Subscribe now

Spread champs,

You won’t be shocked to hear that all we can manage to talk about at length right now is Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s record-breaking, mind-boggling, truth-rocking, industry-changing Elizabeth Holmes film. But we cannot—will not!—spoil this movie for you if you’ve yet to see it.

So we’ve come up with a novel (to us) idea. If you’ve watched the movie and are ready to rumble, click: The Ultimate Spoiler-Packed Spread Guide to You Can See Everything.

Otherwise, enjoy this week’s Spreadiest reads below. Though honestly we’d prefer for you to drop everything and go to a late-night or early-morning screening of the movie instead! Trust: you don’t want to be sitting on the sidelines of this cultural moment. Regardless, once you’ve exited the roller coaster and are ready to process, we’re here for you.

Always disruptin’,

Rachel & Maggie

P.S. At ease! Something we will not be covering this week: Thee Victoria’s Secret fashion show

✨You’re Safe Here! Not a Single Elizabeth Holmes Spoiler Lurks Below! ✨

AI slop has never read this good before.

Our beloved Jean Garnett, who has never written a word we didn’t bring straight to Spreadlandia, has resurfaced in the Paris Review Daily to introduce us to a new kind of avatar: The Pixar-esque illustrated woman who is inconsolably weeping in skincare ads in her Instagram Reels. Whether she’s “in the bathroom, or at the wheel of her car, or at her son’s soccer game,” the poor thing just can’t stop cryin’. Why so sad, lady? Well, she’s aging. And so of course her life is falling the eff apart. Each “Aging Woman Emomercial (AWE)” is a complete telenovela, beginning with a juicy hook: “‘This is the story of the day he walked away.’ Or ‘My ex-husband walked in with the woman he left me for, young enough to be our daughter.’ Or, in one case where the woman is Black, ‘I ran into my baby daddy at daycare drop-off with the bitch he left me for.’” Good news: All Garnett has to do is “take one sip of this mushroom beverage,” and “cute little probiotics will go tra-la-la chimney sweeping through my intestines like Dick Van Dyke, making [her] positively glow with inner cleanness.” At least we know that, so far, AI hasn’t figured out how to make writing this good.

Read “The Uncanny Catharsis of the AI Emomercial” here.

BLERGH.

We weren’t sure we could make it past paragraph #2 of Sophie Haigney’s intrepidly reported story for the New York Times Magazine about the stomach-churning world of “dark nutrition” (think: Measles-vax opponents, but for food). Here goes: “The brain slithered as she pulled it from its container and held it up for me to admire. Then, as though it were a juicy apple, she took a bite of the raw meat. ‘Mmmm,’ she said. ‘This is so good.’” We’re talking about a loose coalition that believes that everything we think we know about food is wrong—yet can’t quite agree on what is right. Don’t get the “Peaters” started on the Carnivores, hoo boy!

One good thing about the new rules: They’ll definitely save time in the kitchen!

1. Animal fat, good: Red meat, butter, and heavy cream are health foods.

2. Weird animal fat, better: Liver, heart, kidney, tripe, brain, testicles.

3. Cooking, bad: Raw milk, raw butter, raw beef, for some even raw chicken or fresh roadkill. Raw eggs become a dip, a drink, a condiment, you name it! (Can’t find raw butter? Look for it labeled as “pet food.”)

4. Broccoli, the worst: Plants defend themselves with toxins, so they’re out.

5. Sugar? Go for it: Orange juice in the morning, Mexican Coke at lunch. And how about stirring a little honey into that raw ground beef?

Read “The Proponents of ‘Dark Nutrition’ Think Everything You Know about Food Is Wrong” here.

Read more

Spreadmates,

Why are we smiling? As regular readers are well aware, the Spread lives for a communal pop-culture moment, and thanks to You Can See Everything’s record-setting theatrical release last weekend, we’re swimming in a monoculture sundae dripping with meme sauce deeper and sweeter than we’ve ever tasted before. (Or at least since the triple-decker insanity of Olivia Nuzzigate.) Since devouring the film on Sunday night—three Spreadbabies celebrated birthdays (6, 12, 16) over the weekend, keeping us from the theater until the sabbath—we’ve whiled away hours consuming reviews, theories, articles, and memes1. We’ve engaged in just as many hours of rip-roaring debates by phone, text, pillow talk, and the bleachers of at least one high-school field-hockey game. But more than anything, we want—we need!—to commune with you, dear Spreaders, over Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s masterpiece.

Because, in a hell of a hat trick, the Elizabeth Holmes “documentary” manages to indict journalism, Hollywood, tech culture. Heck, we’d say it even questions cameras in and of themselves. We’d be tired if we weren’t so invigorated.

We’d also like to offer one caveat before you read further: Our beloved copy editor still hasn’t seen the movie, so we are flying without a net on this special issue-within-an-issue. Wheeee! Please forgive any typos…or worse!

Let’s goooooooo,

Rachel & Maggie

PS: In an act of extreme discipline, Fielder and Oppenheim did not include any archival video of Holmes in the film, instead relying on magazine covers and Amanda Seyfried’s account of watching hours of Holmes’s depositions and other interviews. But after watching the film, we came home and fell down a rabbit hole of footage of Holmes at her baritone-voiced, Steve Jobs-ian peak, and our minds were blown once more. A brief supplemental-watching syllabus: Her appearance on Charlie Rose. In a deposition. Doing a celebratory dance. Saying bonkers stuff on 60 Minutes. And there’s more where that came from….

PPS: Has anyone heard from Spread-beloved Dropout creator Liz Meriwether in all this? Call us, Liz! Also, this video is great.

Playing the Fielder

Jake Silverstein is clearly shaking in his boots, what with Wired threatening the New York Times Mag and all the other usual suspects in its quest to become the best women’s magazine out there. Earlier this year EIC Katie Drummond out New Yorked New York with the mag’s extremely “creative” cover about Silicon Valley’s gay mafia, and now she’s got the YCSE goods straight from the horse’s mouth with an appropriately enigmatic Nathan Fielder cover story Q&A written by Drummond herself, which involved a follow-up chat recorded just before the movie opened nationwide on Friday, and then dropped Monday morning—swish! An extra air clap for Drummond, who straight up says that Fielder was such a pain in the tuckus while the magazine was planning this thing that at times she really started to hate him. Been there, sister!

Read it here.

Fielder’s Other Half

Right on cue, Vulture published an excellent and super-satisfying profile by Alex Barasch of co-director Lance Oppenheim, who is literally 30 years old and also helmed a major narrative film this year with Prime Time, starring Robert Pattinson as To Catch a Predator’s Chris Hansen—a thrilling companion piece to YCSE as it turns over questions about truth, surveillance, privacy, and performance. Read the profile here.

The Amanda Files

Last winter, your Spreaditors were moved to stop the presses in order to crash in an adulatory conversation about the Spreadiest and—yep, we’re saying it—all-out best movie of 2025. Mona Fastvold’s under-recognized The Testament of Ann Lee made the stunning-in-all-ways Amanda Seyfried something of a patron saint of this newsletter. (Also, FWIW: The Dropout claimed the number 3 spot in our ranking of the Spreadiest limited series of all time, just sayin.) So when she showed up in YCSE wearing all the hats—actor, co-conspirator, audience surrogate, hard-hitting Billy Evans interviewer—our buttons were popping. Still are, in fact!

Now, the questions on all pundit lips: Could Seyfried snag an Oscar nom for Best Supporting Actress for this role? If so, would her work playing Holmes in the reenactments be the only bits she could be considered for?

The question on one Spreaditor’s lips: Do Seyfried and Fielder have great chemistry or what? She’s newly single and according to the movie he too recently went through a breakup. And they have been through something together. Imaging them showing up arm-in-arm on Oscar night!

The question on another Spreaditor’s lips: If Amanda is our patron saint, and just coming out of a breakup, don’t we want better for her than this?

Related: Is Nathan Fielder kind of hot? Angelina Chapin got to the bottom of it in 2022. “While some may like the sweet simplicity of himbos, my kink is a man I can intellectually go to war with,” she wrote. He “has a kind of arrogance that makes for great sexual tension.” To this, we’ll just say that Rachel is dressing her husband up as Fielder for Halloween. (She’ll go as Liz. Do y’all prefer this jumpsuit or this one, which she’d yes absolutely totally definitely no-question wear again?)

We Need to Talk About Billy

Or do we? Liz’s Trump-grubbing, gun-toting, egg-beating, wild-eyed partner definitely looked “healthier” in the first half of the movie. What happened there? One eye-opening bit from Oppenheim in the Barasch profile: “One day, he accompanied Holmes’s partner, Evans, to the gym and asked what else he was planning to do that afternoon. Evans mentioned that he’d have to shower, and before Oppenheim could propose a tasteful, minimally invasive approach, he stripped and hopped in. What follows is the sequence that earned You Can See Everything its R for graphic nudity. ‘It seems like he really had something he wanted to show to us and to the world,’ Oppenheim says.”

Let’s Hear It For the Science Boys

In the New York Times and STAT, respectively, Bad Blood journalist John Carreyou and Theranos whistleblower Tyler Schulz fill in the gaps of what the movie leaves out science-wise and context-wise. Carreyou, for starters, wants us all to know that he could have been involved in a Homes doc with filmmaker Erroll Morris, but that the conditions weren’t up to his editorial standards, so he walked. Shultz, who is portrayed in The Dropout by cutie actor and Wallows frontman Dylan Minnette, lays out lots of contextual dirt, our favorite piles of which have to do with a) the blood-testing machine that she shows Fielder in the doc, which he says isn’t the one Theranos was faking things with and b) the real estate: The $135 million pile she was living in during her trial, which we don’t see in the film, vs the rustic rental beach house we do see, where she talks a lot about her mountains of debt. (Granted, this location turns out to be a $9.2 million Del Mar beach house that Liz and Billy were renting for around $28,000 a month. But to the untrained eye, it looks threadbare.)

Both Carreyou and Schulz are operating in the belief that Holmes is a cold-blooded, crazy-talented manipulator who never stops performing—not in the “Who’s on First” scene, or in the initial Dropout viewing scene, either.

But writer Ryu Spaeth takes the dissenting position—emotionally speaking—at New York with “Go Ahead, Pity Elizabeth Holmes,” a good read that bores into the seemingly likely possibility that there’s more going on with Liz than straight sociopathy (not that it justifies a crime spree that literally no one doubts actually happened).

Don’t Tase Us, Brody

At this point it’s a cliché to groan or shake a fist at ye olde New Yorker critic Richard Brody, but his review of YCSE made us wince. Not for the sexism or abject contrarianism we’ve all come to “love” him for but because the guy…just doesn’t seem to get it? Brody perceives Fielder’s manner with Holmes as snarky and brazen, when—to us, at least—the magic of their strange eyeball-to-eyeball connection is borne of Fielder’s ultra-flat sincerity. When the two engage, it feels like two people with complementary neurodivergences have found each other in a strange, stilted ballet. Thankfully, the New Yorker’s more generationally-in-tune Justin Chang reviewed the movie for his other gig, at NPR, here. Also, a reminder that this bad boy is still riding high on Letterboxes as, no joke, The Highest-Rated Film of All Time.

Phew. What else ya got, Spreaders?

We now return to our regularly scheduled programming, aka this week’s main issue.

1

H/t to multiple spreaders, including Marysunny L. and Sarah M.

Subscribe now

Spreadwatchers,

After dropping some very promising breadcrumbs in recent months, announced on Substack yesterday that the no-longer-“girls” of her first and best show are coming back, baby, in a five-episode arc dropping… we don’t know when. Not only has Dunham herself recently enjoyed something of a cultural renaissance, she says the opportunity to revisit these women at forty was simply too rich to ignore:

There are so many ways to be forty—you can live with roommates and get drunk every night, or you can be a parent of four keeping a bustling household in check. You can proudly sleep around, or be in perimenopause and never want to be touched again. I have friends who are in marriage crises but think they’re too old to move on, and still others switching careers for the 9th time. There have been fortieth birthdays thrown at vineyards and fortieth birthday raves. Your parents can be sixty or ninety, alive or dead, ailing or lifting kettle bells (holler, papa!) Your kids can be heading to college or not yet born. It’s an age that sounds so theoretical for so long, so far in the future, that when you’re younger you imagine you might be an astronaut by that time, or a benevolent billionaire, or not alive at all.

Oh, the places we’ll go! The original Girls was birthed in the Obama years, back before most of us were in full-blown panic about the planet, the AI apocalypse, a second (and vastly worse) Trump administration, or the second (and arguably just as bad) adolescence of womanhood. In most parts of the country, you could still get an abortion with what, in hindsight, seems like relative ease. Gawker was still a thing; tradwives were not. Upstate was a cheap place to write your novel. There was no Ozempic. Your Spreaditors were still comfortably employed at legacy print magazines in New York City. It was what Denise Huxtable might have called "a different world"

The Cut rounds up everything we know so far about the new show here, but don’t get your hopes up: “Everything” ain’t much. (Don’t mind us, we’re just mad they got to the Che Diaz joke first!) How will these characters fare in the late 2020s? We organized our first 20 questions here; feel free to jot yours down in the comments…

1. Which of these characters can still afford to live in New York?

2. Who will get the fertility-struggle arc?

3. Will Hannah be afflicted with Lena’s many health issues?

4. Will Dunham’s body still be Girls’s unofficial fifth “girl”?

5. Did Marnie grow up to be a wedding-band singer, or is she a real estate mogul who teaches Hyrox on the side?

6. Is Jessa an underground MDMA therapy guide?

7. How many times will we hear the words magnesium, blepharoplasty, VO₂ max, Oura ring, sleep divorce, deep-plane, bone density, adult ADHD, therapy-speak, vaginal estrogen, mouth taping, boundaries, protein, Orna Guralnik, Wait Until 8th, strength training, quiet quitting, gummies, 529, peptides, seed oils, AI armageddon, creatine, non-alc cocktails, red light masks, and, last but not least, “my Substack”?

8. Lena already let slip that Jemima Kirke envisioned Jessa as being an RFK Jr. devotee. How do you write a disenchanted MAHA mom for a show we won’t see for years?

9. When we last saw Shosh, the friendship was “over.” Who caved first?

10. Grover is, by our calculations, around nine years old. Has he ever met his surf instructor dad, Paul-Louis?

11. When we last saw Elijah, he had just landed a part in White Men Can’t Jump: The Musical. Was that the start of a beautiful career on the ole Broad Way?

12. Ray was always a grumpy middle-aged man. Has he been reborn as a relentlessly upbeat wellness guru? Or is he running against Mamdani?

13. Did Hannah ever write her book? Or has she become the professor who mentions her essay collection a little too often?

14. We can assume that Adam Driver ain’t getting anywhere near this. Does fictional Adam live invisibly in Paris now, à la Samantha?

15. Is Riz Ahmed on board for this?

16. Is Margaret Qualley on board for this?

17. Is Taylor Swift on board for this?

18. Do the original four women even like each other now? Did they ever?

19. How the hell does Lena expect us to wait until 2028 to find all of this out?

20. And, most importantly, which of the Girls read The Spread?

Standing by,

Rachel & Maggie

“Calabasas Is the New Abu Dhabi”

Which publication landed the first excerpt from Vogue celebrity profiler extraordinaire Jonathan Van Meter’s long-awaited (authorized) bio of Kim Kardashian? It wasn’t Vogue. In the Cut, “The Three Marriages of Kim Kardashian” takes us back to a gentler time when Kim was a hot girl hawking QuickTrim diet pills and Sketchers shoes, and Kanye was a Celine-wearing Coachella headliner, the arbiter of cool. To her credit, Kim still gives him props for completely Svengali’ing her. As a reality star whom no one in Fashion would dress, she was one more thing he decided to make cool… kind of like Calabasas! Kim’s own quotes are the least interesting thing here, thanks to what Van Meter calls the “compulsory positive spin” she puts on every story. Luckily, her biographer knows how to dig, and wields court documents, internet rumors, and five-plus years of interviews with Kim and her entire circle to serve up details we actually didn’t know about the woman everybody knows everything about.

Read it here. Order Citizen Kim from the Spread’s little bookshop here.

Do not give this to your sister for Christmas…

Read more

Subscribe now

Spread dolls,

Tonight we are joined by friend, colleague, loyal denizen of Spreadlandia, and An American Girl: How a Billion-Dollar Doll and Its Unlikely Founder Changed Girlhood Forever author Amanda FitzSimons. Amanda, whom we met on staff at Elle almost exactly 15 years ago (gulp!), is as good a reporter as she is a tequila drinker—which is to say, excellent—and we can’t wait for the world to get their mitts on her juicy cultural interrogation of this country’s best-selling 18-inch doll, which hits bookstores and mailboxes Tuesday (preorder it here). Over air tea and plastic cucumber sandwiches, we spoke to Amanda about celebrity superfans, the brand’s racial legacy, and why some of us (ahem Rachel) take these hunks of plastic so dang personally.

And keep scrolling: Because we love ya more, we also rounded up a quick-hits™ list of the week’s Spreadiest magazine reads.

Eat your hearts out,

Rachel & Maggie

As American As a Tiny Slice of Pretend Apple Pie for $6.99 Plus Shipping

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome author Amanda FiiiiiitzSiiiiimonnnnnns!

Spreaditor Rachel: Amanda! Thanks for emerging from the planet of Goodreads—that’s where authors hang out the week before their books are published, right?—to join us in Spreadlandia.

Amanda FitzSimons: Thanks for doing this! OK, so did you have the dolls growing up?

Yeah, I’m a Samantha.

My original dolls were Molly and Kirsten. Samantha was the bestseller in the mid-’90s by leaps and bounds. [A box-fresh Samantha doll magically appears on the Zoom.] But do you know what was the bestseller in the American South, where you lived? Addy. By leaps and bounds.

That’s so interesting. Addy was the first Black American Girl doll, right?

Yes. The original four dolls were all white and Christian. They had last names and were very white and WASPy—not even, like, Italian—and Christian: Kirsten Larson, Samantha Parkington, Molly McIntire, Felicity Merriman. They had Christmas books and Christmas lines, so nothing deviated.

Not great in the larger sense, but savvy marketing-wise: The Christmas clothes and accessories were wildly popular. Those nightgowns!

Exactly. The beats in a nine-year-old girl’s life—back-to-school, birthday, Christmas—neatly aligned with marketing opportunities. Grandparents were also huge purchasers, and grandparent characters featured prominently in the books: Samantha Parkington was an orphan raised by her Grandmarie, and Grandmarie buys Samantha an expensive doll in the book itself! A slam dunk.

Anyway, Addy was launched in 1993, which was a moment when people were thinking about race: Rodney King, Crown Heights, Anita Hill. Addy was developed alongside an advisory board of Black academics—including Lonnie Bunch, who just left the Smithsonian—and endorsed by Oprah. Unlike Black Barbie, which was marketed to Black children, Addy was marketed to both Black and white children, which was unusual and you can see one prism through which it’s a triumph. But the character was an escaped enslaved person, so there’s the complicated part where white girls are buying a doll whose backstory involved slavery. The sales data showing her regional popularity in the South likely reflected affluent Black families in cities like Atlanta, as well as broader reach. When I went to interview white women who bought Addy dolls, none of them would talk to me on the record using their names. Of the Black women I talked to: Some people still love her, and some have really mixed feelings.

When Oprah featured Addy on her show, Pleasant Company’s phone lines crashed from the response of 14 million daily viewers.

The phone lines! The catalogs were important growing up.

Yes, I’m totally addicted to the catalogs. Originally, they were the only way you could buy the dolls. That was unusual for the time; no other toy company operated its own direct catalog except Madame Alexander and that was on a smaller scale. The company founder, Pleasant Rowland, controlled how American Girl was positioned—no pink or purple in early catalogs, only maroon and beige, inspired by Victorian Sears, Roebuck-style catalogs. They were really well-produced.

But in 1998 or 1999, the company sold to Mattel for $700 million. Now all of a sudden it’s brick and mortar, and people who weren’t getting the catalogs, who didn’t have daughters, can see, like, how people interact with these dolls. A bachelor on the way home from work in Chicago can see people queuing up with lines around the block. In the Barbie movie, Will Ferrell has a line that’s, like, “Mattel had a female CEO once in the ’90s?” Well, yeah they did; It was Jill Barad, who bought American Girl.

How much research material did you acquire for the book?

I started buying vintage catalogs on Etsy. I had them on my coffee table when friends came over, and they’d spend hours looking through them. Hours! I also bought this $200 Samantha doll recently for my book party.

I totally would have loaned you my Samantha.

That’s very kind, but I was worried about taking someone else’s to the party because they are so sentimental! I can’t replace your Samantha.

One thing that’s been fun in reporting the book is that I can tell how old someone is based on their American Girl references—like, if your references start with the store, you’re probably also just now starting with Botox: You’re 32.

Before there was the generational cliché of whether you’re a Carrie, Miranda, Samantha, or Charlotte from Sex and the City, it was whether you were a Kirsten, Samantha, or Molly. Samantha’s items felt more romantic and aspirational, like an eldest daughter type compared to Molly with her pigtails and stripes.

Absolutely. Samantha was a catch-all because she had brown hair, which represented a broader demographic of white girls with dark hair. Samantha was the wealthy girl with nice accessories, like the famous 1991 birthday wicker set that cost $250 back then. The look was supposed to remind you of, like, that Secret Garden era. Molly felt more grounded and familiar to me. Today, the brand includes licensing deals—like Frozen or Wicked—and customizable dolls, shifting away from purely historical character narratives.

My sister was blonder and looked like a Kirsten, so I default-identified as Samantha.

I did hear from a lot of people that the older sister had the Samantha; I think part of that is because most people thought Samantha was the best one, so the older got the good one. It’s interesting because there was so much girl power going on in the ’90s—girls playing soccer and stuff—and then you have this wildly popular doll line about old-timey girl power, when girls hewed much closer to gender norms than ’90s girls. A weird, complicated way of celebrating girlhood.

It sounds like a little bit of a prequel to trad wife fever.

Yep, that’s in the book. There was a lot of crafting stuff in the American Girl line. Crafting was huge in the ’90s. You know, like, looms, lanyards.

You sold the book proposal to Simon & Schuster right after the Barbie movie came out for what has been rumored to be a whole lot of money for a first book. Did you think of Barbie as a foil while you were working on the book?

Yes, Pleasant Rowland explicitly built American Girl as a higher-end alternative to Barbie in the ’80s. Barbies were cheap—like under $10— whereas an American Girl doll was around $68 when they launched in 1986. They’re $195 apiece today. That’s roughly eight times the price of a Barbie. Barbie remains the #1 global doll, while American Girl is #2 domestically.

There’s such a hardcore American Girl doll cult out there. How much of the book is about the cult versus the company’s story?

The cult’s significance progressed even while I was writing it. The adult subculture—which is referred to as AGIG on social media—surged in 2020 during the pandemic, driven by nostalgia, meme accounts, people with extra time on their hands at home, and podcasts like Dolls of Our Lives, which was hosted by two historians who said that the American Girl dolls are what inspired them to go into the field.

What was your most exciting reporting scoop?

Through someone in my Pilates class, I ended up meeting Carrie Toll, a PR executive in Brooklyn who was the actual child catalog model for Felicity’s clothing line back in the ’90s! It was incredible.

Read more

Subscribe now

Resplendent Spreadsters,

“There’s probably no surer way of destroying your marriage than writing a paean to it,” wrote Curtis Sittenfeld in an op-ed published in the New York Times in 2015, on the joyous occasion of the Supreme Court vote to legalize same-sex marriage. In it, Sittenfeld—whose best-selling novels are almost all to some degree about holy matrimony—celebrated both the institution of marriage and her own personal union. This weekend, she returned to annotate that essay now that she’s divorced. About that opening line, she writes: “It turns out that invoking a jinx doesn’t prevent a jinx?”

It’s that time again! A fresh spate of #divorcestories has arrived to muddy a divorce algorithm that is “oozing with positivity” these days, as Melinda Wenner Moyer puts it in the Cut. “The Strong, Empowered, Secretly Broke Divorcée” is a must-read for anyone even vaguely fantasizing about a breakup, with a comprehensive look at how divorce has become increasingly financially punishing for women—specifically those in the upper-middle-class (and higher) tax brackets, who go into their breakups with “no idea they would lose so much money.” Turns out the “divorce is great” liberation POV may have helped egg on quiet shifts in marital law that put women—who still tend to earn less than their partners, even before they take the childcare hit on their careers and pay the “motherhood tax” their income may never rebound from1—at a further disadvantage. Before you whip out the world’s tiniest violin and start talkin’ Belle Burden, consider that while the women Moyer is writing about may be the fortunate few, they are not just, like, losing the Aspen house. They’re moving to different states, taking lower-paid jobs, cutting out all nonessential purchases. Moyer reveals late in the article that she, too, is recently separated; to make ends meet, she’s Airbnbing her house and staying with friends on the weekends her kids are with her ex.

What Moyer’s story lacks in delight, Jennifer Wilson makes up for in the New Yorker, revealing her secret identity as a football superfan in a book report on a new biography that “tells the story of Touchdown Tom’s life through the prism of his divorce.” Yes, it is somewhat ridiculous to view the winningest man in American football through the lens of his most colossal fumble—but then, who in their right mind lets go of Gisele Bündchen? The woman is not just a supermodel, Wilson points out, but an über-model, one whose teeth, according to the book, “glistened with the flawless geometry of freshly fallen snow” on their first date. The divorce conceit is, let’s face it, the only reason your Spreaditors would ever spend a Friday night reading a story about Tom Brady. Sure, we know that the most interesting thing about this man is his former marriage, but we’re surprised Brady: An American Story and the Price of Greatness author Lars Anderson—a male sportswriter—sees it, too. Could you make the case that the position is even… feminist? Score!

Should you run into Brady on the sidelines of life, take this note from Sittenfeld: “I now know that when people tell you they’re getting divorced, you don’t say, ‘I’m so sorry!’ or ‘Oh no!’ But it’s OK, and maybe recommended, to say, ‘I’m sorry and congratulations.’

Let’s stay together,

Rachel & Maggie

The Terrifying World of College Girls

It’s been a week of questioning what you thought you knew about how human beings work—one that hit home in a particular way if you’re a parent of young boys. What happens in the brains of a group of young men when they’re gathered in one small bedroom and presented with the possibility of an inebriated woman? At what point does the woman go from being a fellow human being—a classmate, a friend, somebody’s sister/girlfriend/daughter—to being “free pussy” that you advertise to your fellow frat bros on Snapchat? (Are these otherwise decent young men who make terrible choices because of groupthink and, in particular, fraternity culture? Or sexist jerks who go through life penis-first?) happens to have a front-row seat to the exploding story of the Cornell Seven, as a professor of philosophy at the university, and she’s never one to mince words, even when talking about her own employer. Yesterday she weighed in on “What It Feels Like at Cornell Right Now.” Read it here.

A Tale of Two Penélopes

Sounds like the kind of rabbit hole your Spreaditors would find ourselves down after a couple of Negronis (Maggie) and tequila gimlets (Rachel), or—who are we kidding—after our afternoon ounces of H₂O: In the latest installment of her Just Like Us monthly Substack column on celebrity and online culture for the Point, age-gap enthusiast Grazie Sophia Christie ties together the common threads in Olivia Wilde’s The Invite and Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona—a) Penélope, b) nonmonogamy—to talk about shifting morality around sex and why we do the dirty in the first place. Whatever happened to passionate, disastrous love triangles? When did everything have to get so “healthy” and “responsible,” ugh? Christie favors VCB’s “sexy cavemen” and “hot blood” over Wilde’s Esther Perel-choreographed version (news to us: Perel was Wilde’s actual therapist when the director was in her twenties?) and gets into Wilde’s tabloid pile-on and how the internet judged her. But the question of whether it’s awkward to champion a Woody Allen movie as the sexier worldview? Never comes up!

Read it here.

Where’s Beck At?

Just as we were all watching Tom Cruise spend his Digger press offensive doing everything possible to avoid speaking about Scientology—hey, look over here: I’m I’m dancing with Jennifer Hudson, I’m shooting the breeze with GQ—Vulture busted out a doozy of a book excerpt that certainly made David Miscavige break out in hives. (We hope that’s all it made him do!) Pulled from a forthcoming biography of Beck from journalist Josephine Riesman, the piece is a heartbreaking account of the musician’s evasion of his family of origin’s religion and subsequent descent into the cult through the lens of his relationship with longtime girlfriend Leigh Limon. A stylist, Limon lived with and worked for the “pop messiah” until she returned one day to their shared home—guess what: only his name was on the deed—to find their living room filled with strangers wearing suits and Scientology uniforms. The story is haunting, and—though we suspect Limon spoke to Riesman on background for the book—it’s also a hell of a write-around, especially given its relationship to a legitimately terrifying cult that is famous for disappearing people who rub them the wrong way.

Read “Losing Beck” here.

ABORTION! ABORTION! ABORTION!

We’d like to thank Guardian opinion columnist Moira Donegan for writing down something that we feel in our gut every day and say aloud at least once a week: WHY THE HELL IS NO ONE AROUND HERE TALKING ABOUT ABORTION ANYMORE? Four years after Dobbs, you can’t legally get an abortion in more than a quarter of US states, which makes it terrifying to just be pregnant in this country. Not only have women lost their autonomy and their dignity, they are dying because of this. In the first two years after the Texas abortion ban, 120 pregnant or postpartum women died, according to a ProPublica study. Not only that: The rate of sepsis among women in that state who had a miscarriage shot up more than 50 percent due to doctors delaying medically necessary abortion care. Death from ectopic pregnancies? That number is way up, too. And yet we’re all generally just…going with it? As Donegan explains, this is all by Republican design. “Feminism has gone dramatically out of style,” she writes. Twenty-eight days after the death of Gloria Steinem and 34 days until the midterms: How many of us are getting out the vote like our lives—especially our red-state sisters’—depend on it?

Read “Why has abortion faded from America’s national conversation?” here.

The 100 Spreadiest TV Series of the 21st Century

Last week, we received a text: “Will the Spread respond?” And we knew, immediately, what the friend who’d sent it was referring to: The New York Times had published its “100 Best TV Shows of the 21st Century,” making it clear that the paper of record considered us total sheep: Lumping both limited series and multi-season series into the same list? As another friend put it in another text message, “it ain’t right.” Frankly that was just one of the many offenses squeezed into their 100-title ranking, including blanking the entire oeuvre of Ms. Elizabeth Meriwether, who may be the Spreadiest creator of television alive. Now, we know that September has been an unusually list-heavy month in Spreadlandia, but as your humble servants we naturally canceled all of our plans and began scratching out two more lists—one for each small-screen art form—of our own. (Note: We included anthology series in the limited-series bucket, evaluating each season as a standalone work.) Within our corrective, you’ll notice a few signature Spread themes, including women having nervous breakdowns and women on the verge of having nervous breakdowns, plus at least four Duplass-brother performances. Also: No fewer than four Liz Meriwether projects.

Herewith, the Spreadiest series—both limited and regular-degular—of this century… so far.

The 75 Spreadiest TV Shows of the 21st Century!

1. Friday Night Lights, 2006-2011 (#14 on the Times list)

2. Better Things, 2016-2022 (#82 on the Times list)

3. Enlightened, 2011-2013 (#33 on the Times list)

4. Girls, 2012-2017 (#13 on the Times list)

5. 30 Rock, 2006-2013 (#8 on the Times list)

6. Catastrophe, 2015-2019 (#91 on the Times list)

7. Six Feet Under, 2001-2005 (#15 on the Times list)

8. Fleabag, 2016-2019 (#5 on the Times list)

9. Transparent, 2014-2019 (not on the Times list)

10. Halt and Catch Fire, 2014-2017 (#96 on the Times list)

11. Veep, 2012-2019 (#7 on the Times list)

12. Younger, 2015-2021 (not on the Times list)

13. Broad City, 2014-2019 (#46 on the Times list)

14. Togetherness, 2015-2016 (not on the Times list)

15. The Leftovers, 2014-2017 (#25 on the Times list)

16. Weeds, 2005-2012 (not on the Times list)

17. Mad Men, 2007-2015 (#3 on the Times list)

18. The Mindy Project, 2012-2017 (not on the Times list)

19. Succession, 2018-2023 (#4 on the Times list)

20. Happy Endings, 2011-2013 (not on the Times list)

21. Hacks, 2021-2026 (#42 on the Times list)

22. The White Lotus, 2021-present (#21 on the Times list—about as close to alignment as we’ll get)

23. Homeland, 2011-2020 (#38 on the Times list)

24. The Diplomat, 2023-present (#94 on the Times list)

25. The Pitt, 2025-present (#36 on the Times list)

26. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, 2015-2019 (not on the Times list)

27. Masters of Sex, 2013-2016 (not on the Times list)

28. Gilmore Girls, 2000-2007 (#99 on the Times list)

29. Big Little Lies, 2017-2026 (not on the Times list)

30. Tell Me You Love Me, 2007 (not on the Times list)

31. New Girl, 2011-2018 (not on the Times list)

32. The Good Wife, 2009-2016 (#79 on the Times list)

33. Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, 2006-2007 (not on the Times list)

34. PEN15, 2019-2021 (#59 on the Times list)

35. Orange Is the New Black, 2013-2019 (not on the Times list)

36. Furious, 2026-present (not on the Times list)

37. The Crown, 2016-2023 (#20 on the Times list)

38. Grey’s Anatomy, 2005-present (not on the Times list)

39. The Americans, 2013-2018 (#17 on the Times list)

40. Motherland, 2016-2022 (not on the Times list)

41. The Handmaid’s Tale, 2017-2025 (#67 on the Times list)

42. The Wire, 2002-2008 (#2 on the Times list)

43. Gossip Girl, 2007-2012 (not on the Times list)

44. Big Love, 2006-2011 (not on the Times list)

45. Nurse Jackie, 2009-2015 (not on the Times list)

46. The Big C, 2010-2013 (not on the Times list)

47. The Bachelor, 2002-present (not on the Times list)

48. The L Word, 2004-2009 (not on the Times list)

49. The Simple Life, 2003-2007 (not on the Times list)

50. Somebody Somewhere, 2022-2024 (#76 on the Times list)

51. Schitt’s Creek, 2015-2020 (#34 on the Times list)

52. Abbott Elementary, 2021-present (not on the Times list)

53. UnREAL, 2015-2018 (not on the Times list)

54. The Comeback, 2005-2026 (#23 on the Times list)

55. One Mississippi, 2015-2017 (not on the Times list)

56. Killing Eve, 2018-2022 (not on the Times list)

57. The Affair, 2014-2019 (not on the Times list)

58. Orphan Black, 2013-2017 (not on the Times list)

59. Insecure, 2016-2021 (#55 on the Times list)

60. The Gilded Age, 2022-present (not on the Times list)

61. Downton Abbey, 2010-2015 (#52 on the Times list)

62. The Other Two, 2019-2023 (not on the Times list)

63. Skins (UK), 2007-2013 (not on the Times list)

64. Parks and Recreation, 2009-2015 (#50 on the Times list)

65. Arrested Development, 2003-2019 (#12 on the Times list)

66. Pluribus, 2025-present (not on the Times list)

67. Couples Therapy, 2019-present (not on the Times list)

68. SMILF, 2017-2019 (not on the Times list)

69. The Studio, 2025-present (not on the Times list)

70. Loot, 2022-present (not on the Times list)

71. Summer Heights High, 2007 (not on the Times list)

72. Shameless, 2011-2021 (not on the Times list)

73. Party Down, 2009-2023 (not on the Times list)

74. Call the Midwife, 2012-present (not on the Times list)

75. Sally4Ever, 2018 (not on the Times list)

The 25 Spreadiest Limited Series of the 21st Century!

1. Dying for Sex, 2025 (not on the Times list)

2. Angels in America, 2003 (not on the Times list)

3. The Dropout, 2022 (not on the Times list)

4. Mrs. America, 2020 (not on the Times list)

5. This Is Going to Hurt, 2022 (not on the Times list)

6. Howards End, 2017-2018 (not on the Times list)

7. Normal People, 2020 (#49 on the Times list)

8. I May Destroy You, 2020 (#18 on the Times list)

9. Top of the Lake, 2013-2013 (not on the Times list)

10. Fleishman Is in Trouble, 2022-2023 (not on the Times list)

11. The Night Of, 2016 (#92 on the Times list)

12. A Very English Scandal, 2018 (not on the Times list)

13. Say Nothing, 2024 (not on the Times list)

14. Fosse/Verdon, 2019 (not on the Times list)

15. Unbelievable, 2019 (not on the Times list)

16. Adolescence, 2025 (#40 on the Times list)

17. Dead Ringers, 2023 (not on the Times list)

18. Station Eleven, 2021-2022 (#93 on the Times list)

19. Mildred Pierce, 2011 (not on the Times list)

20. Wild Wild Country, 2018 (not on the Times list)

21. True Detective: Night Country, 2024 (the complete anthology series is #35 on the Times list)

22. Maid, 2021 (not on the Times list)

23. Bad Vegan, 2022 (not on the Times list)

24. Love Story, 2026 (not on the Times list)

25. Beef, Season 2, 2026 (the complete anthology series is #35 on the Times list)

Did someone forward you this email? To get the full Spread with all the fixins every week…

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

Brilliant Spread-tectives,

The latest chapter in the Spread’s favorite literary whodunit landed Monday, throwing us into a tizzy from which we have yet to recover. It’s clear from the first graph of Jessica Bennett’s 8,500-word article in New York (nay, from the glowy, Elin Hilderbrand-coded cover shoot—love to be a fly on the wall for that editorial decision) that this is, to large degree, the story that Team Amy Griffin has been hoping for. By which we mean Amy Griffin, John Griffin, their crisis PR firm, their lawyers, and the countless famous people who went out on a limb to make her memoir, The Tell—about recovering horrific buried memories of sexual abuse that she allegedly suffered at the hands of a middle school teacher thirty years ago—a 2025 bestseller. Not so much in Amy’s boat anymore? Her ghostwriter, Sam Lansky, and her editor, Dial Press superstar Whitney “Whit” Frick—who, in this telling, have pretty much been tossed off the yacht in a burlap sack.

The big news here: For the first time, Bennett interviews all the major characters (though not the aforementioned Frick, and certainly not “Mr. Mason,” the man Amy accuses of rape, who has never come out of hiding). She got Amy herself, plus Joleene Altum, the woman who accuses Amy of stealing her own trauma story for The Tell, and—dun dun duuuun—the elusive “Claudia,” the pseudonymous middle school classmate who (stick with us here) is the person Amy says she spoke with before writing her book, while Altum alleges that the book’s “Claudia” is based on herself. The specifically poofy sleeves of the dress that one of these women borrowed from Amy for a middle school dance (the dress plays a big role in the book, in both Amy’s and Jolene’s lawsuits, and now in “Claudia’s” interview) are a character unto themselves in Bennett’s article1.

All of this is so confusing, it would take the rest of this issue to untangle it for you, and we’ve got other sh*t to do here today (if you don’t care a whit, so to speak, for the Amy Griffin story, keep scrolling: We’ve got fall’s best books! And this week’s other best reads!). And it is perhaps because this saga is such a beast to lay out that Bennett waits until the last third of her story to get into the remaining ambiguities in Amy’s account of things—where they may not attract the attention of anyone who hasn’t been watching this story like a pair of rabid chihuahuas (ahem).

We humbly submit:

• Exhibit A: Amy has pulled off a sleight of hand that leaves us aghast and agog, and that even now nobody is really talking about: Over the course of her lawsuit filing and now this interview, she has artfully changed her entire story. Spreaders, the whole point of The Tell is that MDMA was the key that unlocked these awful memories. The book is very clear on this—these memories came to Amy for the first time after the drug kicked in. Now, she says these memories weren’t actually recovered, exactly: She sort of knew them before. The drug just helped bring them back more vividly. Wait, what?

  • Exhibit A.1: Even without the element of an illegal drug that is not proven to help “recover” memories—as Spreaditor Maggie reported here, some experts say it may do the opposite, distorting and exaggerating memories, potentially making them less reliable—such lost-and-found recollections, while devastating, have a way of not holding up in a court of law. With multiple lawsuits pending, that’s no coincidence.

• Exhibit B: Amy finally addresses the tone-deaf editorial omissions that make The Tell feel less than genuine—and that were the first red flag to many lit-world insiders that this book might not totally check out. (One wonders whether, if not for these lost details, anyone would ever have bothered to dig deeper into Griffin’s story, opening up this whole slippery can of…caviar.) Now, Amy is ready to acknowledge that “questionable editorial choices,” as Bennett calls them, were made. But made by whom? That one is laid at the feet of Dial Press and, more subtly, Sam Lansky. They wanted to make the book more accessible to the non-billionaires of the world. They wanted to construct a compulsively readable, suspenseful narrative. Thus, The Tell skates past her vast wealth and prunes out a bunch of details that Amy now says would have brought her story to life and made it more believable.

  • Exhibit B.1: Amy can’t very well say that she made these choices, because the whole point is she’s defending her honesty and credibility, and, again—multiple lawsuits pending.

• Exhibit C: Bennett takes perhaps the only route available to someone in her position—i.e., writing sympathetically about a story in which there are two purported victims—leaving room for the possibility (which seems very far-fetched to us, but then again who are we, Olivia Benson?) that both Griffin and Altum were attacked…on the same night… at the same school… by two different teachers.

• Exhibit D: Keep reading for the story’s kicker, which is a total gut punch and, in our estimation, the single most compelling piece of evidence (even though it’s hearsay) from someone other than Amy Griffin to back up her version of events. Though as to why it’s just emerging now, your guess is as good as ours.

• Exhibit E: WHAT ABOUT THE DANG POSTCARD?? Never mentioned in the cover story is The Tell’s dangling mystery of a postcard that Amy supposedly received in the mail, which she believed came from “Claudia.” The postcard is a flimsy detail that Griffin/Lansky weave the book’s whole ending around. Now, Bennett got “Claudia,” but no one’s clarifying whether that postcard actually exists or who sent it. 🕵️🕵️🕵️

So, is this the end of the Amy Griffin story? (And if so, what are we going to do with our free time? Mah-jongg? Ice climbing?) Or have we just cracked into a new chapter? In Monday night’s Dinner Party newsletter, Bennett suggested that the responsibility now lands with the publishing industry: “Like, ‘We don’t fact-check’ can’t just continue to be the answer from the publishers every time there’s a new scandal.” While we’d love to see that happen (don’t hold your breath), we’d also love to hear our gal Amy take some responsibility, at some point, for the flaws in The Tell (don’t hold your…).

Love,

Rachel & Maggie

P.S. What’s with all the umlauts in our title? Well if “JAŸ-Z” can get funky in the punctuation department, why can’t we?

The Spreadiest Books of Fall 2026!

Before we dive into the Spread’s fall booklist, could we all please pause and pre-order Julie Orringer’s new novel, Luna, Phoenix, Queen? First of all, you know it will be good—Orringer established herself as a bright light with her 2003 story collection, How to Breathe Underwater. Beyond that, buying the book feels like the right thing to do, now that we’re up at night worrying about Orringer’s writer-husband’s early-onset dementia (which informs a storyline in the new book), their two kids, and the not-cheapness of a Brooklyn existence. How is she going to make it work? Liz Egan—who, it must be said, is having A WEEK, what with this Amy Griffin story written by Bennett, a former Times colleague—captures their evolving love story beautifully in “What She Can’t Control in Life, She Could Control in Fiction,” here.

Now, onto the rest of the list!

Switzy by Emma Cline, out now: In a major subject-matter swerve, The Girls and The Guest author’s latest follows a middle-aged man with dementia on his journey to an assisted-suicide clinic. Critics are raving. Buy it from our Bookshop here.

Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel, out now: Set in 2031, the latest speculative novel from Station Eleven’s Mandel centers on a Los Angeles party where the host—poof—disappears. Buy it from our Bookshop here.

The Disappearers by Marlon James, out now: Dwight Garner isn’t the only critic to have a boner for this 640-page epic; it’s now the frontrunner for the National Book Award and the Booker Prize. Buy it from our Bookshop here.

End Times Fascism by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, out now: Klein and Taylor scare the bejesus out of us, then air a plan for how to get out of the Christian-nationalist-and-tech-bro-fueled garbage fire that is our burning planet. They talk to David Marchese about it here. Buy it from our Bookshop here.

The Vanishing Family by Robert Kolker, September 29: Based on a 2023 New York Times Magazine story, the book goes deep on a Pennsylvania family reckoning with an ultrarare, inherited form of frontotemporal dementia: Each child carries a 50-50 chance of having the gene mutation. (Anybody who loved his Hidden Valley Road—about a family of 12 children, six of whom had schizophrenia—will be hooked.) Pre-order it from our Bookshop here.

American Hagwon by Min Jin Lee, September 29: The title sounds like how your Spreaditors wake up looking, but the book (by the author of Pachinko) actually takes on the pressure cooker that is private tutoring when an achievement-focused Korean family settles in Southern California. Paging Apple TV? Pre-order it from our Bookshop here.

Partita by Barbara Kingsolver, October 6: We haven’t been this excited about a Kingsolver novel in a minute. A married piano teacher’s phone rings, and guess who? An old lover from her conservatory days. And then…! For a warm-up, read Casey Cep’s New Yorker profile from this week here. Pre-order it from our Bookshop here.

Fair Ones by Lydia Millet, October 6: From the wild mind behind the Spreaditor-beloved A Children’s Bible, this “double novel” follows two women as they grapple with the violent death of a mutual friend. We’re waiting for a Spready profile on Millet to drop in 3…2…1… Pre-order it from our Bookshop here.

Every Story Is a Love Story by Imbolo Mbue, October 6: The How Beautiful We Were author’s new novel has a gut punch of a concept: A man’s pregnant wife gets hit by a car in New York City and dies. Months later, he receives a letter from the driver, inciting questions about grief and forgiveness. Whew. Pre-order it from our Bookshop here.

Peck & Peck by Bonnie Garmus, October 13: The follow-up to surprise superseller Lessons in Chemistry is about an entry-level mailroom worker at a prestigious poetry magazine! Will Garmus be able to keep up her winning streak? Pre-order it from our Bookshop here.

The Brightness by Chad Harbach, October 27: Sixteen years since The Art of Fielding hit hard, Harbach’s second doorstopper is also a coming-of-age tale, this time about two women named Irma and Pella whose lives spin out into unexpected directions starting at a Block Island wedding. Maggie, who has often daydreamed about writing a novel set in Block Island, is so, so happy for him. Pre-order it from our Bookshop here.

Look at Me by Dustin Hoffman and Ariel Levy, November 10: We’re going forgo Sylvester Stallone’s and Michael Douglas’s new memoirs, sorry, but we will certainly brake for Hoffman’s, which was cowritten by forever Spreadfave (and now 60 Minutes correspondent) Ariel Levy, and says so right out front. Kinda makes you like him, doesn’t it? Pre-order it from our Bookshop here.

Annie Proulx Stories: New & Selected, November 10: A nothing-but-net gift for the hard-to-buy-for Proulx girlie or a lil treat for your own bedside. Pre-order it from our Bookshop here.

Rabbit Rabbit by Jennifer E. Smith, December 15: 39-year-old Billie decides it’s now or never: She’s going to have a baby on her own. Infertility treatments meet “global romantic getaways.” Send this one to AOC! Pre-order it from our Bookshop here.

The Spreadiest Reads of the Week!

Talking Out of School

Over the weekend, Nikole Hannah-Jones—Pulitzer Prize-winning architect of the 1619 Project and foremost justice-focused education reporter—rocked the parental world with the publication of an article second-guessing her own parenting choices and in turn her life’s work: In line with her values and informed by her reporting, she’d sent her daughter to a predominantly Black and under-resourced neighborhood school. But when her daughter got to middle school, she felt betrayed that her parents would choose an education for her with less opportunity than they could have conceivably afforded. It’s an astounding work of contrition and humility that raises as many questions as it answers and as of this writing has inspired more than 1,600 comments. Among the most poignant parts of the article comes when Hannah-Jones interviews the now 71-year-old Leona Tate, who at age six was one of the first Black children to desegregate a southern elementary school: “It wasn’t easy for us, but we had to.” Tate tells her. “I think it was a hard decision, a courageous decision, to put your children on the front line like that. And I probably would do the same thing. I’m glad I did what I did when I did it. Somebody had to do it.”

Read “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?” here.

Read more

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!

Subscribe now

Spreaderinas,

As promised, we’re back with Part 2 of our Fall Culture Preview: Cinemaaaah! You may recall that last week we delivered all the TV you need to survive. Next week: books. Readers, with these lists—plus a 10,000-lux light therapy lamp and a cannily timed Wellbutrin Rx—you will be well on your way to sailing through S.A.D. season in style. Not to mention to winning the golden jello mold award at the Spread Fantasy Oscars League playoffs come March.

Like last week, paid readers will find a link to a handy-dandy printable/downloadable version of our movie list at the bottom of this issue. Which makes this a great time to upgrade to a paid subscription, no?

Subscribe now

And of course we have your reads of the week, served piping hot.

Rachel & Maggie

The Spreadiest Movies of Fall 2026!

Primetime (Sept. 25): Edward Cullen plays a different kind of nocturnal creature: To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen. Early reviews are stellar.

Digger (Oct. 2): This is the oil-tycoon movie Tom Cruise is promoting on the cover of GQ. Directed by controversial Birdman helmer Alejandro González Iñárritu.

Verity (Oct. 2): Annie Hathaway’s fifth major motion picture of 2026 is a Colleen Hoover adaptation also starring Rachel’s first husband Josh Hartnett, with nary a whiff of that Lively/Baldoni mishegoss.

Clarissa (Oct. 4): Set in Lagos, Nigeria, a modern update to Mrs. Dalloway starring Tony winner Sophie Okonedo.

Animals (Oct. 9): An L.A. mayoral candidate’s (Ben Affleck) son is kidnapped. Begs the question: Can we still find it in our hearts to pay money to go watch Ben Affleck in a movie theater?

Fjord (Oct. 9): Sebastian Stan—a legitimate actor’s actor and Marvel property whom Rachel still thinks she “discovered”—and Renate Reinsve are parents who come under intense scrutiny in this Norway-set family legal thriller.

Other Mommy (Oct. 9): Jessica Chastain—who has already led movies called Mama and Mothers’ Instinct—stars in the basis for the most terrifying trailer we’ve seen since the Elizabeth Holmes doc.

The Social Reckoning (Oct. 9): In the Social Network follow-up, Aaron Sorkin slides into the director chair for a shiny cast: Jeremy Strong as Zuck, Mikey Madison (in glasses!) as a whistleblower, and Yes Chef as a Wall Street Journal reporter.

La Bola Negra (Oct. 16): The Spanish drama, which knits together the stories of three gay men in three different time periods (1932, 1937, 2017), got a 20-minute standing O at Cannes.

Sense and Sensibility (Oct. 16): We were happy to let Ang Lee’s 1995 adaptation starring Emma Thompson ride forever, but British filmmaker Georgia Oakley had other ideas, namely casting Daisy Edgar-Jones—perhaps not the most exciting actor of her generation—as Elinor Dashwood. We’re taking a wait-and-see approach.

Fatherland (Oct. 23): Paweł Pawlikowski’s Cold War follow-up features Sandra Hüller playing an actress on a heavy-duty road trip through post-World War II Germany alongside her Nobel Prize-winning father. (Hüller is also said to be generating awards buzz for her role in Maggie’s favorite family movie of 2026, Project Hail Mary, which as Hüller fans we’re good with even though: really, that role?)

Klara and the Sun (Oct. 23): Taika Waititi takes on the formidable task of turning Kazuo Ishiguro’s book about AI, family, and cute robot “friends” into a movie, with Jenna Ortega as the lead ’bot.

Possible Love (Oct. 23): This Korean marital drama was the toast of the Venice Film Festival.

Gentle Monster (Oct 30): Léa Seydoux leads this family nightmare in which her husband is charged with possession and distribution of child pornography. (Is he a member of the “burnerverse”? Keep reading.) About this we say: good grief.

Wicker (Oct. 30): We’re here for this absolutely bonkers-looking tale in which a fishmonger (Olivia Colman) commissions a basketmaker to weave her a husband (Alexander Skarsgård.) A good excuse for a Fiddler-inspired jingle: Basketmaker, basketmaker, weave me a match…

Club Kid (Nov. 4): The magnetic Jordan Firstman—whom you probably know from I Love LA but we fell in love with on The English Teacher—wrote, directed, and stars as a party promoter who learns he has a 10-year-old son in this Cannes hit.

Wild Horse Nine (Nov. 6): It’s kind of a boy movie—John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell star—but Spready types who’ve already seen the action-thriller give it two thumbs up and say it’s nothing like director Martin McDonagh’s last film, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (complimentary).

Elsinore (Nov. 20): “Oscar lock” is being bandied about for Andrew Scott, who is said to really become Scottish actor Ian Charleson, performing Hamlet at the National Theater while dying from AIDS. Asecond movie about a performance of Hamlet in as many years: huh.

Josephine (Nov. 20): Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan—two actors who are very nice to look at—play the parents of an eight-year-old who witnesses a visceral act of violence in Golden Gate Park.

Paper Tiger (Nov. 20): The Pearl family (Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson—last seen together in Marriage Story—plus Miles Teller) gets mixed up with the Russian mob. Anybody else curious to see how they feel about Driver now that they’ve read Famesick?

The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth (Nov. 25): Brad Pitt takes a second crack at his Oscar-winning Once Upon a Time In Hollywood character. Let’s see what off-the-cuff shit we get out of Quentin Tarantino in the press run-up!

14th (Nov. 27): Ava DuVernay’s spiritual follow-up to her 2016 prison-injustice documentary 13th, this one tackles immigration and will burn you up.

Behemoth! (Dec. 4): Pedro Pascal’s prodigy cellist moves home to L.A., where his musical family of origin works in the Hollywood-score biz.

Tender Loving Care (Dec. 4): Kate O’Flynn, who just won the Emmy for Widow’s Bay (!), leads a family dramedy about grief from beloved director Mike Leigh.

The Debut (Dec. 11): If we had to choose one movie to see this season, it might be Jesse Eisenberg’s community-theater dramedy, wherein Julianne Moore goes from housewife to method actor despite having to work under the thumb of local artiste Paul Giamatti.

Ink (Dec. 11): Catnip for media obsessives (hi), this 1969-set film by Danny Boyle traces the rise of Rupert Murdoch’s The Sun under gossip-permissive editor Larry Lamb. Cheers to the return of Claire Foy!

Dune: Part Three (Dec. 18): Robert Pattinson (DRINK!) joins Timmy Chalamet, Zendaya, and Florence Pugh in what we’ve been promised is the final installment of Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi epic.

Werwulf (Dec. 25): In director Robert Eggers’s latest freakshow, Sam Taylor Johnson’s husband transforms into a violent canine in 13th-century England. Lily Rose Depp is also there.

The Spreadiest Reads of the Week!

The Both/And of Surrogacy

We got a poignant one-two punch about women who make other people’s babies this week. Mere hours ago, Lena Dunham announced that, thanks to a surrogate, she and husband Luis Felber are parents to a baby girl—a fate that anyone with half a heart who read Famesick will have hoped for. In an essay in Vogue that is ostensibly (and winningly) about the joy of shopping for a baby before she arrives, Dunham writes that she wasn’t jealous of her surrogate for being able to carry the baby that she couldn’t. “Instead, I felt a different kind of jealousy—toward said baby, for the chance to be tucked into someone who radiated such safety. I could just tell she knew how to steer an SUV in the snow.”

Meanwhile from the Atlantic comes the other side of the story: On the heels of one mindbending surrogacy case after another, Spread Dame—we’re kneeling—Helen Lewis’s “Mothers For Sale” puts the United States’ commercial surrogacy industry into a global context, and honestly, our minds are blown. Get this: As surrogacy becomes more commonplace in our society—with seemingly every celebrity (except wanton fornicator Claire Danes) using one to procreate—Lewis (a Brit) writes that Europeans believe this is one more reason we’re nuts: “Europeans think of Americans’ enthusiasm for paid surrogacy the way we regard their fondness for guns and capital punishment: inexplicable.” She gets into the ethical contradictions around what turns out to be a much thornier practice than we as good our-bodies-our-choice feminists had previously understood, especially given that regulations in this country are practically nonexistent, and surrogacy tourism is booming. Remember the New Yorker story from February about the Los Angeles mansion housing dozens of surrogate-born children and their nannies? Mmhmm.

Read Dunham’s Vogue essay here.

Read Lewis’s piece in the Atlantic here.

Read more

Subscribe now

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?

Subscribe now

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.

Read more

Subscribe now

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.”

Read more

Subscribe now

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.

Read more

Subscribe now

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!

Read more

Subscribe now

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.

Read more

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!

Subscribe now

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.

Read more

Subscribe now

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.)

2

Subscribe now

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….

Read more

Subscribe now

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.

Free subscribers: You have hit a wall. A paywall, that is. Hop over it to find…

• An argument in favor of embracing “ugly” (or just…meh)

• A definitive exploration of the Nancy Guthrie tragedy

• The hot take of the week (in a word, Jackass)

• What your mother-in-law isn’t telling you about her woodwork and your effect on it

• The juice-y juice on Candice and Brandon Miller

• The young woman who made social media addiction a thing—who says she is still addicted to social media

• And more. See you on the other side!

Paid subscribers: Thank you for your support! As you were…

Read more

Subscribe now

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.

Read more

Subscribe now

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.

Did someone forward you this email? To get the full Spread with all the fixins every week…

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

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.

Read more

Subscribe now

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.

Read more