as read by Lena herself on the audiobook. Also: What if after 10 years of accruing wisdom, each of us got to spend 400 pages tastefully, thoughtfully, and with great stylistic panache setting the record straight on our twenties—clarifying every intention, repackaging every public relationship, sanding off some edges and polishing up others? Well, we’d all be so freakin’ exhausted we’d have to take to the bed Leanne Morgan style (or, you know, Lena Dunham style—though her physical ailments, which she enumerates in the book, are no joke).

Dunham’s telling of her young romance and partnership and the dissolution thereof with Jack Antonoff reads as unflinching and yet respectful—there are things that must have been hard to write, even for her—and her relationship with her brother, Cyrus, as depicted is nothing short of stunning. But it’s the buildup to and fallout from her friendship with creative partner Jenni Konner that stopped us in our tracks. It’s visceral, painful—and yes, we realize we’re using this term to describe Lena Dunham!—and brave: a serious entry into the canon of writing about friendships that burn hot and flame out. (Would we read a two-sided review of Mother Mary from LD and JK? Faster than Marnie Michaels would grab the mic at karaoke night.)

As for Beef 2, this is not a drill. As Lindsay Crane-Martín and Josh Martín, Carey Mulligan and Oscar Isaac nail a couple of Erewhon-frequenting, Hot Chip-loving, interiors-obsessing striver millennials like never before committed to screen. The couple they beef with, Gen Zers played by Cailee Spaeny and Charles Melton, are equally magnificent. When it comes to laser-sharp cultural critique, The White Lotus better watch its back.

Steak knives out,

Rachel & Maggie

P. S.: Tonight’s New Yorker newsletter features a Devil Wears Prada Part Deux convo between Naomi Fry and critic Justin Chang that is so Spready, we had to toss it right in here at the eleventh hour. Fry’s opening salvo: “If you’re going to do a movie about the magazine business right now, you would be remiss not to accept the facts: everyone’s on the internet, no one buys magazines anymore, print is dead, we live and die by clicks. And what do we do when business is dying? We depend on mercurial billionaires to come save us. Come save us so we can keep doing these Sisyphean, no longer lucrative jobs!” Read Chang’s review here.

P. P. S.: Tell us, are you going to see the movie in theaters? Dressing in costume? Waiting for the streamer? Never in a million?

When Skin Is In

A sentence we never thought we’d write: We’ve been thinking a lot about baggy foreskin this week. Like, a lot a lot. And we have New York magazine—our nation’s longtime chronicler of what’s new in the circumcisionsphere—to thank. In “The Men Who Want Their Foreskins Back,” Bianca Bosker profiles restorers (go ahead, try to say it aloud: The Rural Juror was a restorer) i.e., circumcised guys who to varying degrees feel like they’re missing something—and are doing something about it, whether through surgery or more manual methods, which include stretching devices and the most down-to-basics tactic: tugging. Some men seek superior sexual satisfaction, some a sense of bodily autonomy, and some just like a more generous, um, drape, a preference that has apparently been around for thousands of years: The Ancient Greeks were foreskin maximalists. In closing, we learned a lot today.

Read it here.

Our plastic-surgery-story diet starts today.

Sick of reading the words plastic surgery here? Good, because we’re getting pretty tired of writing them . It used to seem like a certain sort of progress when “even” the august Atlantic would get its feet wet in the fish-nibbling pedicure pool of beauty journalism. Now it just feels like piling on. Rheana Murray rounds all the well-trod bases of the new “confessional era” of celebrity self-customization to ask a (somewhat) new question: In revealing the exact cc’s of their implants and the location of their incisions, are famous people actually delivering us all a handy how-to guide? Also: Is this transparency just a ploy to conjure authenticity, i.e., likability? (Hold the phone: Were we just duped into high-fiving Denise Richards?!) But Zoe Dubno’s piece in the Cut—similar ideas, very different tone—felt both refreshing and shockingly overdue. “Stop the insanity,” as Susan Powter once screeched. Dubno documents the ever-higher time and money investments of “basic” maintenance for regular women—never mind the peptides-pumped lifestyle of the longevity-obsessed. It may be deeply unfashionable to shame a woman for her self-care routine these days, but baby: If your morning skincare takes three hours, maybe you need to find something better to do with your time?

Read “The New Plastic-Surgery Playbook” in the Atlantic here.

Read “I Spray Myself With Magnesium and Read Under a Chicken Light” in the Cut here.

Paying to Play at Mary Kay

In the biopic of beauty empress Mary Kay that is surely in development by somebody, somewhere, the Spread would like to cast the sorely underutilized actress Miss Piggy in the role of a lifetime: a Dallas-era power player in a “capacious blond bouffant wig that perilously topped her tiny frame and sky-high stilettos” who lives in a pink mansion with a “bathtub the size of Switzerland.” Mimi Swartz offers a dual review of Mary Lisa Gavenas’s glowing, 15-years-in-the-making (!!) Selling Opportunity: The Story of Mary Kay alongside Bridget Read’s far more skeptical investigation of the business model of Mary Kay, Amway and Herbalife), Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America. Kay, a Texan down to her (pink) toenails, built an empire run mostly by women. The sell: “If you worked very, very hard, your reward could be the era’s stereotypical trappings of hitting it big, ladies’ version: furs, diamonds, your own mansion, and, of course, a head-turning pink luxury car.” But your chances of achieving that success were roughly equivalent to a gambler in a casino. In Canada, where such facts must be disclosed, 85 percent of Mary Kay consultants earned zero commissions in 2022. The house always wins.

Read “How Mary Kay Built a Billion-Dollar Empire” in Texas Monthly here.

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Spreadsquad,

We come to you fresh from reading about the specific appeal of Vermont’s greatest export since maple syrup, singer-songwriter Noah Kahan, where the New Yorker’s Amanda Petrusich really puts her finger on it in a way that feels, at least for your Spreaditors, uncomfortably close to home. Kahan makes “music for people who own too much performance fleece to embrace the bombast of Taylor Swift but aren’t quite feral enough for the cacophony of Geese… the kind of thing that sounds really nice in a Subaru, on your way to work, with an iced coffee nestled in the cup holder.” (To which we say: 🚙☕👋 and mmm…) We expected a few gentle digs at Kahan’s fan base from this story. What we did not expect was the singer’s admission—which Petrusich writes about, but that he makes onscreen in Noah Kahan: Out of Body, the doc that Netflix released Monday—that he struggles with body dysmorphia and an eating disorder.

Old clothes haunt him: “I just want to fit back into my old pants. There’s a whole shame section of my closet that’s, like, ‘You are too fat for this now.’ Too fat for these, bro.”

No success is ever good enough to obliterate the body noise: The morning after a sold-out MSG show, working out with a trainer, he says, “I binge eat a lot of food when I’m feeling stressed, and then I get so hateful about my body and what I look like that I don’t eat for a while. I starve myself.”

The comments section is a killer: People think “it’s fine to call me ugly. You know, I make those jokes myself. But sometimes I want it to stop.”

No matter how many essays we read by men about their Ozempic journeys—and how many stories we skip past about about “looksmaxxing,” which is definitely body dysmorphia by a buzzier name—it never fails to stop us in our tracks when men speak this vulnerably, using language that sounds…just like us. Like the neverending hum in a woman’s head about how we feel in our bodies.

This is hardly the first time we’ve heard this from a lovable emo dude. Ed Sheeran revealed in 2023 that he struggled with bulimia: “There’s certain things that, as a man talking about them, I feel mad uncomfortable. I know people are going to see it a type of way, but it’s good to be honest about them. Because so many people do the same thing and hide it as well.” Rob Pattinson has opened up about body dysmorphia: “I get a ton of anxiety. ... Body dysmorphia, overall tremendous anxiety. I don’t have a six pack and I hate going to the gym. I’ve been like that my whole life. I never want to take my shirt off.” In his 2016 memoir, Zayn Malik wrote that while in One Direction, “I was suffering from an eating disorder... I’d just go for days—sometimes two or three days straight—without eating anything at all.”

Hard stats are tough to come by, but about as much as one half to one third as many men as women now report having eating disorders. And, given the double whammy of shame around revealing what is considered to be a “women’s condition,” the actual numbers are probably much higher. We expect men to have a hard time wrapping their minds around this one but, if we’re being honest, we have a mental block around it too. How do we adjust our thinking about body image issues—which feel, on a societal level, like a handicap inflicted on women by men, or at least by the patriarchy? By allowing men into this cursed “club,” would we be giving something up, or gaining something better?

You know what—if anybody could figure this one out, and set it to music, it’s Noah “Call Your Mom” Kahan.

Rachel & Maggie

“No one in the history of the world has lived better than we have. Even the old kings and queens. The least we can do is enjoy it. If we don’t, it’s offensive. It’s an offense to all the billions of people who can only dream that one day they could live like we do.” —Lauren Sánchez Bezos Victoria Ratliff, The White Lotus

Was Mrs. Bezos intentionally channeling our spiritual third Spreaditor, Mrs. Ratliff, in the New York Times this weekend, when she proclaimed her state of bliss to all the world—or is this just further proof that Mike White is a savant of the modern superrich? If you can make it past the Bezoses’ daily gratitude lists and Lauren’s praise for her husband’s physique (“He looks good, doesn’t he?” she says, slow-nodding for emphasis. “He looks good.”), you will find a pretty compelling theory on the ish of Sánchez Bezos. Writing about billionaires is fraught, and, predictably, not everybody agrees with us on this, but we thought Amy Chozick walked this tightrope quite well—treating her subject generously while capturing plenty of her bizarre, stage-y extraness, and making a case we’d never considered: that Lauren Sánchez Bezos has had real influence. (We’re not saying it’s good influence.) Chozick credits her with being the match that lit the flame of our current moment—more than just marrying the richest man on the planet, she married her world (reality TV, Hollywood flash) to his (once-mousy Silicon Valley superwealth), emboldening the billionaire class to live large with Dallas-style abandon. Bravo?

Read it here.

“She makes us look like interesting women doing interesting things.”— Zadie Smith

Maya Singer’s profile of designer Rachel Comey in Vogue is the palate cleanser you need after resting your noggin, however briefly, on Sánchez Bezos’s pillowy bosom. For 25 years, Comey has been designing “low-fuss, non-basic” fashion for women “who do things,” Singer writes: sound engineers, human rights activists, painters…Spreaditors! (When we’re good.) She’s kept her independent, woman-led label going while countless peers have fallen by the wayside, honing a certain smart, laid-back cool—and a version of “privilege” that, unlike everything written in the previous blurb, does not make us want to gouge out our eyeballs. Anybody casting about for a Mother’s Day treat might want to consider these or these or this. Just saying.

Read it here.

Spoiler alert: The winner is not Red Lobster’s Cheddar Bay biscuits.

The Atlantic has called itself “America’s leading destination for brave thinking and bold ideas that matter.” It is dedicated to “the American idea.” It has a gray beard that is kept neat with an antique shaving brush made of the horn of a buffalo slayed by Teddy Roosevelt. And it just published an eleven-thousand-word cover story about writer Caity Weaver’s quest to ascertain which restaurant serves the best “free” bread. The odyssey and its placement rocked our intellectual self-confidence enough to actually inspire us to read it—both for our own edification and in service to you, dear Spreaders. And after spending nearly 90 minutes with the text, carefully searching for layers and listening for the crashing symbols of Big Ideas, we found ourselves: occasionally chuckling, genuinely craving a chunk of salty focaccia, and as flummoxed as ever. Still, we’d be remiss not to mention that the section “What Celebrities Don’t Want You to Know,” which arrives about 40 percent through the story, is a highlight worth reading as a stand-alone: an artfully comedic performance of reporting via Hollywood that lifted our spirits. That is before we careened over to Whole Foods, bought a large boule, and promptly began—to borrow a word from the French—a’gnawin. Thanks for that, Jeffrey Goldberg.

Read “I Found It: The Best Free Restaurant Bread In America” here.

When Cognitive Dissonance Is an Understatement

Between the tale of Dr. Heidi Kling’s allegedly nonconsensual affair with a client in Granta and Sarah Goldberg’s SEC-defying shrink in AMC’s new Silicon Valley dramedy The Audacity (a show that if we’re being honest we give a C+), it’s already been a rich season for therapists behaving badly. But British novelist Lucy Ashe’s new essay for Bustle takes the cake in our book, in no small part because her story is boldly first-person, recounting her own extremely intimate and crazy-making obsession with a boundary-pushing therapist (not complimentary) she refers to as Dr. Webb. The yearslong relationship becomes all-consuming, inspiring Ashe to have sexual fantasies about him—that he then asks her to recount in session…you know, as part of the work—and also to write her latest novel, The Model Patient, which was released yesterday. It’s a gutsy story behind the story that’s a satisfying meal if not one with a tidy resolution.

Read “My Therapist, My Fantasy Lover, My God” here.

Buy the novel here.

Readers, there is so much more to devour, if you just hop, skip, and jump over this paywall! All the words you can’t use anymore (we’ve been doing talking all wrong, as usual); the dirtbag politician aesthetic we’d like to put an end to; a triple-scoop of takes on The Drama, with a cherry on top; our come-to-Jesus about Lena Dunham…

Join us on the other side, as the cult leaders say.

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Singular Spreadbaes,

To those of you out there who are sane people living rational lives outside of the media bubble, it is difficult to explain just how surreal it is to see Anna Wintour play ball on the launch of TDWP2 with such gusto—such a sense of, dare we say… fun? (Is that, or is it not, a smile and 65% of visible face in this photo!?) One of your Spreaditors was a Vogue staffer around the time the first movie came out. In the office back then, it was The Movie That Dare Not Speak Its Name. To admit within earshot of the boss that you had seen it was considered, among underlings at least, career suicide. Now here she is, posing on the cover of her own magazine next to the most respected thespian of her generation—who is playing an iconic character based on her own mythology? Even we cannot keep up with these dance moves.

We’re bringing you the Spread light and sweet this week! Please feel free to bang that ❤️ and Spread the love.

See you in the backseat,

Rachel & Maggie

P.S. When Anna finally retires from Vogue (it’ll never happen but indulge us in the thought experiment) to become a therapist like everyone else leaving media, do you think they’ll move this sawed-off movie set Town Car into her West Village townhouse to serve as her “office”?

The Beckhams laugh at your piddly “family drama”

Nothing about Bridget Read’s lengthy dive into the Beckham-Peltz mishegoss in the Cut is going to make you feel better about the world in general, or about these individuals in particular. But who doesn’t love a story of wedding planner abuse, “£7,000 Wendy’s Frosty machines,” a “floating aisle”—we still can’t picture what that means, please send photos—and dueling superyachts? Between the casual racism of Nicola’s father, the wild materialism of Brooklyn’s people, and the desperate need for attention among everyone involved, we are starting to see why these are the “royals” of our times. Alana Hadid (the “other” Hadid sister) said it best when she posted on IG: “That girl doesn’t want privacy. She’s been trying to be famous for a decade.”

Read it here.

Can a journalist be a celebrity anymore?

It’s a question we’ve thought about a lot since Patrick Radden Keefe—New Yorker staff writer, author of Say Nothing and Empire of Pain—popped up on a private jet in the series finale of Industry. PRK has a new book out, London Falling, about a teenager who fell from a London high-rise into the Thames and turned out to be living a double life. He also has J.Crew modeling gigs, an A24 option on the new book, and a big fatty New York Times profile that really captures the way dudes relate to other, supersuccessful dudes in this industry, so we’re gonna say… yes?

Read it here.

Tough to watch

Vinson Cunningham is pretty much the only person we’d want to hear from on the “professional exercise, however unprecedented” of a grief-stricken Savannah Guthrie returning to the Today show in the wake of her mother’s disappearance. Though relatively brief, his essay inspired no fewer than four heavily-highlighted screenshots in our reading. Including this one: “Although Today has no official religion, its aesthetics—vibrant colors, kind words, total decent positivity—match that of an American public Christianity whose moral and imaginative hold lately keeps attenuating, until, suddenly, in the right, blameless hands, it seems briefly to brighten again.”

Read it here.

“I don’t want to be doing things for free that I don’t get paid for.”

Preach, Emma Grede! The Kardashian-adjacent British entrepreneur has delivered unto us a book called Start With Yourself. In WSJ, Chavie Lieber calls it a “Lean In for the post-girlboss era.” Call us crazy but we feel like we’ve heard that one before? What we hadn’t heard before was the term “max three-hour mum.” After slogging through the 9 a.m. to noon shift with her kids on weekends, Grede says, “I am done with these four.” She has the same strategy for child-rearing she does for limited-edition fashion collabs: focus on creating “high-impact, core memories” and leave the messy, boring in between to an army of nannies, cleaners, the personal chef, and your chief of staff. (Assistants are for losers.)

Read it here.

Paid readers, keep on chomping… over the paywall and through the woods you’ll find more delicious Spreadsnacks: Times Mag vs. T Mag—who’s winning? What men want that JFK, Jr. had lots of. Praise for a woman you never thought you’d hear us praisin’. And a new #relationshipgoal (it’s French, so it must be better)…

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