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Spreadsquad,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rachel & Maggie

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

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

Read it here.

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

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

Read it here.

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

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

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

When Cognitive Dissonance Is an Understatement

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

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

Buy the novel here.

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

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

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Singular Spreadbaes,

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

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

See you in the backseat,

Rachel & Maggie

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

The Beckhams laugh at your piddly “family drama”

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

Read it here.

Can a journalist be a celebrity anymore?

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

Read it here.

Tough to watch

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

Read it here.

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

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

Read it here.

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

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Spreadpeeps,

As a couple of Substackers who are “keeping our day jobs” (we mean this both literally and euphemistically), we don’t exactly have the resources to employ a full art department. Still—and especially since we got nominated for the ASME for best newsletter!!—we often hear it’s time to take the Spread to “the next level.” Another thing that we often hear is that (until it kills us all), AI can be a useful tool for scrappy little operations such as our own. So earlier this week, on a day when we were on deadline for said day jobs and had no business dicking around, we felt inspired to try out the ole machine learnin’ for a little adventure in branding. What would be our first experiment? Duh, the writing was all over the wall. Urgently, we asked Gemini—can we call you GiGi?—to render your Spreaditors in the style of Italian artist Francesco Clemente’s portrait of Gwyneth Paltrow from the poster of the canonical 1998 Alfonso Cuarón film, Great Expectations. And we got:

Nice job, we told GiGi. (Misspelling of “presented” our own.) Our “branding exercise” was off to the races, and our creative juices were now fully flowing. This was clearly a path for us to level up and quickly begin making $275,300 a year (apiece!) on this enterprise. Hand in hand with GiGi, we sallied forth.

Could she Spreadify The Parent Trap?

She could! How about the classic Tatum O’Neal/Kristy McNichol vehicle, Little Darlings?

Yes indeedy! Though we’re not sure how Rachel ended up with Farrah Fawcett locks while Maggie got…buckteeth. But hey, when your art department’s working for free, you take it. Hey Gemini, we suggested, let’s go for a little more angst and try Thirteen.

And that was fine—though we may have to workshop that word “blog” and Maggie’s hair transformations were getting downright lazy.

Anyway, by now we were 120 minutes of premium Tuesday afternoon work hours into GiGi, what with the back and forth it took to get our various piercings and hair configurations right. Still, if time is money, we were a dream team! And GiGi was turning out to be the most chill art director we’d ever worked with.

Then we got this one. Good try, we told GiGi gently—in the tone we used with art directors of our past who, say, illustrated stories on postpartum psychosis with photos of generically hot teenage “sad girl” models. (This is true: We once had a photo director who compiled a binder of “sad girl” art just to illustrate our features.) Anyway, we told GiGi that while we loved what she’d done here, we would like her to make “the woman on the left” look a little less exactly like Susan Sarandon and more like Rachel Baker. Then we re-uploaded photos of Rachel, just to drive the point home.

Looking back, we can see that this is where things took a turn. Little did we know it, GiGi was mad. Real mad. Madder than any other art director we’ve ever squabbled with, which is really saying something. And we know this because—no joke—this is what she sent us next.

Folks, this is the AI equivalent of the time the creative director from our fashion mag past hurled a pair of scissors across the studio—narrowly missing several underlings—and stomped out. Thus concluded our brief interlude as a media “company” with an art “department” and the most hilarious day at the office in we don’t know when.

We’ll circle back,

Rachel & Maggie

P.S. Novelist Maria Semple is back and OK, sure, great—it’s not her fault that the film adaptation of Where’d You Go, Bernadette? was unbearably bad—but we did like ogling her stuff in the Wall Street Journal.

You know the drill… we’re just getting started! What’s on the other side of this line for paid subscribers? A banger of a therapist/client sexual affair (two words: “mistress money”); our ongoing Lena Dunham debate; the one thing you shouldn’t say to someone at a party (that we can’t stop saying); another doc from the Netflix Dept. of Fearmongering; a wild side-effect of all that red light you’ve been beaming at your eyeballs…

Come on in, the water is warm and the takes are spicy!

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Spreadbunnies,

Robyn, the Swedish pop phenom who, thanks to Jia Tolentino, we now have 100 more reasons to love, has a theory for why New York clubgoers are superintense—whereas happy, chilled out Swedes, like, chat on the dance floor. “That’s because [Swedes’] lives are too good,” she tells Tolentino. “New York is this place where people just work so hard, and you’re…in a country that’s really failing at taking care of its citizens. And that combination, I guess, is really good for people like me, who want to play for an audience that feels something.”

You could pound out your personal misery and/or rage about our failed social contract on the dance floor. Or you could pour it into your art. But some of us prefer to scrub it out. Sort it, organize it, cleanse it, control it. Launder it, bitch. In the past 48 hours, we have seen: “Coming Clean: How I Tricked Myself Into Enjoying Laundry Day with Luxury Products” in Vogue and “7 Things You Should Never Put in the Washing Machine, According to Pros” in Real Simple. We have learned that Laundry is an official Topic to follow on Apple News. And that laundry baskets are a particular kink: Wirecutter gives us “The Quiet Luxury of a Collapsible Laundry Basket”; Consumer Reports, the more workmanlike “Best Laundry Baskets.” (Even before this revelation we had been stuck in an identity spiral over a handmade model from amishbaskets.com that was recently rhapsodized about in . “To hate something you touch every single day of your life is unacceptable.” Sure, but are we $180 laundry basket people? And that story about washing your sweaters in snow… the nerve of the New York Times to introduce us to this concept right after our two-foot mountain of the stuff turned to muck.)

Sensing a groundswell, Vox takes the laundry beat up a notch with a profile of a man named Kismai, a self-described “fat, sweaty slob who eats with wild abandon and apparently never learned to use cutlery as a toddler,” who has “singlehandedly changed the way people do laundry” by introducing a sizable swath of Redditors to the enzyme lipase, which can apparently get that splotch of ghee out of your favorite overpriced T-shirt like nobody’s business. (It’s science, and there’s a professor at the University of Tasmania who says it’s true.)

We suppose we could take a feminist tack here and ponder the tradwifery of it all: Has there been an uptick in laundry content, now that women are back to our god-given purpose as baby factories? It’s true that the tone of many of these stories is an intoxicating blend of permission (“Is it Okay to Wash Bath Mats with Towels?,” asks a querulous Southern Living) and judgment: “You’re doing your laundry wrong!,” blares the Daily Mail. But the truth is, we’re fine with laundry porn. This is a world in which there is a solution to every problem, a fix for the stains of life. So yes, we will read (and promptly forget) the advice in all of those stories, and more than that, we’ll do it for fun—while our dirty clothes pile up.

So fresh, so clean,

Rachel & Maggie

We’re just getting warmed up! Paid subscribers get… The unbearable tragedy of Camp Mystic; the one Lindy West read (of 1000) that you really must catch; Sofia Coppola’s favorite rock goddess; the Cesar Chavez debacle; a deliciously trashy food-world controversy; a Smut-y new must-listen pod; AND a whole new ‘fluencer to fear—the “gun-fluencers.” You’re not gonna stop here before you get to all that, are you?

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Dear Spreadfiends,

If you haven’t yet seen Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!, we can’t blame you. The reviews have been atrocious—if entertainingly so. Vulture’s Alison Willmore called it “more pussy hat than punk rock in nature, vague and mild-mannered underneath the occasional blood splatter and can-you-believe-we’re-getting-away-with-this posturing.” The Atlantic’s David Sims wrote that “any attempt by Gyllenhaal at conveying a message is drowned out by its overwhelming goofiness.” But we weren’t going to miss a Maggie G. picture, and surely not one for which she used her $100 million budget to cast her brother, her husband, her Batman, and her muse. If she was going there, so were we.

Once we settled in for a 6 p.m. showing, with a double pour of Sauv Blanc and a large popcorn “to share,” three thoughts struck like a triple-bolt of lightning. 1. We’d clearly be up all night peeing. 2. The salt bloat would be punishing. 3. Our favorite critics—who struggled to figure out what this movie is about—are apparently not in a certain phase of life, because The Bride! is clearly a meditation on perimenopause.

The gist of this wildly chaotic adaptation of the 1935 film The Bride of Frankenstein, itself a spin-off of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: The monster (Christian Bale, who we’d like to see work with more female directors—he looked to be having so much fun here!), who is now 117 years old and goes by Frank, is lonely, so he asks a mad scientist (Annette Bening!) to “reanimate” him a companion. They dig up the body of a young moll named Ida (Jessie Buckley), who was killed by mobsters after being possessed by the ghost of Mary Shelley (also Jessie Buckley—let’s not spend time on that here). Once reanimated, Ida, who is still possessed BTW, is told that she simply lost her memory after an accident. After Frank and Ida kill some people—self-defense, kinda!—they go on the run Queen & Slim-style Bonnie and Clyde-style, kill more people, fall in love. All with a detective (Sarsgaard) and his clever “assistant” (Penelope Cruz, slumming it) hot on their trail. Eventually Ida learns of her true backstory and decides her new name is “The Bride,” but before she can marry herself, more shooting occurs and both Ida and Frank are killed. But this is a Frankenstein movie! So of course they get reanimated and re-fall in love. It’s a lot.

OK, fine, you say—so why is this a perimenopause movie? Keep in mind that though the Ida/Bride character is given no age (Buckley herself is 36), Gyllenhaal, who wrote the film in addition to directing it, is a perfect 48 years young. Ahem:

1. The Bride seethes: Buckley’s character is pissed. Sometimes she flies off the handle for good reason; other times, her anger just festers. Familiar!

2. The Bride suffers “brain attacks”: These moments of split personality and/or mental blankness are parlayed into an entire plot point about women—not just the Bride herself, but also her followers—who use “brain attack!” as a rallying cry to confront men. “Brain freeze” is mentioned at least once, too. There’s even an original and extremely moody song called “Brain Attack” on the soundtrack. (No lyrics; apparently couldn’t recall them.)

3. The Bride’s got frizzy hair: Declining estrogen levels reduce the scalp’s natural oil production, leaving hair dry, brittle, and prone to breakage. Or so we’ve heard.

4. The Bride’s muscles are kind of stiff: One woman’s rigor mortis is another woman’s frozen shoulder.

5. The Bride’s skin pigmentation has gone haywire: Did someone say goth melasma?

6. The Bride has an identity crisis: And isn’t that just perimenopause in a nutshell?

The bottom line: Sure, this movie is messy as hell, but so are we, and we enjoyed a rip-roaring 126 minutes at the theater.

Turn on the fan on your way out, would ya?

Rachel & Maggie

We’re guessing In-N-Out wasn’t a hot afterparty stop this year…

By the time late March hits, we always feel a bit like football players in the days after the Super Bowl—it’s the end of our season, and we need some rehab, some anti-inflammatories, maybe a break from our teammates. We’re referring to the Oscars, of course. This year’s ceremony held few surprises, except for a feeling that built little by little, and that by the end of the show was fully aflame: outrage. If we had to look at one more skeletal clavicle, one more female bicep so scrawny it could barely hold up a statuette—we were gonna scream. In the days since, just like every year, many outlets (mostly tabloids) have noted the extreme thinness of Hollywood bodies—this time zeroing in on Emma Stone, Demi Moore, and Nicole Kidman. On Substack, , a fashion writer who has been outspoken about her own recovery from an eating disorder, summed it up with a great headline: “I Can’t See the Dresses Anymore, Can You?” But while Ruthie takes the gentler tack of hating the game, not the players—she’s right, of course: you can’t blame a person for their own illness—we are increasingly fed up with that approach, which has gotten us exactly nowhere. Where does the buck stop, if not with these rich, powerful, and established actors who run their own companies and call the shots on their projects, yet refuse to take an ounce of responsibility for what their own dwindling BMIs do to the minds of the women who keep them in business, buying tickets to their movies and slathering on the skin creams they shill? Do they feel no responsibility to us? And, fine, if we can’t put the blame on them, let’s put it somewhere. On the designers and stylists who dress them in clothes that emphasize their skinniness, celebrating it as a virtue. Or on the Louis Vuittons and Rolexes and Chanels of the world, which keep renewing their contracts, despite obvious shrinking that would give any “normal” person pause. Or on the doctors who may be renewing GLP-1 prescriptions well past the point of any logical weight loss. Or maybe just on the army of yes-men and yes-women who surround these people at all times, nodding like obedient little bobbleheads, taking their paychecks and their fringe benefits, and never stepping up to say: STOP THE INSANITY. At some point, somebody’s got to take the blame. Who’s it going to be?

A Talented Little Bitch Grows Up

Zac Posen, who has a reputation for being a technically talented designer and also a bit of a brat—both of your Spreaditors have experienced this first-hand so, yes, we’re starting shit but also, yes, we know whereof we speak—started his House of Z atelier at his parents’ place in Soho when he’d been on this planet for a mere 20 years. He quickly became fashion’s boy wonder, dressing hot young stars in his signature gowns and never missing a photo op for himself. Now, at 45, after his own company went bust, Posen is the creative director of Gap Inc., overseeing Gap, Athleta, Banana Republic, and Old Navy—a real man of the people! Some might call this a swerve. Some might call it a great reason to give him the New Yorker treatment! (We are both of those people.) Writer Rachel Syme pulls no punches (“Posen’s name-dropping has flowchart momentum, each acquaintance branching into subsequent friendships, projects, and parties.”) but her assessment is generous overall. Honestly, if you read one thing this week, this one’s a blast.

Read “How Zac Posen Went from Making Ball Gowns to Remaking the Gap” here.

Life on the Edge of Chaos

Anyone who wore drippy eyeliner and a dime store tiara to her mid-’90s senior prom in homage to Courtney Love (Maggie) will bow to the flame-haired rock goddess Melissa Auf der Maur, who joined Hole—the biggest-selling, most-Grammy-nominated female band of that tumultuous decade, but also one of its most dysfunctional—just four months after Kurt Cobain’s suicide, in the heat of both her bandmate’s heroine use and the country’s misogynistic anti-Love fever. In an excellent interview on NPR, the thoughtful and extremely well-spoken bassist reflects that writing Even the Good Girls Will Cry: A 90s Rock Memoir (out yesterday) was at least partially about processing (and exorcising) her past in order to be a more whole person and, ultimately, a better mother to her teenage daughter. There’s a Rolling Stone excerpt here, and we somehow missed this late-Feb New York Times profile (with great photos) by Melena Ryzik. Still, we’d love to see her get the New Yorker treatment by one of her peers, if anyone out there is listening. …Paging Ariel Levy and Emily Nussbaum?

Listen to the interview here.

Buy the book from our Bookshop here.

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Twinkling Spreadstars,

Because we are nothing if not completists, to kick off Oscars week we finally got around to watching Song Sung Blue: a mess of a “movie of the week” treatment about two Neil Diamond “interpreters” that precipitated Kate Hudson’s performance of a lifetime. Yes, we’re talking about her work as Claire Sardina, a hard-working Milwaukee mom with a heart of gold and a dye job that says “Clairol Nice ‘N Easy Frost & Tip,” which proved once and for all that Kate can belt ’em out, she can tinkle the ivories, and she can handle real drama. But we’re also talking about the moment Hudson found out that, twenty-five years after her supporting nod for Penny Lane in Almost Famous, she’d been nominated a second time for an Academy Award. In this video of the moment, there is screaming, there’s rocking, there’s a rumpled bed—all of which generated in us more goodwill for a nepo baby than we thought possible.

Kate: You know and we know that you’re not going to win this thing—and that’s a feeling your Spreaditors know a little something about. But damn, it’ll be fun to dress up. In your honor, the Spread is officially dedicating its Sunday night viewing party to all things Kate. Consider it our love letter to underdogs everywhere, and to Penny Lane, Andie Anderson, hell, even that young woman you played in The Skeleton Key (underrated!)

Rachel will be donning her best yellow satin halter gown for the occasion; Maggie a shearling-trim suede coat and purple Yoko shades. We will both be acting adorable, charming, and wildly body positive, while frosting ourselves liberally—icing, not diamonds, unless you want to send some our way?

It’s all happening,

Rachel & Maggie

Smizing Through the Apocalypse

One of your Spreaditors may have side-hustled as a dating correspondent for the Tyra show circa 2008—but she’s not the only one mainlining Netflix’s Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model. The three-episode series, which has been the subject of much chatter these last few weeks, goes deep on the sins of Tyra Banks’s Real World-meets-American Idol mashup, which for 25 “cycles” starting in 2003 took normal girls who aspired to make it big in fashion, and ritualistically demoralized them for our entertainment. Exactly none of the show’s hundreds of contestants went on to become a legit top model.

Reality Check features interviews with a handful of the most traumatized hopefuls: Shandi, who was filmed while a guy from a photoshoot had nonconsensual sex with her while she was black-out drunk. Danielle, who was forced to undergo a permanent orthodontic procedure according to Tyra’s aesthetic whims. Shannon, who, recovering from an eating disorder, was weighted and called heavy on camera. Also: conversations with the panelists Banks hired and fired (creative director Jay Manuel, photographer Nigel Barker, runway coach Miss J. Alexander, who the Times recently profiled post-stroke) and something far from a mea culpa from Banks herself (“different times” is an excuse proffered more often than a weave on makeover day).

What’s the point of all this Monday morning quarterbacking? And what do we want from Tyra in the here and now? Two of our favorite critics, Wesley Morris, in perhaps the best installment of his Cannonball podcast yet (bring back guest Michaela Angela Davis, please!), and Sophie Gilbert, in the Atlantic, wrestle with the show’s legacy. This is Gilbert’s kingdom—last year, her book Girl on Girl zoomed in on the hyper-sexualization of young women in pop culture in the early 2000s. “Top Model and shows like it were intoxicating because they compelled each woman who watched to imagine herself as a virtual contestant, and to internalize the idea that beauty wasn’t a pleasurable pursuit but a grind for self-optimization and profit,” she writes. “The world we live in now, with its casual parlance of Botox and blephs, glass skin and looksmaxxing, was built on the foundation that Top Model helped set—the idea that if you simply work hard enough on your physical form, blessings will surely flow.”

Listen to “Tyra Banks Is (Kinda) Sorry” here.

Read “What America’s Next Top Model Was Really Selling” here.

Hugh Who?

Former Teen Vogue and Them content director and Out editor-in-chief Phillip Picardi is leaving his we-imagine-to-be-enormous chief brand officer job at Weight Watchers to run Playboy as chief brand officer and editor in chief. Picardi is an inspired choice to reinvent the OG girly mag for this Heated Rivalry moment. We’ll take a supersize popcorn with extra butter for this show.

She heard a pop, her knee buckled, and she crumpled in a heap. Her joint felt “creepy” and “gross,” she says, as if the lower leg had detached from her body.

The biggest issue (other than concussions) in the $40 billion business of youth sports is one no one talks about: the torn ACL. It’s happening in every country where kids play serious sports, and mostly to girls: Young female athletes are three to six times more likely than boys to tear an ACL—and it’s especially common among girls who play on year-round teams. Craig Welch, usually an environment writer at National Geographic, was motivated to investigate for the New York Times Magazine after an incredible 19 of his daughter’s current and former soccer teammates busted their knees. Was this some kind of mass hysteria? (Well, no: It’s hard to fake a floppy leg.) It’s partly due to improved diagnosis of ACL injuries, partly to “exploding participation in youth sports, especially among girls.” But it’s also largely because no one’s doing the simple 20-minute training regimen that has been proven for 25 years to cut the risk of this injury. One Spreaditor (the one who was told last week she is officially “knee replacement old”) has already scripted an email to the local rec department, asking them to make this required reading for all coaches.

Read it here.

We Are All Regina George

Hot on the heels of David bar cofounder Peter Attia’s national demotion in light of his well-documented Epstein palship, a new class-action lawsuit alleges that the media elite’s protein snack of choice are—kid you not—packed with more calories than they their packaging claims, causing devotees to gain weight. That’s right: The fashion flock has been housing Kälteen Bars. RUN FOR YOUR LIVES.

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Welcome, welcome, new (and faithful) readers!

A fresh crop of you arrived in Spreadlandia following last week’s news of our ASME nomination—a nomination that we reserve the right to mention early and often—and we are overjoyed to have you here. Hope you’re hungry!

If you are indeed new here, you might not know that we are an unofficial Amy Griffin ’zine. We’ve had our noses to the ground on the case of the billionaire memoirist and friend-of-Reese since a year ago, when Vogue published a strangely oblique excerpt of what would become Griffin’s bestselling 2025 memoir, The Tell—in which Griffin recounts horrific memories of rape by a middle school teacher, which she says she unearthed while on MDMA. In September, Elisabeth Egan and Katie Rosman of the New York Times poked significant holes in Griffin’s claims in this investigative feature. And soon thereafter, our own Maggie probed a specific piece of Griffin’s puzzle—whether MDMA can really help us uncover buried memories. (CliffsNotes: Probably not.)

After the Times exposé, we expected Griffin to abscond to one of her private islands. Instead, she stuck to a strict “keep on keepin’ on” strategy, adding the actual New York Liberty to her portfolio; hanging with our spiritual auntie Leanne Morgan; snuggling Gloria Steinem. (See this week’s Fortune story about Dr. Becky’s $34 million parent advice empire, backed by one Amy Griffin.) Right this minute, Amy is probably in some private Italian hospital suite, massaging her buddy Lindsey Vonn’s left foot.

Well, no. Right now she’s definitely in the boardroom of a crisis PR firm. (Right?)

Today, Rosman and Egan are back with the news that in California, a former middle school classmate has filed a lawsuit against Griffin alleging that The Tell’s stories of sexual assault aren’t Amy’s stories at all—but rather, her own. Our collective Spread mind exploded. Then we swept the bits into these seven talking points.

1. The Tell’s central thesis is that Amy’s identity as a “good girl” defined her whole existence. Evidence of this goodness begins and ends with that time she loaned a dress to another girl in middle school. Reading the book, we thought, again and again: Really—we’re still talking about one dress, one time? This lawsuit is filed by the girl who borrowed that dress. She is known in court papers as Jane Doe.

3. Besides Griffin, Jane Doe’s suit also names publisher Random House and The Dial Press—no great surprise—but also ghostwriter Sam Lansky, which we’re told is not unheard of in cases like this.

4. We continue to be amazed, astounded, just completely knocked out by the fact that this book was published without adhering to basic legal and ethical standards, like, um, giving the people you’re writing about a heads up—and that this is not regarded as some kind of historic publishing world malpractice. Folks, this thing went all the way to print, to Oprah, to Goop, to every “platform” you can think of without anyone ever reaching out to the former teacher Amy remembers raping her. He is known in the book (and now, on Reddit, Instagram, you name it) by a pseudonym, Mr. Mason, but is apparently easily identifiable in the smallish town of Amarillo, Texas, based on the book’s description.

5. The Tell is full of Amy’s highly specific, graphic mental images from her alleged attacks. Jane Doe has horrifying details of her own. When a teacher raped her, she says, the bandana he stuffed in her mouth “caught on her braces.”

6. Just, woah. Jane Doe says that though she was raped by a teacher, it is not the teacher described in The Tell. If this is true—and we have no evidence so far that says it is—the man Griffin calls “Mr. Mason” has been wrongly accused and likely exposed in his community in a way that can never be repaired.

7. And here’s the one that stopped us in our tracks. The suit alleges that in 2022, Jane Doe was contacted by someone claiming to be a talent agent and producer who “expressed an interest in using her life story” for film or television. She says she met with this person and in their conversations revealed her story of middle school sexual abuse, and that the person then ghosted her. (Weird on many levels: Why would she believe that someone wanted her story, out of the blue? Who is this person? Assuming they exist, were they hired by Griffin?) Three years later, The Tell comes out. According to Jane Doe, it features her own horrors—in someone else’s life story.

So where does this leave us? Despite the New York Times investigation, and what we also know about how MDMA works (and doesn’t), it was possible to doubt parts of The Tell, while still giving Griffin herself the benefit of the doubt. Maybe Amy had not intentionally misled anyone, but really believed her MDMA-induced visions, even without evidence to support them. Or maybe, despite the lack of any shred of proof—which we know can happen in rape cases, especially those that happened 30 years ago—it was true.

No one wants to doubt a victim, after all—least of all the kind of women who have publicly backed (and, um, been financially backed by) Amy Griffin.

But now? It’s time for receipts. Phone records. Questions must be answered. It’s hard to imagine this thing ever making it to trial—don’t deep-pocketed people usually settle before a case like this even makes it to court, to avoid the scandal and legal hassle? But if this one does, we’ll see if a jury will give Griffin the same benefit of the doubt that her powerful peers have been willing to.

Just the facts ma’am,

Rachel & Maggie

P.S. In much happier news, shout out to our Substack sister and phenom, Sari Botton, whose very deserving mag got the New York Times Styles treatment this weekend. “Everyone who’s alive and aging is an oldster,” she says. Count us in.

We want to grab a smoke with Charge Nurse Dana.

She was already our favorite American; one Spreaditor and her Spread-husband have been barking the words “Baby Jane Doe” at each other for weeks now. But in season two, episodes 7 and 8, of The Pitt, Charge Nurse Dana (aka Katherine LaNasa) taught us more about rape kits—the specific evidence gathered, how it works—than all the articles we’ve read on the subject put together. The story arc was written with input from the UCLA Health Rape Treatment Center and Pittsburgh Action Against Rape. “But what makes this storyline so notable is the way the writers foreground trauma without sensationalizing it,” writes the nonprofit Feminist on Instagram—indeed, you never hear the story of what happened, how, or by whom: “By withholding the details of the assault, the writers deny viewers the narrative cues we might normally rely on to validate trauma. Instead, the story remains anchored in the survivor’s agency, Nurse Dana’s compassion, and the exhaustion threaded through each step of evidence collection.” Anyone who has been violated deserves this kind of careful, methodical, loving care. And anyone who can handle watching these episodes should—no matter their gender.

Putting the I in Power

In their new post-Epstein profile of exiled power broker Peggy Siegal, New York’s Jessica Bennett and Katie Ryder didn’t need literary fireworks. Instead—with visual assists from portrait photographer Gilliam Laub and an obviously crackerjack photo researcher because dang the archival shots hit—they handed her a rope and a stool and left her to her own devices. Siegal, who for decades was considered the queen of connection among Hollywood and New York City’s entertainment industry elite, lost her standing in an instant in 2019 when she was revealed to be a social enabler of Jeffrey Epstein. But she remained cagey about the extent of their relationship, claiming she had attended a dinner or two and that, of course, there were film screenings. With the recent avalanche of released files, however, she’s got nowhere to hide, and evidenced by her participation in this story, nothing to lose: More than 5,000 emails between Siegal and Epstein have been made public, and Bennett and Ryder got the story from the pasture pet’s mouth. Though Siegal maintains that she was not privy to Epstein’s crimes involving underage girls, the story reveals an almost codependent friendship that ran on compliments, access, and connections. Also: lots of money. Epstein would open his wallet to support Siegal’s lifestyle, especially travel to power-studded locales, and Siegal would open her Rolodex to support his. It all adds up to a close-up of how these kinds of mutual, uh, backscratch relationships actually work at the highest levels of power. And a reminder of how satisfied we are with our own $39.99 ErgonomicLux.

Read “The Grande Dame of the Epstein Files” here.

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Spreaders,

A scene from the before times: In 2013, a couple retired to the South of France. They rented a yellow house with blue shutters. There was sun, cicadas, olive trees, a swimming pool. As soon as the grandchildren arrived, they would throw down their things and jump in. The husband cooked, he did DIY projects, he was athletic, he was tidy. Sometimes, friends would ask the wife, “Doesn’t he have a brother?”

Since we last met in Spreadlandia, 73-year-old Gisèle Pelicot—the real woman, not the media cut-out—has emerged via an “astonishing” and “extraordinary” memoir, A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides. We knew the facts: She thought she had a happy marriage, only to learn, 50 years into it, that her husband regularly drugged her to unconsciousness and invited dozens of men (found in a chat room called “Without Her Knowledge”) to come into that yellow house and rape her while she lay slack-jawed and motionless, snoring through it all on video. We knew that in 2024 she took the stunning step of waiving anonymity and demanded a public trial, which made her a feminist icon in France. What we didn’t know was her.

Now, stories about the book are coming out daily, with good reason. In a rich profile in British Vogue (pour one out for women’s magazines, which really can do this best—if somebody would just buy some goddamn advertising!), veteran Gaby Wood explores the story through the lens of the specific sexual mores of France—where swinging and BDSM are considered libertinisme, and until 2021 there was no legal age of consent—and where the beloved icon “Gisèle” has become a legal and cultural change agent.

Sophie Gilbert widens the aperture in the Atlantic, asking not just, “What kind of man does this?” but, what happens when men refuse to take on the shame, as Pelicot’s book title demands? Gilbert brings other stats to bear: In 2024, some 83,000 women and girls were killed intentionally, 60 percent of them by their intimate partner or a family member—that’s 137 a day. (vs. the 11 percent of male victims killed by an intimate partner or family member.) And this, from a sexual abuse expert: “A relationship is the best avenue to sexual offending. It is the path to love, trust, hope, and denial.”

How many rapists can there be in one tiny town, asks Lulu Garcia-Navarro, in the New York Times’ The Interview? Wood points out that many of the 51 defendants at Pelicot’s trial, ages 22 to 70—“Parrots, deplorable mouthpieces, violent, cowardly little people,” Pelicot calls them in her book—were “professional guardians of public life: nurses, firefighters, a prison warden, a journalist, a soldier.” Two thirds were fathers; most lived within 50 kilometers of her home. “They claimed to have neither the intention nor the awareness of committing rape.” Some said they were just being polite—doing what their host told them to do.

Unsurprisingly, Rachel Aviv goes the deepest, constructing a full psychological portrait in the New Yorker that pulls harder on threads that other stories mostly hint at: the devastating way this story has splintered Gisèle’s own family, estranging her from her daughter Caroline, who believes she too was drugged and raped by her father, and whose anguish Gisèle could not—or would not—publicly affirm in court. (Readers: he stored photos of Caroline asleep in underwear that she doesn’t recognize in a file labeled “my daughter naked.”) Aviv also explores the possibility of haunting generational incest, Gisèle’s son’s questionable paternity, and the tenuous, day-by-day reconciliation that may or may not hold.

Some of you told us that reading any one of these stories felt like too much to handle. Reading all of them, all together? Intense. We can’t un-learn that in the weeks after Dominique Pelicot knew police were onto him, he doubled down, raping Gisèle three times in less than one month. Or that one of the attackers’ female defense lawyers was suspended after posting a video on social media miming to “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” in reference to Gisèle.

You might start to wonder, in a world that seems to be crawling with Diddys, Epsteins, Weinsteins—and the powerful people who knew what they were up to and looked the other way—not just what is wrong with men, but what is wrong with humanity?

But here is what comes through in every story: Gisèle does not. She has a new boyfriend, a new life, and while she has no desire to forgive the man she refers to as Monsieur Pelicot, she has not emerged from her ordeal hating men. Wood observes in her “a palpable sense of freedom, and an almost unearthly transfer of optimism to those in her midst.”

Vive Gisèle!

Rachel & Maggie

Gay Issue(s)

On Tuesday night, when the gold medal-winning U.S. men’s hockey team trooped into the U.S. Capital to bend the knee for Trump’s State of the Union, we were sure that Heated Rivalry fever had broken or at least gone low-grade. (This is not what the show led us to believe about male hockey players!) Then New York dropped a perfect cover (Ken doll y Ken doll) with an even perfect-er cover line (“Now Kiss”), selling a story by E. Alex Jung that intellectually elevates the whole cultural frenzy: The piece digs into the concept of fujoshi, a Japanese term for women who love men who love men, interviews Ilya-and-Shane-obsessed ladies, and traces the proliferation of gay romance novels back to its fanfic origins and on to the slash fiction movement. It’s fun, it’s juicy, it scratches a real itch—and it nicely fills the gap left by our short-lived hockey fandom.

How, you might wonder, could that be only the second best gay cover of the week? Allow us to direct your attention to Wired, whose investigation into Silicon Valley’s supposed “gay tech mafia” did what we previously thought impossible: it out-New Yorked New York. The entire project is wild—and, we believe, could not have been executed at this level even a few years ago. In addition to the delightful and legitimately edgy cover, the story itself, by Zoe Bernard, slaps. So many of the quotes are so outrageous that we eventually stopped taking screenshots, but here’s a smattering: “Of course the gay tech mafia exists. This is not some Illuminati conspiracy theory. And you do not have to be gay to join. They like straight guys who sleep with them even more.” “Gays run this joint.” “If I were gay, I wouldn’t be having any trouble. That’s the whole thing with Silicon Valley these days. The only way to catch a break. Is if you’re gay.” “I mean, I wish Peter [Thiel] tried to groom me.” Bernard covers the hell out of the theory, interviewing dozens of gay movers and shakers and probing post-#MeToo ideas as well as the complex nature of gay culture. If this is what Katie Drummond’s Wired wants to be, well, that’s hot.

Is it perimenopause, or is it ADHD?

Two articles with exactly the same thesis and almost identical headlines—one in the Cut, one in the Atlantic—are here to frog-march us through the brain fog and force us to think, dammit, think! Between 2020 and 2022, the number of women ages 23 to 49 newly diagnosed with ADHD nearly doubled. This may have a hormonal culprit, but it could also be the result of historical under-diagnosis in girls… or it may be a case of current overdiagnosis across the board. Some broad takeaways: Not every midlife brain fog is created equal. If you’re blanking on words mid-sentence or don’t know how to spell something you’ve known for decades, that could be a sign of mild cognitive decline—a clinical stage that lies between healthy cognition and dementia. If you’re losing your keys or forgetting what you walked into a room for, that could be ADHD.

Read Yasmin Tayag’s brisk Atlantic explainer for just the facts, Jack.

Read Caitlin Moscatello’s more personal take in the Cut to hear from women whose brains felt like “a pinball machine” their whole lives, and who now wonder what could have been: If they’d been diagnosed with ADHD earlier, could they have gone to better schools, become doctors, dated differently?

George Santos was there. What could be sexier than that?

Lots of people wrote about the sex-positive fashion week partay thrown by the favorite magazine of the “womanosphere,” the dastardly misinformation-spewing Evie. (Founder Brittany Hugoboom—we’re still investigating whether that’s a real name—gets the Vanity Fair treatment by Marisa Meltzer here and pops up in WSJ mag here.) This party had a name, “Eros,” and at least one guest whose literal hair caught on fire? But don’t worry, conservatives. The issue, which will exist on zero newsstands, is supposed to bed-ucate married women only. Our favorite tidbit: Many of the influencers on site turned out to have no idea whose party they were at. They just got pinged by an app that senses influencers in the area—the force is strong, we guess—and invites them to parties.

Read “Pro-Trump journalists threw a sex-themed party. So did Pornhub. I went to both” in Slate here.

Read “Did Anyone at the Evie Magazine Fashion Week Party Read Evie Magazine?” in the Cut here.

Turns out “spread” is the most terrifying word in the English language.

As we witnessed our country’s potential (probable) next surgeon general stumble all over herself to avoid admitting that the flu vaccine keeps people from being hospitalized; watched measles cases tick up to 979 in South Carolina’s Spartanburg County; and read about this RFK Jr. ally / dangerous dipshit who wants his son to catch polio and measles—lines from Elizabeth Bruenig’s controversy-stirring Atlantic story kept floating before our eyes.

The controversy, for those who missed it: Bruenig employed an old-fashioned journalistic trick, constructing an imagined second-person scenario—not a real child, not her own family—to show how a measles death could happen circa 2026. Apparently the fictionalization factor was lost on readers including, embarrassingly, “a media ethicist and senior vice president at the Poynter Institute” and “a former World Health Organization communications director,” both of whom told the Washington Post they thought Bruenig was writing about her own family. (The story never said that nor, to our eyes, even implied it.) The Atlantic has since bumped up a warning label that probably should have been at the opening of the story all along—but can we get back to the point? This threat is R-E-A-L. Bruenig’s tale is dark enough for Grimm’s: it starts at a birthday party, where one infected, asymptomatic, unvaccinated child unwittingly showers guests with “microdroplets of mucus carrying the measles virus” like confetti from a popped balloon. We watch the droplets enter a little girl’s bloodstream, descending “upon her lungs, kidneys, tonsils, and spleen, down to the marrow of her bones.” We watch her mother take it in stride—colds are tough. From the pediatrician, to the hospital, to “becoming a data point in an outbreak”: this is a fast-slow horror-movie descent into an illness that shouldn’t even be happening. An illness we’re opting into.

Read “This is How a Child Dies of Measles” here.

Read “The Atlantic’s essay about measles was gut-wrenching. Some readers feel deceived” here.

U.S. Male, Not the Mall Chain

For those who identify as SMGs (Serious Magazine Geeks), Esquire legend Tom Junod has “finally” written a book: The Janes is an interlocking biography of Jane Goodall and Jane Fonda that explores themes of ambition among women born between the Great Depression and World War II. JUST KIDDING! Junod’s got a memoir about masculinity and fatherhood literally called In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means To Be a Man. On its occasion, Esquire took the bait, producing a Junodian profile of Junod by John Hendrickson. Read “Tom Junod Finally Reckons With What It Means to Be a Man” here.

We’re Doing It All Wrong

We rarely quote at such length, but allow us to make an exception for the lead of Gillian Morris’s recent New York Times Opinion essay advocating for living with friends in adulthood:

When my friend and business partner, Phil Levin, and his wife, Kristen Berman, were planning for their first child, they didn’t go looking for a single-family home in the suburbs.

Instead, in 2019, the couple and five of their friends moved into two adjacent buildings in Oakland, Calif. Now there are 20 adults, eight kids and six buildings at the Radish, as the complex is known, where a communal meal is cooked almost every night, everyone helps with child care and the hot tub is always warm.

Once Phil and Kristen’s kids are asleep at 7 p.m., they can text one of their 18 friends next door, pass the baby monitor to whoever is home and head out. No babysitter, no preplanning — just an impromptu date night, like in the pre-baby days. Their friends have known their kids since birth and are comfortable intervening if needed.

“People talk about the first year of having a kid as extraordinarily challenging. I feel like a bit of a jerk for saying this,” Phil wrote in a newsletter, “but it’s been much easier than advertised for us. And we think our living situation plays a huge role in this.”

Have you ever read anything more convincing about…anything? Because we haven’t. Who’s ready to go in on a condo building?

Read “Why I Never Want to Have My Own Place” here.

Hash, Rehash

Is there a chicer way to say “chewing the cud”? Because that’s clearly one of our favorite activities around here. While we’ve already declared our undying love for Lynne Ramsey’s recent film Die My Love (and for The Testament of Ann Lee—twice), we’d like to do so again via a recent episode of the Blank Check podcast, on which hosts Griffin Newman and David Sims and their guest, Vulture critic Alison Wilmore, spend—we kid you not—three hours dissecting both DML and Jennifer Lawrence’s career. The insights are smart, funny, and got one Spreaditor through an entire week of carpool. Listen here, or wherever.

Talk about a cushy assignment!

In the new Vogue—Chloe Malle’s first at the helm—Alice Gregory goes on a personal quest for…new pillows. Because it was Alice Gregory—a writer so talented we’d read her riff on drying cement—we stayed the course, and you know, what? We learned a few things, including that the best pillows cost $700 and that we were, heretofore unbeknownst to us, yearning for a highbrow, literary Wirecutter/Strategist recommender that takes us all the way from the Upper East Side to Soho (whew!): Have Gregory and Malle created a new subgenre of service journalism? Here’s hoping! Also a promising sign: the story is illustrated by Spread-approved painter Noelia Towers.

Read “Pillow Talk” via AppleNews here.

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

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Glorious Spreadfamiglia,

Sometimes we love a thing too much to keep that love to ourselves. Such is the case with The Testament of Ann Lee—officially the Spread’s favorite awards-bait movie of the 2025-2026 season, which (and this is so us) has not been nominated for any Oscars at all. The universe may have conspired against this inventive, lyrical, and thought-provoking piece of filmmaking, but we are here to give it its due. Somebody tell director Mona Fastvold and star Amanda Seyfried: We’re sure this vote of confidence from Spreadlandia is all the approval they need.

As you’ll see, we do go on (and on) about this one. If you make it all the way to the end—maybe pack a protein bar for the journey?—you will be rewarded by this week’s most excellent reads.

Hands to work, hearts to God,

Rachel & Maggie

Maggie: Rachel! It’s been so hard to save my thoughts on Ann Lee for today’s Spread. If I watch a movie and don’t process it with you immediately, did I even watch it?

Rachel: Well, we’re doing the Lord’s work and saving our hot takes for our readers! This movie sticks its neck out so far. It’s a really audacious movie to full-throatedly recommend. And yet, I want everyone in Spreadlandia to see it.

M: People talk about how this is a musical but really it’s a DANCE MOVIE.

R: It’s 1000% a dance movie. It’s basically the pre-, pre-, prequel to Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. It’s like if that A24 movie from 2015, The Witch, had a baby with Flashdance.

M: Somehow after J.Law’s Die My Love, Hamnet, and even If I Had Legs (which I thought was excellent), this is the movie that thrilled me this year. Probably because I really didn’t expect to love it. I thought the whole thing might be...chafing. But it’s so inventive and gorgeous. Fastvold somehow makes it feel like this is the one and only way this story could be told.

R: Is this where I admit that I’ve been listening to the soundtrack on Spotify?

M: Wow, your level of commitment never fails to astound. I read that Fastvold based the dance moves on paintings from the period and actual writings from the Shakers about their “ecstatic worship.” So while the very forceful choreography feels super modern (is it dated of me to say there’s a lot of, um, popping and locking going on?) I guess it’s also somewhat historically accurate?

R: Let’s have a sleepover and make up our own dance to “All Is Summer.” That’s the thing about this movie as a whole: it’s a faithful (in more ways than one) period drama that feels completely modern.

M: I’ve been thinking so much about “ecstatic worship,” and how the Shakers experienced transcendence through moving their bodies. Don’t laugh but it made me think of Taryn Toomey’s “The Class”—that culty exercise class. And about how the dance floor is the place I’ve come closest to… I don’t want to say God… but certainly to some higher collective energy. Ecstatic is the word. Maybe the Shakers weren’t religious zealots after all: They just liked to boogie?

R: That’s what’s so fascinating to me about Ann Lee herself: She liked to boogie, she didn’t want to fornicate — boom, that’s the religion! The movie takes this woman who literally believes she is the second coming of Christ SO SERIOUSLY. And also neutrally enough that we can see the seams of her psychological trauma that steered her down this path.

M: This is an unexpected entry in the list of recent films about the brutality of motherhood. Readers: Ann Lee lost four children, some in childbirth and some as infants. After which she had a religious epiphany (boy, I had to fight not to put that word in quotes!) and decided that all sex, even in marriage, was a sin that kept humans at a remove from God. Which is a pretty good way to make sure you’re never going to have to suffer the loss of another child. Rachel, on the cinematic spectrum of “(white) motherhood is hell,” from most gruesome to least, how would you order Hamnet, If I Had Legs, Die My Love, and Ann Lee?

R: Oh great question! Well the rub for Ann Lee is that motherhood is hell, and Motherhood is sublime — or divine. Her followers refer to her as Mother Ann. There’s a song about 20 minutes in that’s extremely graphic in its portrayal of these births and losses. I closed my eyes through the whole thing: Thanks to Spreader Jesse B. for tipping me off.

M: I failed to get the memo from Jesse B.! I had to race home and do some serious googling, I couldn’t believe that the Shakers really never had sex. Never? The obsolescence of the community is built in. That seems like a serious design flaw (har, har) for a sect that was so into design. But it’s true: No babymaking. They only recruited through adoption and conversion. (Trumpers would hate that!) And now there are three living Shakers. Literally, three. Living in a town in Maine.

R: Interesting that they never address that fact in the movie — that they’re not making more members. I guess it would have been too obviously expository? Do you think they should have confronted it or better left as, duh, subtext?

M: I think it works. Fastvold had to know her viewers would be googling before they even got out of the theater. I had to resist the urge to research in the middle of the movie! Can I throw another hot take your way? Sexual frustration can really lead to some good lookin’ furniture.

R: Visual ASMR: Them building the commune! The making of the furniture! Wow.

M: The shared tasks! The chairs on the walls! The adult-size cradles for the sick and aged! If anything, this was Container Store porn. “A place for everything and everything in its place.”

R: That’s our new catchphrase at home with our children; not sure why they’re not joining us in song. OK, Maggie: This was the most original movie of the year, and yet it got a total of ZERO Oscar nominations. What do you make of this?

M: I am mystified. It didn’t seem to have much of a publicity machine behind it, relative to other Oscar bait. Like when I came home and wanted to read EVERYTHING about it, there wasn’t that much. (I did like this piece in Smithsonian Magazine about Shaker design. 🤓)

R: Remember that Fastvold’s husband and writing partner, Brady Corbet, was absolutely insufferable on stage when he won awards for The Brutalist last season. There are theories about why The Brutalist cleaned up and Ann Lee got blanked—one of which is that the world hates women.

M: Natalie Portman sounded off on how this movie and others by women directors failed to get their due this year. Appreciate you, Natalie. Compare this to more “auteurish” fare (by men) from the recent past, whether it’s Anora or Bradley Cooper’s Maestro. This, to me, blows them out of the water.

R: I have to hope—because I don’t want to have to shun the Oscars like I’m a Shaker and they’re the devil’s dance of doin’ it— that the problem is just that not enough people saw it. Apparently Searchlight didn’t pick it up for distribution until October. I’ve read that their big Oscar bet was Is This Thing On? A fine movie that’s just not Oscars-y at all. When they realized that, they scrambled and grabbed Ann Lee. Too late.

M: I bet Natalie wishes she got to play Ann. But thank goodness it was go-for-broke Amanda Seyfried. Now officially the Spread’s favorite actress.

R: I literally lol’d when Christopher Abbott strode onscreen to play Abraham, Ann’s toxic husband. That guy just cannot quit playing bad boyfriend types—it’s definitely “in conversation” with his body of work, to put it lightly.

M: I totally forgot he was Charlie from Girls.

R: Hell, he played the same character two years ago in Poor Things. In Ann Lee, he says something to the effect of “You are wife now” to a prostitute he’s been getting it on with because Ann is both above and too traumatized by sex. I was like, wow, just rolls off the tongue!

M: Wives: we’re pretty interchangeable. Rachel, do you think we’re overselling this movie for our gentle readers? I mean, as delighted as I was by it, I don’t think it’s everyone’s cup of tea.

R: Overselling it? Nah. Our readers are hearty and creative and brilliant. (You’re welcome to join me in lavishing praise on them to bait them into loving it as much as we do — that strategy would clearly work on us!)

M: Oh yes, and don’t forget beautiful.

R: GORGEOUS!

M: One question before we go—and I don’t think it’s a big spoiler. In one scene Ann spritzes her newborn in the face with breastmilk that I swear is coming from Seyfried’s actual breast. For a second, I thought: Wait, are we saying Ann Lee’s babies died because she didn’t know how to breastfeed them!? Did you have that thought? Please help.

R: Hmmm. If the movie was saying that, would that be pro breastfeeding lobby or against? I’d love to ask Fastvold about that. I think that was probably shorthand for this shit is hard—can you imagine doing it without modern medicine and resources?

M: I think Seyfried’s face in the photo below sums up my thoughts on that.

We’ve just applied for the vanity plate KEEPWWRD….

…in the states of New York, California, and North Carolina (because they’re the only states that allowed eight characters and we couldn’t figure out how to pull it off with only seven, OK?). And once our registration goes through, everyone on the highway from sea to shining see will know what we’re talking about: Keeping W magazine weird (in a fashion-y way, of course), especially their Great Performances issue! Duh! We digress: This season’s pre-Oscar portfolio, photographed by Tyrone Lebon and styled by EIC+ Sarah Moonves, is a classic of the form, with wild and woolly images of, say, Renate Reinsve bleeding profusely from the head and someone who purports to be A$AP Rocky wearing a full-body mascot costume of some kind. Also: Tessa Thompson serving; Jeremy Stern going method in every actor’s dream role (Little Bunny Foo Foo); Stellan Skarsgård in drag; Kate Hudson in a sea of imposters; Chase Infiniti staying dry; and Emma Stone—who we’ll begrudgingly admit was excellent in Bugonia; we’re sick of her!—dragging (?) a (??) body (???); among others. And though she was blanked by the Academy, our beloved Amanda Seyfried wins big here in the role of actor acting.

1. “Her ability to tolerate pain is her greatest asset,” said no one about your Spreaditors ever.

Cramps, dehydration, 30-mile-an-hour wind gusts, minus-21 wind chills. Legs numb. Lungs exploding. Contacts frozen to your eyeballs. Vision turning… pink? In a totally fascinating even-if-you’re-not-a-sports-person New York Times Magazine profile of Jessie Diggins—the greatest American cross country skier of all time, male or female—Reid Forgrave digs into the art, headspace, technique, and physiology of a sport that tests the upper limits of human endurance. The whole thing can basically be summed up in two words that we tend to associate with childbirth: pain cave. Still, it is moving to learn that the greatest pain Diggins has ever experienced has been her struggle with an eating disorder—and to marvel at what she’s able to do with her body despite it. Does she race the way she does because she’s driven by demons? “No,” she says. “Because I’m free. Because I’m happy and joyous in my everyday life, I can put myself through all that pain. But if you’re already in pain, you can’t do that.”

Read it here before Diggins competes tomorrow at 7 a.m. ET in the women’s 10 K freestyle. This time, she’ll be skiing with bruised ribs that make it hard to breathe. Fun!

2. He Got It From His Mama

We’ve heard people call him “Zohran the Great,” and lesser life forms call him “Zohran the Moron.” But ever since now-mayor Mamdani entered the national chat, we’ve almost exclusively called him “Mira Nair’s son.” Because: Can you believe he is Mira freakin’ Nair’s actual son? Thankfully, this week, in New York, the story we’ve been waiting for: A profile of filmmaker and Mamdani “producer” (her term—cute, right?) Mira Nair by none other than Rebecca Traister. The whole portrait is lovely but we’ll leave you with this quote from agent Bart Walker: “When I think about where Zohran comes from, I think about how Mira made history…there was no woman auteur from India having films distributed in the U.S. to a general audience. There was no Mira before Mira, no precedent for her; she blazed her path with talent, charm, and will in superabundance. Sound familiar?”

Read “The Mayor’s Mother” here.

3. Bring forth the frozen taquitos

In a week that saw the downfall of one longevity bro—with a few others perched in his wake, we can only hope—an uprising of lady doctors pushing back at the credibility and the intentions of these self-appointed swamis, and Mike Tyson fat-shaming “fudgy” American bodies as he pledges allegiance to RFK Jr, it turns out the most feminist thing we read was an op-ed defending (gasp!) Big Food. “We Shouldn’t Want to Eat Like Our Great-Great Grandparents,” write Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel N. Rosenberg, pointing out that back when we only had “real food” to eat, “malnutrition was rampant,” anemia was all the rage, and folks were walking around with goiters caused by iodine deficiency. As we see it, a defense of “Starbucks egg white bites, Trader Joe’s palak paneer or frozen microwavable vegetables” is a defense of the people most likely to take on the burden (and the paranoia, guilt, and expense) of the perfectionistic eating at which the cults of MAGA and Gwyneth intersect: Women, specifically mothers. These processed foods may not be perfect, but they’re helping us get the job done, people.

Read it here.

4. She Took It Into Her Own Hands

Is the increasing availability and cultural acceptance of medically-assisted death for the terminally ill—“a suicide approach that is advertised as a dignified way to alleviate pain”—making it easier for people suffering from mental illness to find a way out? In the Atlantic, Elizabeth Bruenig tells the story of Eileen Mihich, a 31-year-old (who was in deep distress but not medically ill) who checked into a 4-star hotel in Portland, Oregon, last March and two days later was found dead next to prescription pill bottles and a pamphlet: “Step-by-Step Instructions for Taking Aid in Dying Medications.” Today, twelve states and Washington, D.C., allow doctors to prescribe lethal dosages of medication. The drugs are hard to get: many pharmacies refuse to sell them. But if Mihich found a way around the regulations, others could too, raising questions about what kinds of pain “qualify” for assisted suicide—and who should get to decide their own fate.

Read “It Was Too Easy For Her To Kill Herself” here.

5. ♬ The best part of wakin’ up is Folgers in your cup perusing the table of contents of the new New Yorker. ♬

For those of us who find ourselves humming that little jingle on Monday mornings, we got quite an eye-opener of a headline this week: “The Babies Kept in a Mysterious Los Angeles Mansion.” Was this a horror story? A head fake of some kind? Was the “Reporter at Large” slug a typo, when they really meant “fiction”? Only a couple hours into the workday, we began receiving texts: “Have you read the babies story?!?!?!” “I’m afraid to read it!” “Do the babies get hurt?” And so forth and so on. In the name of service journalism, we read it and lived to tell. The gist: Staff writer Ava Kaufman’s at once sweeping and exacting story about a pair of Chinese parents, Guojun Xuan and Silvia Zhang, who moved to Southern California and set up their own surrogacy agency with the sole purpose of producing babies to make a “large family”—at least 26 so far. The 13,000-word rollercoaster is extremely complicated because it involves the couple’s layered biography, motives, and brushes with the law; a host of surrogates; and several different states, all with different laws. Lots of threads! On top of that, Kaufman weaves in the legal and social context around surrogacy and surrogacy tourism, and sensitively acknowledges that while it’s the surrogacies gone wrong that make the news, thousands of lovely and trusting surrogacy arrangements succeed every year. The story is a feat. Also there is child abuse involved. And it’s a lot. If you’re feeling fragile, consider this your permission to skip!

Read it here.

And one to grow on: That’s Boss

We thought The Devil Wears Prada 2 trailer was exciting. Ha! We now know it was but an amuse-bouche for this week’s New York Times joint interview by Jessica Testa with newly coronated American Vogue workhorse editor Chloe Malle and Anna Wintour, which, well, hot damn. Especially in this Diet Prada clip—which has sparked a battery of topnotch comments as usual—Malle is, compared to Boomer queen Wintour, basically a Millennial Norma Rae in Altuzarra.

Watch the whole interview here, or whet your appetite here.

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Cherished Spreaditarians,

For more than a year now, our nipples have been hurting—you know, metaphorically. And since Sunday night introduced us to Chappell Roan’s pioneering nipple-ring drapery, they’ve ouched in an additional, more specific way. With gusto, you might say. (We too have heard about a MacGyver-level operation involving chewing gum and something called “power mesh,” but still: ow.) Jill Lepore’s personal story in this week’s New Yorker is a balm for all of it—an escapist Lanolin cream for a specific kind of 2026 ache. The essay is headlined “Living in Tracy Chapman’s House,” but that’s metaphorical to some degree, too: We learn early on that this “isn’t a story about Tracy Chapman, it’s a story about a house,” a six-bedroom duplex in Somerville’s Davis Square— “the Paris of the eighties”—that housed up to a dozen housemates at a time. (Chapman, who like Lepore went to Tufts, did live in the house but the two never overlapped.) Lepore creates a magnificent portrait of a gaggle of misfits trying to figure it out after college as the Reagan simmered, “trying so hard not to be normal,” and “yearning, yearning, yearning.” She writes, “I’ve been told that it’s the work of young adulthood to learn that you are in charge of your own life….but [that’s] for sure wackier and more fun in a house with a bunch of other misfits especially if at least one person knows how to make a decent frittata.” It’s a lovely way to spend a half hour, and after years of admiring Lepore, we can now say we are fully in love with her.

We’ve got a whole mess of reads for you today—from heavy duty to feather light. Please stick with us, and if you haven’t become a paid subscriber yet, there’s no time like the present.

Rachel & Maggie

P.S. Our hearts go our to our compatriots at the Washington Post today, where some 300 reporters were laid off, including—according to this raw and tearful video posted by longtime Spreadfave —anybody who created “arts coverage that doesn’t involve Trump.” The features section? “Decimated,” she says. Another dark day for journalism. And a good day for whoever’s smart enough to snap up Jada!

Suffer the Little Children

In recent years, as MAGA has coopted and twisted the basic tenets of Christianity to suit its own purposes—nothing new about that, we know—your Spreaditors, who to varying degrees were both raised Christian, have wondered: Where did the good believers go? By which we mean, the progressives, the intellectuals, the people who support the real fundamentals of that faith, which by the way map pretty exactly onto the values of progressive Democrats? We’re talking about kindness, forgiveness, loving thy neighbor. The stuff we’re seeing people do in Minneapolis every day now, as their mayor pointed out in this interview (of course, they’re caring for their neighbor because that neighbor is under attack by their own government.) The stuff Emily Witt sees teachers and volunteers doing to feed, transport, and educate the destabilized “School Children of Minneapolis.” Anyway, it feels like it’s been a long time since we’ve seen anything more than a glimmer of a better Christianity in the mainstream discourse. But we saw it last week, in Texas Judge Fred Biery’s clever and finely-wrought 500-word decision freeing 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father. (The New York Times helpfully decoded the decision here—to be clear, we would never have gotten all the way here on our own!) Usually when court documents include Bible verses, we get itchy. But when Biery ended on John 11:35, “Jesus wept,” we wept, too. Elsewhere in Texas, we have 36-year-old James Talarico—yes, OK, he once told Joe Rogan he should run for president—who is earning a master of divinity degree at seminary while running for US Senate. That and Talarico opposes the legislation requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in classrooms. And he supports universal healthcare and LGBTQ+ inclusion (he says God is “nonbinary”). And and in this January interview with Ezra Klein, he points out that abortion is never mentioned in the Bible—so why would we foist this “Christian” anti-abortion belief upon people? (On that topic, he also pointed out to Rogan that before she gave birth to Jesus, God asked Mary for her consent, an important detail of the Christmas story if you ask us!) Allow JT to flip the script: “Everyone is religious,” he told EK. Including Trump, who is “very faithful” to the religion of “money and power and status.”

A Not-So-Modest Proposal

Whether it’s the ASMEs or the American Gastroenterological Association or another group—but please don’t make Katie Couric add this to what’s certainly her already lengthy to-do list—somebody needs to give Sam Anderson an award for his New York Times Magazine “letter of recommendation” for colonoscopies. It takes a lot of gall and poetic talent to recast the most maligned and invasive routine cancer-screening procedure as a short vacation, and Anderson does just that, calling his “the most fun I’ve had since the sunniest summer days of his childhood” and selling even the pre-colonoscopy prep as “as liberating as a spa day.” If this doesn’t save lives, we don’t know what will.

Read it here.

…. and in other media news, Puck’s Lauren Sherman has joined Bari Weiss’s merry band of hot-taking CBS contributors, along with a bunch of Substackers—cookbook author , chef , Gen-Z whisperer —and a host of longevity bros. Well, minus Peter Attia, who (oops!) lost his gig faster than you can say “Centenarian Decathlon” due to his starring and exceedingly yucky role in the latest batch of Epstein Files. (Read “The Longevity Influencer Who Went Into Withdrawal Without Jeffrey Epstein” in the Atlantic here.)

From the mailbag: “This episode really Spreads.”

In a reprieve from the drumbeat of Venezuela and Minneapolis content, the Ezra Klein Show this week gear-shifted into Full Spread Mode™ with Art of Gathering author Priya Parker in the seat. It’s a conversation between friends—Ez and Pri want us to know that they have gathered socially multiple times, OK??—about the shifting definition of hosting, why we as contemporary Americans aren’t naturals at this whole community thing, religion and togetherness, how to actually gather as adults with young children, and why gathering is inherently political. Parker’s north star for any gathering, she says, is that it has a “disputable purpose,” meaning that not only does it not have to be everyone’s cup of tea but it shouldn’t be everyone’s cup of tea. Spreadcon 2026, anyone? Bonus: While we generally don’t participate in “video podcasts”—kind of like we don’t do jumbo shrimp or deafening silence—it’s worth peeping this convo if only for Parker’s super chic dress. (If any of y’all can ID the designer, you know where to find us!)

Listen to “Is Your Social Life Missing Something? This Is For You” here or (just this once) watch here.

Keviiiiiiiiiin!

After we lost Diane Keaton (and yes we do mean we, personally, lost her), the sudden passing of Catherine O’Hara—right when she was swooping into another amazing phase of her career!—was almost too much for us. You’ve read the tributes. You’ve watched the clips. But have you seen this Vogue video from a few years back, where she walks us through her looks, from going shopping for Delia Deetz’s wild black-and-white wardrobe, to the Etsy crown made of zip ties she wore as Moira Rose on Schitt’s Creek? These women! Incredible. Indelible.

Allow Mother Ann to Enlighten You

We’d pay good money to hear Priya Parker’s review of The Testament of Ann Lee, the startlingly original musical biopic about the founder of the Shakers—a religious cult that touted celibacy in combination with ecstatic, communal dance. Set in the 18th-century, the movie, which was directed by Mona Fastvold (who co-wrote both this and The Brutalist with her, uh, verbose husband Brady Corbet), mashes up Shaker hymns and new songs as well as period choreography with modern moves, and stars Amanda Seyfried—who was robbed of an Oscar nom—as a British woman who after losing four children believes she’s the second coming of Christ. (We never said this one was light!) As Lee’s husband, Abraham, Christopher Abbott continues his career-long run of bad-boyfriend types, and as her brother, Lewis Pullman (son of Bill) demonstrates why he’s Kaia Gerber’s chosen one. It all adds up to a deeply moving old-world fantasia that’s risen to the number one spot on at least one Spreaditor’s 10 Best list. Get thee to the theatah!

Under his eye.

The Spreadie Award for best use of ChatGPT this week goes to Substacker , for serving up this pitch-perfect image of Usha doing her duty as a wife and a patriot (and aren’t they the same thing, after all?) by producing baby No. 4. To anybody who was holding out hope that this one-time progressive lawyer would some day come to her senses, this pregnancy—so beautifully aligned with a pronatalist agenda: the first sitting second lady ever to give birth!—says, “Nope! We good.” And if you thought conservative pols would shy away from the horribly crass phrase “Trump Bump” (at least in reference to their own wives and progeny)—that’s also a hard no, as Senate candidate and one-time Project 2025 architect Paul Dans demonstrated with this post featuring his pregnant (AGAIN) wife Mary Helen Bowers1 at the Melania premier.2

Read more

Spreados,

If you have trouble with blood, you might want to sit down for this one. Yesterday on the Cut, Brooke Nevils delivered a startling and powerful account of her #MeToo ordeal with Matt Lauer—the one that finally caused NBC to shit-can the highest paid man ever to work in morning TV in the fall of 2017. Nevils has processed what happened to her when she was a junior producer by writing Unspeakable Things1, a book about sexual harassment and assault from which this essay is excerpted (it’ll be published Tuesday; you can preorder it here). In it, she’s unflinchingly honest about what never came to light: She alleges Lauer anally raped her when they were working at the Winter Olympics in Sochi. In her account, what was widely referred to as Lauer’s workplace “affair” was not an affair at all, but something infinitely worse and far more brutal; Lauer comes across as no mere Mitch Kessler, abusing his power with underlings, but a cruel and careless predator. Now, Nevils details what was going through her head at the time, and the context she’s brought to it over the past eight years—a rare combination that moves forward the #MeToo narrative as a genre. “I was supposed to use a hashtag and call myself a survivor,” she writes. “I didn’t feel at all like a survivor. I felt like an idiot, set up to fail from the beginning.” The most gutting scene of the piece isn’t the bloody one—though that’s a doozy—but a phone call during which she comes clean to her mother.

With the men of #MeToo gradually coming back out into the light—not so cancelled after all, it turns out, in the era of the manosphere—this is a reminder that some deserved far worse than they got. And should never return to our good graces.

Curious to see what Meredith Viera will have to say: Nevils cites her as a mentor and says Viera was at the bar with her that night in Sochi, before things with Lauer went south. No doubt this book’s ripple effect will be wide.

Rachel & Maggie

P.S. We’re lifting the paywall in a week that feels like everybody could use a little extra love. (We know we sure could.) Free subscribers: See how good it feels to get the fulllll Spread?

P.P.S. ❤️s are for [Spread] lovers.

The Dystopian Nightmare Next Door

There are of course endless important and worthy articles one could read right now about the travesty that’s happening in Minneapolis. For our money, Minneapolis native Charles Homans offers the most comprehensive view in the New York Times Magazine. With both ICE officers and the protestors who are keeping watch for them prowling the city, fueling fear and paranoia; immigrants holed up in their apartments for months on end, afraid to so much as look out the window; and police defending their own positions—it’s a thoughtful and many-angled portrait of a powder keg ready to blow. Read “Watching America Unravel in Minneapolis” here.

A strange swipe of the claw

Airmail sicced Jessa Crispin on the literary trio of memoirist Emily Gould; her author husband, Keith Gessen; and Keith’s sibling, New Yorker writer turned New York Times columnist M. Gessen. These are the kind of industry dots we love to see connected, but the story’s raison d’etre is fuzzy at best, and its tone mean-spirited from the get-go. All in a day’s work for Crispin, the irritable Bookslut founder whom Alexandra Jacobs has characterized as “the Patti Lupone of literary critics.” With Gould currently enjoying her most likable era yet as the writer of the New York’s Dinner Party newsletter, and M. Gessen cranking out important work at Opinion—and a lot of real shit to worry about these days—it would seem the lit world’s appetite for snark on these three is pretty low. Judging by the “meh” comments on Airmail’s IG post about the story: a swing and a miss? Read “Keeping Up with the Gould-Gessens” here.

“Middle-age divorce is an act of optimism.”

Recommended by Spreader Lindsay M., Gabfest Reads’ recent episode, an interview of author Curtis Sittenfeld by journalist Emily Bazelon, is indeed a 10 out of 10 on the Spready Scale™. Halfway through the brisk half-hour conversation about marriage, the passage of time, and how perspective changes events—as pegged to Sittenfeld’s recent short story collection, Show Don’t Tell (buy it here)—Sittenfeld reveals (blurts out?) that her own marriage has ended, and the divorce is a week out from being finalized. It’s the first time in all the press she’s done about the marriage-centric book that Sittenfeld has acknowledged that her own union went bust, informing the work’s themes, and it tone-shifts the conversation in surprising and rewarding ways.

Listen to “Troubled Marriages and the Clarity of Middle Age” here.

Stacked!

A couple weeks ago, Spread-beloved beauty queen Linda Wells filed a little explainer on the sudden ubiquity of peptides for Harper’s Bazaar. We raced to read it, but the subtext—that buying rando shots off the internet is commonplace, everybody’s doing it, ain’t no thang!—left us itching for a deeper dive. Enter Ezra Marcus’s New York feature, which jacknifes into the dark-gray underbelly of the unregulated and booming peptides market, powered by US compounding pharmacies and Chinese factories. Retatrutide, the Ozempic one-upper we wrote about a couple weeks ago, is just one of the “not for human use” injectable proteins flying off conveyer belts, alongside peps for sexual performance, weight loss, stamina, clarity, energy, muscle mass, pain relief, etc. These shots are so rampant and so powerful, “wild west” doesn’t even come close. As one superuser put it to Marcus: “If people got super-sick this next year, I wouldn’t be surprised.” And well, yeah, if we feel this dizzy from just reading about them…

Read “Life on Peptides Feels Amazing” here.

Hollywood’s High Priestess

We had recategorized Chloe Zhao as an icon of sheer joy after that clip of the Hamnet cast busting a move to Rihanna went viral (even tried to recreate the moment in our own homes, with a significantly smaller cast.)2 Last weekend’s “The Interview” brought us back down to earth—or rather to the profound and mystical headspace that Zhao occupies. The still-somehow-only-43-year-old director tells David Marchese she’s studying to be a death doula, because she’s paralyzingly afraid of her own death. Her thoughts on loss and mourning are a rejoinder of sorts to the “grief porn debate” (yes, it’s become a debate!) around Hamnet.

Funny enough, she collaborated with Jessie Buckley the exact same way we make you a new Spread every week:

“In the morning, she would do fever writing about her dreams and then would pick some music, and as soon as I got to set, I would put the music on repeat so the whole set was harmonized to the vibration she wanted. Other than a conversation about which setup we want to do, we just go in there and do it. When she let out that very guttural scream of grief [in the scene of Hamnet’s death], that was not planned. But I believe it didn’t just come from her; it came from the collective. When that happens, it’s the most exciting thing for me as a director, because there is no way any of us could have thought of that. That is truth happening in the moment.”

Read “Chloe Zhao is Yearning to Know How to Love” here.

More “heavy lifting” propaganda, and other stories.

We know, we know. But for those who have read Lisa Miller for years, her story about learning to love weight lifting at 62 was an eye-opener (and not necessarily because of its fitness revelations). Who knew that Miller—who on the page has always seemed ultra refined and buttoned up—was so…rugged!? “Long afternoons of hill sprints”? Backcountry skiing with igloo-building and sleeping”? Lisa, we’re intimidated in a whole new way. Read it here.

Speaking of writers we love pulling back the curtain: In a moving post, Tina Brown celebrates her son George’s “fucking 40th.” It’s fairly common these days to read the narratives of mothers of young children with special needs. Brown is writing—with characteristic brio but also such rich tenderness—about providing for those needs into adulthood. It made us love “Georgie” and his highly specific party cheese plate demands (you’ll see what we mean), but also added new depth to our longterm crush on Tina. Read it here.

Maybe Claude can sort it out?

The “latest episode in the perpetual soap opera that is the artificial intelligence industry, where young billionaires clash over professional and personal relationships as they vie for money, power and supremacy in the field”? Mira and Barret and Luke and Sam (Altman), aka the ballad of Thinking Machines Lab, has all the components of a cinematic tech-world implosion, including a smoking-hot female lead (tacky of us to point out? Maybe, but no less accurate for it), bonking colleagues, billions at stake, and of course, as a backdrop, the rise of evil machine overloads threatening to take over humanity. This tale was reported in the Times and the Journal this week, but is still awaiting its juicy and highly option-able Vanity Fair unspooling.

Poison Penned

Were you able to muster the fortitude to get through Texas Monthly’s haunting “The Baby Whisperer”—a feature about an at-home daycare director who was arrested for the death of one of her charges that we wrote about this fall? Regardless, we recommend Ben Taub’s sophisticated new New Yorker story, which hinges on a different tragedy: an infant deemed to have ingested fatal levels of codeine via breast milk. This one is no tawdry yarn but a crime thriller set in the world of toxicology and centering on its most prestigious research stars.

Read it here.

You know we’ve reached peak fibermaxxing…

When the Rancho Gordo Bean Club ($200 a year) has 30,000 members—and 29,000 people on the waitlist. Reader, we’re talking about beans. Workhorse beans. Eye of the Goat beans. Beans with the spots of a cow. Beans striped like zebras. And something called Good Mother Stallards that “look like some kind of mishmash of pintos, cranberry beans and the Milky Way at dusk.” Read it here.

We’d pay good money for a newsletter about movie and TV interiors.

Does this already exist? If it does, dear readers, please point us in the right direction. In the last few months alone, we have googled the exact shade of peacock blue in Shiv Roy’s house on All Her Fault and the lighting scheme in Cate Blanchett’s dreamy London home in Disclaimer—and both times, come up basically empty. We already know that we’re gonna have questions about that pink couch in Margot’s Got Money Troubles. Curbed gives us sweet satisfaction with “Sentimental Value Is an Excellent Lamp Movie” here.

Elsewhere in interiors, Jolie Kerr coins a term that we’ll be mulling for a while, “aspirational clutter.” The kind you can’t let go of because it represents the person you wish you were; the items that “quietly create guilt and overwhelm and stall progress when they pile up.” Think: That Peloton you’re hanging damp laundry on, the Artist’s Way workbook on your bedside table that never got around to changing your life. Read it here.

You’re telling us this table is not a cry for help?

Pity the good folks over at Architectural Digest, whose good manners (and, we’re just spitballing here—high dose of beta blockers?) led them to describe, with a straight face, a certain furniture designer as “a former architectural designer at Yeezy and now a designer in her own right” when really that person is Bianca Censori, as in “Bianca-blink-twice-if-you’re-not-O.K.“ (Naomi Fry) and one half of “the most attention-thirsty couple in Hollywood” (Vulture.) To date, Bianca’s biggest credits include exhibiting the least supportive sports bra in history and maybe leading the “redesign” project/destruction of Ye’s $57.3 million Tadeo Ando beach house. But sure, AD, let’s treat her work with the seriousness it so richly deserves. Read “Bianca Censori’s Bio Pop Furniture Debuts a New Kind of Feminist Critique” here.

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Sensational Spreadsters,

One Spreaditor to her family this week: “I cook every morsel of food that gets eaten in this house!” Another Spreaditor to her partner last week: “I do every inch of admin around here!” Folks, not only are we doing emotional and domestic labor like it’s going out of style, we also stand ready at all times to do a tight 10 on the topic. Same as most of you, we’re guessing. But before we collectively storm out of our kitchens like Norma Rae, Brooding columnist Kathryn Jezer-Morton would like us to pause and consider what it would really look like if our households were more egalitarian. If labor in the house was equally distributed, would everything else be, too? In other words: Would mom still be the boss?

In “Moms, How Much Power Are You Willing to Give up?,” KJM flips the script on well-worn concepts including “weaponized incompetence” and the “mental load” of motherhood. “Whether we want to or not, we run shit. We may not have the most agency in how we use our time (in that regard, according to virtually every time-use survey ever published, dads are way ahead of us), but what we get in exchange for that agency is power.” It doesn’t always feel like “power” to be the one mincing 15 cloves of garlic for a fancy meal that your entire family summarily rejects, or to be the one standing by at 9am on the dot on the day that summer camp registration opens A WEEK AFTER CHRISTMAS. Nevertheless, most heterosexual families are hierarchical, with moms as top dog, largely holding “the power to decide how, and when, and under what circumstances things get done and the power to complain, to condemn, to judge.” Jezer-Morton explicitly states that her point is not whether this power is a good thing or a bad thing, she’s just saying—it’s a thing. Could we really handle having our opinions downgraded to one more voice in a collective?

Jezer-Morton is in good company this week, with the mythical “good mother” returning as a hot topic. (But then, when is she not?) In the Cut, Samantha Mann sets herself the Olympic-level goal of not yelling at her kid. “Here I am, demanding respect, gentleness, and emotional control while not exuding any of it,” Mann writes, describing a not-unusual outburst, followed by the inevitable “post-rage hangover…the guilt that I have felt more anger toward this tiny person I love than toward those who have actually harmed me.” The solution she devises is—wait for it—creating 30-day behavior charts for herself and for her son. His reads, “Following Directions and Safe Body!” After 30 check marks, she promises, he’ll get to buy a longed-for toy. Her chart is, “No Yelling.” We never do find out if she got her reward after 30 check marks (it’s supposed to be a facial; man, does she earn it), but we do learn that practicing the basic-but-excruciating rule of staying silent when her temper flares helps her build in a self-regulation window to get control over disproportionate reactions.

Meanwhile, Rebecca Mead gives us a classic New Yorker book report on not one but four new additions to the “good mother/bad mother” bookshelf of life. We could tell you what each of them is about, but then we’d just be the poor woman’s Rebecca Mead, so instead we wrote terribly inaccurate and mildly insulting book blurbs that follow the rules of our kids’ new party game, Poetry for Neanderthals: players must describe a complicated concept using only one-syllable clues, or risk getting bonked on the head by a large inflatable caveman stick. In no particular order:

1. A Woman’s Work: Reclaiming the Radical History of Mothering, by British historian Elinor Cleghorn.

Neanderthal says: In old days, lots of moms and babes died in birth— “good” was just to live. Then we had to go and make more angst.

2. Motherdom: Breaking Free of Bad Science and Good Mother Myths, by another Brit, marketing expert Alex Bollen

Neanderthal says: “Good” mom is fake news and there’s no “right” way —why even try?

3. Life After Ambition: A “Good Enough” Memoir, by Cut parenting columnist Amil Niazi

Neanderthal says: Moms were sold a bad goal to work hard and have babes: Most can’t do it, so let’s give up and be meh.

4. One Bad Mother: In Praise of Psycho Housewives, Stage Parents, Momfluencers, and Other Women We Love to Hate, by yet another Cut writer, Ej Dickson

Neanderthal says: Smart look at all types of “bad mom” in pop asks: What makes us “bad” and why?

If you’d like an intelligent take on these books, read Mead here. Or go ham like any good mother would/should, and buy or preorder every one of them in the Spread’s Bookshop here.

You all get gold stars in the Spread’s behavior chart,

Rachel & Maggie

P.S. The Atavist started out with the mission of financial transparency and paying writers good money for the kind of ambitious stories that had hit the endangered species list. Now, they’re paying for previously published stories that fell off the web altogether. The new project, Revived, will republish old work: $2,000 for 5,000 words and when appropriate, a round of updates and edits. (But their criteria for what quantifies an Atavist story is… challenging.) Read about it here.

P.P.S. We’ve only just started Amy Poehler’s Good Hang with Jennifer Lawrence—we’re savoring this one, why rush it?—but can already break news: In the first five minutes, Lawrence jokingly laments that no one ever comments on how slender she was while filming Die My Love, several months pregnant with her second kid. Jennifer! Jen! J! Have you let your Spread sub lapse? Because that is *exactly* what we noted in a slightly unhinged post on the movie back in November. Here for you girl, as always. Love, Rachel & Maggie

We Live to Serve

Spread Viewing Checklist

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Last week, several of you told us we’d provided the very media checklist you needed to get through a crowded TV and movie season. Yippee! Some of you overachievers even printed it out to keep by the remote. That inspired us to offer this handy PDF version—updated to include The Housemaid, the movie that made Boobs McSweeney and Amanda Seyfried “instant best friends” (sure, if you say so), and Is This Thing On?, that movie starring Amy Poehler’s ex. This will make it easier than ever to track your journey to becoming the nerdiest A+ know-it-all at this year’s Oscar viewing party. (Everybody loves that guy. Right, Rachel?)

P.S. We haven’t added Kristin Stewart’s upcoming directorial debut, Chronology of Water because as of now it appears to be showing, like, only at the Angelika. (New Yorkers: Aren’t you special!?) But between this New York Times “The Interview” (yes, we’ve mentioned it before) plus Richard Brody’s at-times-gushing review, plus Stewart’s red carpet reminder that she and wife Dylan Meyer1 are simply cooler than everyone else, we’re on the edge of our seats.

P.P.S. As you know, we missed the (early) boat on Heated Rivalry, and we’re not going out like that again. So allow us to introduce you wayyyyy ahead of time to Slo Pitch. According to Autostraddle—a publication we read all the time because, like Kristin and Dylan, we are achingly cool—this mockumentary about a softball team is the lesbian answer to Heated Rivalry, brought to you by the same superrandom northern network—cue the Vulture story on Canada’s Crave network—and produced by Elliot Page. Due out later this year.

Bari’s Boot Camp

Like you and Nikki Glaser, we’ve been doing the reading on CBS News under new editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, and it’s been making us tired (amongst a whole spectrum of darker feelings). But we perked up when we saw that the New Yorker’s big feature on the Eye Network and its bespectacled queen was by Clare Malone, a media reporter who always follows the exact tentacles of a story that most interest us. Just as we hoped—in addition to hitting the full Bari bio; the recent, bumpy plight of CBS News; and the chaotic state of media in general (no small order!)—Malone delivers a personality portrait of Weiss. Among the most illuminating and satisfying descriptors of BW she collected:

• “values driven”

• “deep commitment to her own advancement”

• “If you’re really getting down to work and you’re Bari Weiss, you’re putting on a collared shirt.”

• “She was intoxicating, superficially conversant in a number of different directions, and she would name-drop adults of heft.”

• “She has a bubbly, vivacious personality, that kind of Bill Clinton effect, where she makes you feel like you’re the only person who matters in a room.”

• At the New York Times, “Most of us found her conniving….A lot of things she was saying we were at least open to. It was the way she was saying it, and the way that she was trampling on the rest of us, that I think ate at us.”

• “She was so brilliant and charismatic, and if she’d started a church we all would have joined.”

• “She’s really good at a honeymoon and really bad at marriage.”

• “She needs to take her job a little bit more seriously.”

• “You know that phrase ‘generational talent?’ She’s really that good. I think she’s more ambitious than the great Tina Brown, if that’s even possible.”

Read “Inside Bari Weiss’s Hostile Takeover of CBS News” here.

Boogie Nights

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Spreadfluencers,

We have a confession: Heated Rivalry was the one that got away. The show caught fire in late November, and while we had the best of intentions to catch up on it over the holidays, one thing led to another, yada yada yada, and now we find ourselves surrounded by late-stage Heated Rivalry fever, gazing into the taillights of a television phenomenon that should have been ours. (An erotic gay Canadian surprise hit about sex and ice hockey with a raging fanbase of midlife moms: Has there ever been Spreadier fare?) Naomi “Nomi” Fry has already put the show in the context of E.M. Forster.1 Faith Hill is praising it for “taking sex seriously.” Blasberg’s got the selfies. British GQ has figured out how Hudson Williams shapes his “glorious glutes.” There have, apparently, been live-watch parties at bars across America; our invites got lost in the mail. So here your Spreaditors sit, in unfamiliar territory: the cultural caboose (we’re never afraid to mix a transit metaphor), discovering at the pace of, well, regular people. To ensure that we never let this happen again, we have prepared a rigorous viewing slate to get you (and us) through the coming eternity of daylight savings time and our national dystopian nightmare. Some we’ve seen, others we have not.

Pre-Oscar viewing obligations, in order of urgency. (This is serious, people: We’re T-minus 60 days from Sunday, March 15.)

• Marty Supreme (in theaters now)

• One Battle After Another (on HBO Max; streaming rental for $7)

• Sentimental Value (streaming rental for $15)

• Hamnet (in theaters now)

• If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (streaming rental for $5—it’s on sale)

• Blue Moon (streaming rental for $15)

• Sinners (on HBO Max)

• The Secret Agent (in theaters now)

• The Testament of Ann Lee (coming to theaters January 25)

• It Was Just an Accident (streaming rental for $10)

• KPop Demon Hunters (on Netflix)

• Frankenstein (on Netflix)

• No Other Choice (in theaters now)

• Sirat (in theaters February 2)

• Sound of Falling (coming to theaters January 16)

• Wicked: For Good (streaming rental for $20)

• Weapons (on HBO Max)

• Train Dreams (on Netflix)

Watch “for fun”—aka unlikely (or ineligible) to be Oscar nominated

TV

• His & Hers (on Netflix)

• The Beauty (coming to Hulu January 22)

• Pluribus (on Apple TV)

Movies

• Die My Love (on MUBI; streaming rental for $10)

• Jay Kelly (on Netflix)

• Song Sung Blue (in some theaters; streaming for $20)

• Come See Me in the Good Light (on Apple TV)

• Hedda (on Prime)

• Private Life (coming to theaters January 16; see Jodie Foster blurb below)

• Nouvelle Vague (on Netflix)

Returning must-sees

• The Pitt (back for season 2 on HBO Max)

• Industry (back for season 4 on HBO max)

• Landman (back for season 2 on Paramount+)

• Shrinking (back for season 3 on Apple TV, January 28)

• Bridgerton (back for season 4 on Netflix, January 29)

Get them on your radar now

• The Moment (coming to theaters January 30)

• Wuthering Heights (coming to theaters February 13—more on this later!)

• The Bride (coming to theaters March 6—more on this later!)

Clearly, we’ve all got our work cut out for us. But you know what they say…

Together, we can do hard things,

Rachel & Maggie

P.S. If you’re having fun here—and are willing to forgive our brief moment of television negligence—don’t forget to hit the ❤️.

P.P.S. The new Hope Hicks is named Margo Martin. #alliteration #notourtype

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

After the wild success of her book Didion & Babitz—basically every celebrity on Instagram hailed it as their favorite book of 2025 (though in many cases we’d put money on the fact that it was the only book they read last year)—author Lili Anolik has trained her, um, clairvoyant (?) gaze and tapdancing prose on tragic heroine Dorothy Stratten. The 18-year-old Canadian bombshell/child was discovered by a literal pimp named Paul Snider in the late 1960s, elevated to Playboy pinup by Hugh Heffner, and made a Hollywood ingenue by director Peter Bogdanovich—all before Snider raped and murdered her at age 20. It’s a story so sad, seedy, and sensational that, good taste be damned, our culture has been turning it over for nearly 50 years: Stratten’s murder was the subject of a Pulitzer-winning article, a memoir by Bogdanovich, a TV movie starring Jamie Lee Curtis, and a major motion picture directed by Bob Fosse and starring Marielle Hemingway (Star 80.) Now it’s been resurrected once more for Vanity Fair. Anolik spends most of her piece analyzing the men who made and failed Stratten with her usual bulldozer confidence, drawing all sorts of wild assumptions and connections that make for an engrossing if occasionally queasy read. One example: Heffner, Bogdanovich, and Fosse? All those guys are pimps, says Lili. That’s entertainment?

Read “Forgotten Star Dorothy Stratten Lived the Hollywood Fairy Tale. It Ended as a Horror Story” here.

Let’s just gorge on protein powder till we die.

Prolific mag writer Rachel Sugar enters “New Year, New You” season with a protein-packed double-header: First, she published a paean to our protein-gram-counting moment in the Atlantic that—even as it poked fun at the phenomenon—compelled one Spreaditor to order up a box of Salted Peanut Butter David Protein Bars, stat. (That’s 28 grams of protein, 150 calories, and zero sugar, “basically a protein Scud missile wrapped in gold foil” according to the Times’ Protein Bar Arms Race, ICYMI). Meanwhile, over on Grub Street, Sugar (oh, the irony of that surname) chronicles the shocking demise of the “plant-based” aka vegan movement—which, like other forms of youthful idealism of the 2010s, is officially gone, dead, donezo. What’s up? Proteinmaxxing plus MAGA plus the general economics of running a plant-based restaurant (vegans don’t drink, and it takes a lot of labor to make eggplant compete with ribeye), plus the novelty of fake meat wore off, plus, perhaps, the death of hope and progress? “All the news was bad news; what were you supposed to do about it, eat a grain bowl?,” Sugar writes. “Real fur was once again in fashion, as was tanning, as was smoking. Steakhouses, avatars of mid-century American order, seemed to be the hottest openings of the year. Progress no longer appeared inevitable, and if the world wasn’t going to be better and the future wasn’t brighter, or maybe there was no future, then what was the point of all this sanctimonious restraint?”

Read “America Has Entered Late-Stage Protein” here

Read “How Veganism Got Cooked” here.

People Pleasers Anonymous

Technically, the anti-self-flagellation tome Are You Mad at Me? came out in August, but hey, if it’s still new enough for Katy Waldman to cover in the New Yorker this week—and to keep not one, but two, of our ladies’ weekends buzzing—then it’s fresh enough to Spread about. In the most overgeneralized terms, the book is about breaking the habit of being a people pleaser, aka a “fawn,” the kind of person who doesn’t know her own favorite color because she’s so busy chameleon-ing to keep the peace with the alphas in her life. We have observed that the book title alone is a fascinating litmus test: Bring it up in a group of friends, and see who lights up with recognition, and who doesn’t get it at all. Turns out it is also a subgenre, joined by the very similar sounding Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves—and How to Find Our Way Back, which is also by an Instagram famous mental health expert white lady from California (who is surprised? No one). While thinking that everyone is probably mad at you all the time can be a trauma response—solicitousness is a pretty smart survival mechanism—being a nice, flexible, and considerate empath isn’t all bad! “For some people, fawning is about being more of who they are—smart, generous, successful, funny, or beautiful,” writes Fawning author Ingrid Clayton. “For others, it’s about being less: vocal, ethnic, creative, self-assured, or able to set boundaries.”

Read “How to Recover from Caring So Much” here.

We won’t be mad at you if you order the books at our little Spread Bookshop here.

Testosterone: Not just for chicks!

It’s not just women getting a kick in the pantalones from Big T. Turns out the bro-osphere is doing its own form of hormone replacement therapy—and testosterone makes them feel like they’re “back in college again,” writes Katie Berohn in Elle. Take too much and it can also make them angry and physically aggressive. What could go wrong? While we’re here, we might as well ask: who caught last week’s Vanity Fair story with truly eye-popping (except not eyes) details about, um, the anti-aging of the penis? Tidbit: the podcasting founder of Bulletproof coffee, Dave Asprey, treats his junk to regular injections of stem cells and acoustic wave therapy. If that’s too costly, don’t worry, he suggests a completely free DIY therapy… that sounds like a scene from Dying for Sex. We were tempted to write all of this off as male fragility and vanity but, hey, with women (and tech) doing everything they can to turn back the clock on the ovary, maybe we’ve got no room to judge?

Read “The Adonis Injection” in Elle here.

Read “Why Bryan Johnson, Dave Asprey, and the Other Longevity Bros Are Obsessed With Penises” in Vanity Fair here.

Just Can’t Get Enough

The New York Times Magazine let Taffy Brodesser-Akner write 5,500 words on her new hobby: Attending the Broadway show Operation Mincemeat, which she has seen a whopping 13 times (12 of them by buying tickets with her own money). The article is in small part about the musical itself, but in large part about the sensation of becoming a fan—of falling in love with a work of culture and having an insatiable desire for experiencing it again and again. Given that the Spread is basically a revolving fanzine, we get it. (We also feel obliged to admit here that one of your Spreaditors has seen Rent on stage more than 20 times, and it’s the same one who’s seen Call Me By Your Name at least a dozen times.) Is this a crucial read? It is not. Is it a fine way to spend a plane ride from, say, CHO to LGA? It is. The cherry on top comes in the NYT comments section, where Brodesser-Akner enthusiastically engages with her own fans and critics as well as fellow “Mincefluencers.”

Read “Why on Earth Have I Seen The Same Broadway Show 13 Times?” here.

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Spreadbeauties,

We greet you as our identities as brilliant editors with impeccable story sense face a new challenge: A viral story penned by a woman who once uttered the words, “The old Sharpay knows what she wants and get what she wants,” in a film called High School Musical 2. Yes, we’re talking about “Breaking Up With My Toxic Mom Group Chat,” by Ashley French (née Tisdale). Catchy headline, sure. But the essay itself is so boilerplate, so blah, such a—as an editor with seniority once described a manuscript to young us—”snoozecream sundae with yawnsauce,” that had it come across our desks, we’d have scrawled “nothingburger” across the top, killed it, and moved the bleep on. (In a gracious and encouraging way, of course, because we are girls.) Shows how much we know. Some genius at the Cut (and we use that word with all sincerity), read the same piece, leaned back in her chair, and said, “sure, let’s lob that thing onto the internet and see what happens.” What happened? Online sleuths immediately uncovered the identities of the mom group members who had made French feel left out enough to whine about it on the internet, and—yep—they are: Hilary Duff, Mandy Moore, and Meghan Trainor (whom we’re proud of for making the cut if not the Cut). Since these “mean moms” were identified, madness has ensued, including the Instagram-unfollowing of Tisdale by Duff, the dragging and redemption of someone named Matthew Koma (?), and no fewer than six updates on People.com (Duff is “tuning out the noise with a new song”). Not to mention 217 comments and untold traffic for the New York Media.

Lesson learned. Now here’s to the year of the horse.

Giddyup buttercups,

Rachel & Maggie

PS: Though it’s a fast, furious, and terrifying news week for, you know, the world, Spreadlandia has a taste for stories that spend a little longer in the oven, and in that category, post-holiday pickings remain slim. We’ve done our best, and yes, while we try to Spread the love, we realize that this week we have multiple Cut stories in the same issue. Thanks for playing!

PPS: If you’re as happy to be back here in this space as we are, please make sure to bang that ❤️ button!

Robyn is Mother

Let’s hear it for the Paul Shaffer of Spreadlandia, Robyn, for birthing “Sexistential,” which a press release explains is “possibly the world’s first rap about having one-night stands while 10 weeks pregnant after IVF.” Which sounds frankly awful to us but really seems to work for her. Here she is debuting it on Colbert. Sample lyrics, kid you not:

My body’s a spaceship with the ovaries on hyperdrive

Got a whole universe inside that exists in between my thighs

Do I have a consistent will to persist and finish this ride?

My babymaker’s got twenty in the clip, ready to fire

The Wolff in Chic Clothing

New York Times Styles has really outdone herself with a profile of Victoria Wolff, the 45-year-old influencer wife of 72-year-old “writer” (look at us not taking the bait) Michael Wolff. The crux is that Victoria has parlayed their Meyersian house in Amagansett and Michael’s “newsiness” into a social media mini-empire, with a sizable Instagram following and a thriving Substack presence built around the couple’s lifestyle. The article, by Rory Satran, is an exercise in raising one eyebrow on the page, with our favorite backhanded compliment arriving at the end: “The Wolffs’ home is smaller than it appears onscreen. With its swimming pool, expansive garden and high-ceiling kitchen, it’s enviable, but more World of Interiors quirky than Architectural Digest impressive.” Southern translation: Bless her heart.

Read “How to Live Like a Wolff” here.

Welch Out

Those who caught our end-of-year wrap-up(s) will recall that, with all the Vanity Fair hoopla and Devil Wears Prada 2 anticipation, we’d convinced ourselves that maybe, just a little bit, in some way, somehow, magazines were kinda sorta back, baby? But on Tuesday, our freshly pumped tires met a Louis Vuitton-monogrammed bayonet: GQ global editorial director Will Welch is leaving not just the title, but publishing altogether. He’s heading to Paris to work with shorts-suit trailblazer Pharrell Williams. It’s a blow to magazines in general and Condé Nast in particular: With brand new leadership at Vogue and Vanity Fair, this is the third top-of-the masthead vacancy at one of the publisher’s four flagship titles in eight months. (We got David Remnick’s voicemail when we called to tell him to just go ahead and give his two weeks for retirement.) Welch, with whom we had a rip-roaring conversation on the Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) podcast last year, was among the last couple of magazine editors bridging the old school and the new (cc: Sarah Ball, with whom we also ripped and roared recently). He’d studied under GQ’s Jim Nelson for a dozen-plus years before getting the top job, and took the responsibility of stewarding the title into its next chapter seriously. His GQ was edgier, more fashiony, and as he told us, “a little dangerous.” GQ fashion writer Sam Hine1 and Cosmopolitan editor Willa Bennett (not to brag but we also podded with her) are at the top of the goss list to fill Welch’s seat, which…OK! Au revoir to all that!

OMG MTG WTF

While we were out, both the New York Times Magazine’s Bob Draper and the New Yorker’s Charlie Bethea (no idea if anyone has ever called Charles Bethea “Charlie” but it’s 2026 and we’re feeling emboldened) delivered profiles of newly awakened, freshly resigned Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who in a move of total kismet turned over a new leaf at the exact moment Trump dropped her faster than green vegetable over the Epstein files. What comes across in both profiles is that Greene, who is inexplicably still 51 years old, is a total kook and also, perhaps out of necessity, does seem genuine in her attempt to evolve. (Does that earn her our forgiveness? That’s a different question.) She told Draper that her literal come-to-Jesus moment occurred at Charlie Kirk’s funeral, when Erika Kirk forgave her husband’s murderer moments before our president declared his unyielding hate for his opponents. MTG even regrets accusing Nancy Pelosi and AOC of treason. Her new thing, she says, is trying to behave like the Christian she is. Both profiles are, no surprise, solid and lengthy. If you only have only 8.5 minutes, though, may we recommend a change of course: Here’s Marjorie yesterday on TV’s most powerful political gab show, The View. Joy goes hard-ish! Sunny too!

Read the New Yorker story, which definitely won the art contest, here.

Read the New York Times Magazine story here.

Watch The View here.

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Spreadbabes,

We know you’ve thought of nothing else since you last heard from us, and here it is at last—all the other things we obsessed about, feared, craved, poked at, armchair-analyzed, imbibed, and shared with you in 2025. New Years, here we come!

Love you, mean it.

Rachel & Maggie

Worry not: Those of you who missed Part One of our Year in Review can dig in riiiiiiight here. (We’ve got blephs and facelifts a plenty—Meghan and Harry galore. You want magazine goss? We’ve got twenty…)

Also in 2025…

8.) We crowned Victoria Ratliff our Honorary Spreaditor of the Year.

The caftan-clad, generously medicated matriarch of White Lotus, Season 3, sparked a new love of flouncy nightdresses, a welcome return of better-than-ever Parker Posey, and a certain fellowship among your Spreaditors. Like (some of) us, Victoria has a drawl like a mint-julep-drunk Persian cat and a knack for staying vigilant at all times, no matter what comes her way. The cherry on top: y’all, she’s real!

9.) Gen X got taken for a wild ride.

You’d think that all the HRT and Lexipro that Gen X women are on would keep things even-keeled, but sheesh, the highs and the lows! First Mirielle Silcoff lifted our spirits and our libidos with a fist-pump-inducing reframe of the “misery perspective” on aging. The former latchkey kids and riot grrrls of Gen X, forged in the fire of the ’90s, were emerging into a kinder, gentler, more open-minded sexual era to find “a womblike bouncy castle where women are invited not just to have orgasms but also to have important conversations about their orgasms.” Gen Xers are having the most and the best sex of any demographic, she argues. “Whoop-tee-do!,” we say. But then Steven Kurutz had to come along and kill our buzz with “The Gen X Career Meltdown,” now maybe the most-invoked title in Spread history. It’s too painful for us to put into words, so we’ll just re-quote fellow Substacker ’s take: “The long careers we all thought we would have in magazines, advertising, graphic design, et cetera, have been cut short and no one knows what the f*ck to do anymore, and most of us are just out here flailing and feeling washed up and old and useless.” Now all those unemployed Nirvana fans are becoming therapists—even Eliza Dushku. Which might help us process the late-breaking news that, wait, no, actually Generation X is the greatest—the coolest, the most creative, the one everybody else wishes they could be!! See what we mean by highs and lows?

10.) The West Village was ruined, young conservatives had a blast—and Brock Colyar got invited to both.

The two magazine stories that truly permeated the zeitgeist this year were both written by New York’s reporter-about-town Brock Colyar. First, the instantly iconic “It Must Be Nice to Be a West Village Girl” zeroed in on the army of strangely identical, gorgeous, skinny, moneyed, Aritzia Super Puff-clad girlies running rampant on Bleecker Street, treating New York’s most young-woman-idolized neighborhood like they’re on a perpetual semester abroad. Then with “The Cruel Kids Table”, Brock embedded with the rich, hardpartying twentysomething Trump fans who just want to have fun and believe real fun includes the ability to make off-color (at best) jokes. Taking on this assignment was a bold move for Colyar, who has written beautifully about their gender identity in the past, and who is referred to by their subjects while reporting this story as “a queer. But a friendly one” and “not ‘normal gay.’” Still, Colyar approaches these Trump lovers with the same open-hearted fearlessness as the denizens of any other scene they’ve covered.

11.) Republicans decided that what American women really need is more babies!

Remember Simone Collins, the “Techno-Puritanist” who started her own religion to hold people “responsible for every life they chose not to bring into the world”? If only she was a lone she-wolf! Alas, she was just one of the “zany” characters in the Times story that brought us deep into the beating heart (blergh) of the pronatalist movement by hanging out at a convention for their kind in Texas. The story, which would have been great theater had it not been absolutely chilling, came hot on the heels of a report that the Trump administration was considering pitches for how to make women have more babies—with no mention of, say, early childhood education or any other resources we might need to care for more babies AMONG OTHER PROBLEMS. While we tear our hair out, please allow us to refer dear Simone, the Project 2025 architects, and honestly, everyone, to this stirring New York Times Magazine profile of MaryBeth Lewis. Lewis birthed a batch of five in quick succession, then another eight, the last of whom she delivered at 62. At 65, she wanted even more, but no one thought that could be a good idea for infinite reasons, so she hired a surrogate and got two more—it was only then that the legal drama began. Fifteen, wow! That’s even more than Elon.

12.) That whole Amy Griffin thing? Saw it coming from a mile away.

Before Griffin’s bestselling memoir, The Tell, even hit bookstores, The Spread sniffed something rotten in Denmark. Why did the book excerpt published in Vogue by a woman we’d never heard of, writing about her perfectionist tendencies—which: fine—neglect to identify her by any of the markers that would actually mean something to readers, i.e.: the fact that she’s buds with Reese and Gwyneth and runs a baller VC firm that cut deals for Spanx, Goop, and Bumble? We now know that it’s because… her book doesn’t either! All summer, book-world friends were confounded by the omissions in The Tell and its unvetted claims about Griffin’s alleged attacker. In September, the New York Times rolled out a banger of an investigation that was everything our nosy little buttons could have asked for. A month later, Spreaditor Maggie dropped into the chat a piece published in Bustle about the effect of MDMA (Griffin’s hallucinogen of choice—she’s an investor!) on buried memories. Did it stop Griffin in her tracks? Not so much. She was too busy partying with her latest purchase, the New York Liberty.

13.) Boobs made a comeback

If you were an alien who’d just landed on earth, you’d think breasts were a brand new phenomenon, lighting up every corner of the internet via the otherwise blank actress Sydney Sweeney. Well aware of this sensation, Sweeney has in turn fed the frenzy by “wearing” her ample orbs in myriad arrangements on the red carpet (turns out she can tie ’em in a knot, tie ’em in a bow, and throw’ em over her shoulder like a continental soldier). While the solid-as-moonrock mammaries of space babe Lauren Sanchez may be a little one-note compared to Sweeney’s capricious bombs, Mrs Bezos’ chesticles also demonstrated a knack for starting conversation this year. Your Spreaditors saw art in them there hills at the inauguration in January, while the New Yorker’s Naomi Fry interpreted that unflinching rack as another unapologetic reminder that in Vladimir Trump’s America, “women will be women and men will be men.” Finally, we can shake off all that neutered, no-fun corporate culture (sensitivity training, what a buzzkill!) that pervaded the Biden era.

14.) We discovered some hard truths about our bodies, ourselves.

It’s not news that The Cut produces some excellent content about women’s cultural, sexual, and intellectual lives. But in 2025, they officially became our editorial destination for stories about the corporeal, too, delivering one super-relevant, well-reported women’s health story after another and seriously outscoring most of their competition in that genre. The supernova, of course, was our friend Laurie Abraham’s rigorous, moving, and (seriously) laugh-out-loud funny first-person report on her colon cancer “journey” (read our Behind the Music interview with LA here), but we were also served with news we could use on topics like breast reconstruction, the suddenly widespread affliction of brain fog (hi), and 2025’s favorite health boogeyman, inflammation. Now if someone over there could just take a look at this mole…

15. ) We learned some other things, too…

A. That god is a woman. #Facts. When a bunch of religious leaders took ‘shrooms in a university study, “men and women alike experienced the divine as a feminine presence. Participants characterized God as “soothing,” “maternal,” or “womb-like.” A Baptist Biblical scholar said, “God struck me as a Jewish mother at one point, which is funny, since I’m a Jesus follower.” (Michael Pollan, sticking to his beat in the New Yorker here. )

B. ….And her name is E. Jean Carroll. In a profile timed to the release of Not My Type: One Woman vs. a President (we particularly love the audio book) Jessica Bennet captures an icon of resilience and originality: our shotgun-toting, flight-suited fairy godmother in her mystical cabin in the woods. But it was E’s appearance on the Modern Love podcast that really moved us. Host Anna Martin caught a rare peek behind E’s armor of unflagging optimism. Thirty years after her assault, she admits, it’s still excruciating to open up to the possibility of romance and eroticism. Nevertheless, she still longs for it.

C. That Taylor Jenkins Reid banks $8 million per book. In other brain-bending publishing news: “Romantasy” is so dominant these days that two of its two biggest authors, Sarah J. Maas (A Court of Thorns and Roses) and Rebecca Yarros (The Fourth Wing), between them, wrote five of the ten top-selling books of 2024. Friend-of-Spread Véronique Hyland profiled Yarros for Elle: Two years after her Empyrean series took off, the military wife has sold millions of volumes and has production deals in the works with Netflix and Amazon. What have you accomplished since 2023?

D. That testosterone is the hormone of the year! It improves sexual health in about 50 percent of women who try it, but for most the results are subtle. “It’s not like ‘whammo-bammo,’” one expert told health reporter extraordinaire Danielle Friedman back in February, presaging the official Big T report from Susan Dominus (who found a woman who said the opposite: She wants sex so much now that even when she’s in the midst of shtupping her husband, she’s thinking about the next time.) Too bad those side effects—facial hair, deep voice, enlarged clitoris—might be… permanent? See also: Macronutrient of the year (protein), powdered blergh of the year (creatine), and parenting philosophy of the year (FAFO).

E. That the aughts was maybe the worst time to be a girl? Spread Icon Sophie Gilbert’s book, Girl on Girl, summed up all the ways that the supposedly sex-positive porn culture and “recreational misogyny” that peaked right when she was coming of age (Gilbert was 16 in 1999) crawled into our subconscious, deeply resetting ideas about how women should be treated, talked about, and viewed, and simply what we’re capable of—ideas imbibed not just by men, but by women—and, as we’ve seen in the last couple of years1, it stuck.

F. That sometimes the nanny never leaves. For sheer entertainment factor, we’ll take Bindu Bansinath’s story about a wealthy 30-something New York couple who moved with their baby to upstate New York and won the nanny lottery in the form of an experienced, high-end, German-speaking, 50-something former model—who moved into their guest house, wrecked it, and refused to move out. Almost makes us glad we can’t afford live in help!

OK, Spreadfriends! We’ve left it all on the mat in 2025. SEE YOU NEXT YEAR!

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Joyful Spreaders, Grinchy Spreaders, Hungry Spreaders:

Looking back through this year’s issues, some of the things we obsessed over feel like ancient history (Lively v. Baldoni, the hot cocktail party goss last winter), others feel like they happened just yesterday (the debut of Jordon Hudson, self-declared “golddigger”), and others feel so dystopian and absurd—Katy Perry making space “chic”; actual humans falling in love with the robot voices that live in their phones—that we’re not sure whether they actually happened, or if the anesthesia from our joint facelift still hasn’t worn off. Did Martha Stewart really cop to biting her new pets on the face, or was that just a Spread fever dream? (Also: Whyyyy? To establish dominance? Catch a snack?) This week we are kicking off the first half of a 17-point blockbuster list of The Year in Spreadlandia: a synthesis of the stories, ideas, and characters that imprinted on us these past twelve months.

As Paris says, this is Sliving!**

Merry, merry,

Rachel & Maggie

PS: If you find yourself wanting for programming this “break”, may we suggest you return to the Spread 100, our superior-to-the-New York Times ranking of our favorite films of this century: Get crackin’ here!

PPS: We are lifting the paywall this week so that everyone can experience this bounty. Please consider giving us the enormous gift of passing this email along to a few of the smartest woman you know. (No really, we love fresh eyeballs!) Also nice? Consider wrapping up the gift of a paid Spread subscription!

** “iconic term for ‘slaying and living,’ meaning to live glamorously, empowered, and authentically.

In 2025…

1.) Magazines gave ’em something to talk about

Last year, we would have told you that we were the co-presidents of a pretty exclusive fan club: People Who Still Care About Magazines (PWSCAM, pronounced pwuh-scam). But today, our feeds are as clogged as J.D.Vance’s arteries with talk of Vanity Fair’s “diabolical,” “intentional,” “evil genius” photo shoot of Trump’s basket of deplorables. The magic of magazines, bay-bee!

Not since the very same publication egged on Nuzzigate (three whole weeks ago) have we seen this kind of all-in chatter, commentary, and sheer glee—proof that Anna Wintour (who 100% had to sign off on the feature) has official reached her gives-no-fucks era. This is the perfect nightcap on a year that also saw a Condé tell-all (Michael M. Grynbaum’s Empire of the Elite), a Condé memoir (Graydon Carter’s When the Growing Was Good), a fictionalized Condé insider account (Caroline Palmer’s Workhorse: catch our Exclusive Interview™ with the author here), a handy-dandy Condé quiz that we aced (“Could You Have Landed a Job at Vogue in the ’90s?”) and the promised sequel to everyone’s favorite Condé spoof. (To answer your next question: May 1, 2026.) After a couple of intense conclaves, we even chose a new Pope and, uh, cardinal—Vogue “editorial director” Chloe Malle and Vanity Fair “global editorial director” Mark Guiducci. The latter, as established, is turning out to be a born headline-grabber, with the hire of VF’s shortest-lived West Coast editor in history and now the absolute PR bonanza of this Trumpworld shoot. Will that pay off in actual ad dollars come 2026?

2.) Everybody got a “bleph”

In early July, our group chats emitted something between a gasp and a squeal when “Annie” Hathaway showed up in Vogue looking, uh, exceedingly well rested. Later that month, the Hollywood Reporter declared plastic surgery to be “finally out of the closet” and our For You pages began exclusively featuring celebrity before-and-afters. In September, the Cut published “The Forever 35 Face,” detailing the rise of the deep-plane facelift and the procedure’s prevalence among women we previously believed were nowhere near the facelift demo. And in November, our own Maggie Bullock wrote an up close and personal profile of the Upper East Side’s star tweak doctor, Lara Devgan, as part of a 17-feature Bustle interrogation of the culture’s suddenly all-consuming preoccupation with cosmetic surgery. Over six months of inundation, we’ve cycled through all the emotions—shock, curiosity, envy, denial, empowerment, resignation, and annoyance (not necessarily in that order). Though our For You page is still a lost cause, the backlash has begun and, we must admit, we are tired of the Emma Stone discourse, tired of Mandy Moore looking nothing like Mandy Moore, tired of Kate Winslet feeling like she needs to weigh in. So tired we probably need a ble…

3.) Meghan and Harry’s stock plummeted.

One year ago, people were still giving that girl from Suits and her affable, redheaded spouse the benefit of the doubt. Sure, her podcast had been a nothingburger and neither of the Sussexes exactly radiated self-awareness, but the royal family and British tabs had been deeply terrible to them a while back—and who doesn’t love a love story? But in January, with Rahdika Jones still in the EIC chair, Vanity Fair slapped a stock photo of the Duke and Duchess on the cover and commissioned writer Anna Peele to let ’er rip, producing the most scathing write-around we’ve read in years. The piece literally likens Meghan to a “Mean Girls teenager.” In one of its wildest anecdotes, she floats a divorce memoir to a major publisher, gauging interest in case she and Harry were to get divorced anytime soon. (For these and more sick burns, read the Spread’s full take here.) Wilder still: All of the above occurred before Meghan hit Netflix like a ton of vanilla bricks in May, prompting Vulture critic Kathryn VanArandonk to string together this sentence: “With Love, Meghan is an utterly deranged bizarro world voyage into the center of nothing, a fantastical monument to the captivating power of watching one woman decorate a cake with her makeup artist while communicating solely through throw-pillow adages about joy and hospitality.”

4.) Ezra Klein hurt our feelings.

This year, our old crush repeatedly made reproductive rights sound like a bargaining chip. (At the risk of sounding crass, say it with us: boner killer!) He also rolled out a handful of interviews that reminded us why we’ve been known to call The Ezra Klein Show the best ladymag in the land: Wide-ranging chats with superfeeling writer Kathryn Schulz, trans Congresswoman Sarah McBride, and shamanic rockstar Patti Smith. We’ve been told that a person can hold two truths at once, but Ezra: Why you gotta make it so hard?

5.) Our evil twin jumped out from behind the bushes.

Ack! While we were over here poking fun of Republican henchwomen in Kabuki makeup and bad filler, a thriving female counterpart to the manosphere—one that’s cannier and more nakedly ambitious than the #tradwives, and bears a strong resemblance to “our” people—was gaining steam. We were still licking our inauguration wounds in February when we first caught a glimpse of this “womanosphere” (the polar opposite of the Spreadosphere) an “ecosystem of young conservative female voices that fills space for a generation of women who are at least curious about some traditionally conservative views—but aren’t always interested in entering the digital man cave that is the overwhelmingly male right-wing podcast space,” wrote Max Tani in Semafor. Now we know that it has its own “conservative Cosmo,” Evie magazine, which reads like the Onion but actually means headlines like, “I Don’t Want to Be Independent Anymore”; benign-looking avatars like Katie Miller (wife of Goebbels-lookalike Stephen); and the lock on a vision of womanhood summed up by womanosphere influencer Alex Clark: “Less Prozac, more protein… Less burnout, more babies, less feminism, more femininity.” (The womanosphere has perfected many dark arts, but merchandising does not appear to be among them: When we Googled this choice phrase plus “merch” we found nary a tote bag, bumper sticker, or insulated pink travel wine glass. Shocking!)

6.) Elizabeth Gilbert fell off her pedestal.

When the previously untouchable goddess of self discovery released her tenth book this fall—All the Way to the River, a memoir about her sex-and-love addiction and the prolonged demise of her partner, Raya, from cancer—a literary it girl of another generation, Jia Tolentino, stepped up to the plate. In a searing (and impressively self-aware) star-on-star “book review” that’s in fact more of a full-fledged analysis of Gilbert’s interlocking oeuvre and celebrity, Tolentino puts into words what we’ve all been observing and wondering about for a while: Liz’s insistence that, as a famous, 56-year-old kajillionaire, she is still an everywoman is at once delusional and unnecessary, and her imprint on our culture runs deeper than linen pants, long baths, and travel as self-care. “So many women—and I would never exclude myself,” Tolentino writes, “have come to believe, at some level, that they, too, are Elizabeth Gilberts, people who search hard and love harder, whose personal journeys can and should captivate millions, whose flaws and failings only make them better heroines in the end.”

7.) Dying for Sex shook us to our core.

Can we recommend an 8-episode limited series about a woman whose terminal cancer diagnosis inspires her to leave her husband, bring her best friend closer, and set out on a quest to feel alive—if only for a moment? That feels like too much responsibility. But we can say that Hulu’s Dying for Sex, which stars Michelle Williams with Jenny Slate as her friend, Sissy Spacek as her mother, and Rob Delaney as her love interest, is the Spreadiest piece of culture we consumed this year by a country mile. It’s also, somehow, some way, really funny, which, we suppose, is part of its power. In a profile of Williams, Rachel Handler wrote of the show: “It’s casually groundbreaking in its treatment of heterosexual sex; its protagonist has sex with multiple men largely without vaginal penetration, a choice that stands in direct opposition to most of the show’s thrust-loving American television forebears. It explores kink as an opportunity for liberation and catharsis, not as a punch line or dark Freudian detour on the way to conventional sex. It doesn’t shy from the visceral realities of what happens to a human being as she dies—the sounds, the way time slows and distorts. It’s proudly weird and theatrical, featuring a hallucinatory dream-ballet sequence complete with custom puppets, one of which is a hyperrealistic penis outfitted with fairy wings.” We rest our case.

8.) Leanne and Amy saved us.

We do a lot of work around here to KEEP IT UPBEAT. In this, the year of ICE, Hegseth, Noem, Epstein emails, mass shootings, measles outbreaks, epic humanitarian fails, and homicidal Hollywood sons, Amy Poehler gave us a go-to emotional hidey-hole, Good Hang1—a place to get away from it all, where the women are rad, the c-pap machine is crankin’, the veggies are fake, and everything is more or less ok. If saying welovethisshowsofuckingmuch makes us basic, then basic we must be. During her chat with Maya Rudolf2, we legit started to wonder, wait, is that us talking? (Which, now that we say it, is not just delusional but a little arrogant. Oh well!) Hard to play favorites here, but Amy’s interview with Leanne Morgan—another of our other most cherished 2025 discoveries—made us laugh so hard we hit our heads on the kitchen counter.

If there’s anything we could wish all of you for the new year, it’s that kind of concussion-level happiness. Which we will be delivering right here—same time, same place—next week!

TO BE CONTINUED ON DECEMBER 26!!!

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1

Spreaders, we saw you out over there in the comments section for the Julia Louis Dreyfus ep of Good Hang

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Spreaders on the verge,

“You’re so chill!” said no one to your Spreaditors, ever. Thankfully, there’s someone in this business who’s cool, calm, and collected enough to meet this chaotic media moment. That’s Nikki Ogunnaike, the smart and decisive EIC of Marie Claire.

Nikki arrived at MC in 2023 and promptly began giving the entire industry lessons in the art of modern editor-in-chiefing (she has her own newsletter and podcast in addition to the website, magazine, and events arm to manage, NBD). The daughter of immigrant parents who worked in retail—her dad at CVS, her mom at Staples—Nikki’s been training for this job since college at UVA. She has zigged and zagged as the industry shifted, leapfrogging through an impressively wide variety of roles (writer, fashion editor, digital editor, print editor, and—oh yeah—social media-savvy multiplatform operator) at basically all the glossies (Vanity Fair, Glamour, InStyle, GQ, Elle—where we got to know her—and Harper’s Bazaar). How’s that for running the gauntlet?

For our latest episode on the mic for Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!), we talked to Nikki about being the editor in chief of a women’s magazine “as the job exists today.” What does “magazine editor” even mean now? (And what do you wear to do it?) How does she navigate being a progressive voice in this “womanosphere” shitshow of a moment? How is the magazine evolving to meet a new reader, or should we say follower? And how is she making sure it stays the same old MC?

Also: Are we saying “girlboss” again?

Listen and learn—we did.

Rachel & Maggie

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Spreadbuds,

We are not the first to declare this moment in television to be highly mid. But we just might be among the first to admit to ostentatiously basking in the mid? (Midness? Midity?) To occasionally even prefer the mid? While, yeah, we’d love for one or two A-grade programs to spring from the ashes, the current slate of shockingly okay limited series scratches a real itch—one that allows us to run to the bathroom without pausing the action, and even occasionally close our eyes and enjoy the proceedings as an audio story. Can’t say that for The Night Of or Angels in America1 or even the 2017 version of Howard’s End (we’re always looking for an excuse to highly recommend Matthew Macfadyen in Darcy mode as Henry Wilcox)!

Herewith, the Spreadiest middlings of the moment, ranked in order from mid-mid up to warm-mid. May they ease your descent into the shortest days of the year.

5. Death by Lightning (Netflix): Betty Gilpin sprinkles a hint of Spreadiness on the story of James Garfield’s (Michael Shannon) rise to the presidency in 1881 and the damn fool that shot him (Macfadyen with a screw loose).

4. Down Cemetery Road (Apple+): Will the storyline ever fully make sense? Seemingly not! But we can still enjoy Ruth Wilson’s color palette (sunflower yellow + cobalt) and Emma Thompson’s voluminous quiff and not-shy-about-it sex drive in this thriller about a London art conservator who stumbles upon a government cover-up.

3. The Girlfriend (Prime Video): Who’s worse—the adult son’s social-climbing, meat-cutting girlfriend (Olivia Cooke) or his obsessive, art-dealing mother (Robin Wright)? We’re in it for the she-said/she-said switcheroos, the enviable interiors in London and Italy, and the tragically Gen Z outfits Cooke’s Cherry chooses to meet the parents.

2. All Her Fault (Peacock): Shiv Roy—sorry, Sarah Snook—and Dakota Fanning elevate a twisty, movie-of-the-week-like kidnapping thriller with a Big Little Lies veneer. (Before we watched, we googled whether or not the kid was returned to his mama in the end—recommend!)

1. The Beast in Me (Netflix): In a modern version of The Journalist and the Murderer, Claire Danes does all her usual facial contortions as a grieving Carrie Mathisonian scribe, while Matthew Rhys thrives as a Robert Durstian killer with a Hannibal Lecter twist. (This Doreen St. Félix review nails it.)

Wallow proud, friends,

Rachel & Maggie

Talkin’ Bout Our, Our, Our Ge-ge-generatiooooons

One of your Spreaditors is a late-Gen Xer, the other an elder millennial, which has led to some spicy debates over the years about what Rachel loves to refer to as our “microgenerational differences.” Let it be said that for every theory that groups people together in age-related cohorts, there’s a separate theory that generations aren’t even a thing—and those “generational myth” types are gonna be busy churning out their rebuttals in what we’re calling Generations Week in Media. (Catchy, no?) First comes Amanda Fortini with a banger of an issue theme for T: The Times Style Magazine: “Is Gen X Actually the Greatest Generation?” Its core argument is that all the characteristics that Gen X was once derided for—alienation, irony, slacker-ism, the benign neglect of our parents—were actually great conditions for creating establishment-shaking artists (and also exactly what’s lacking in “kids today,” hence their abiding fascination with all things Gen X). In the Cut, the message for millennials is significantly less uplifting: Dinner Party “host” and poster girl for the avocado sandwich (née toast) generation Emily Gould—DRINK!—goes long on the aging cliff, a term we all came to know and love last year via All Fours, and that science apparently bears out: At certain times in our lives, we age faster, starting with the cute age of 44. As “luck” would have it, Spread copy chief extraordinaire Allison Wright is the star of the show: Allison had a grueling entrée to her fourth decade with a battery of hip issues that just reading about will make your hindquarters ache. Allison, thank you for sharing your story for the sake of journalism!

Read Fortini on the Xers here, and Gould’s “Young Old Person” here.

Knives Out

On cue last week, a handful of women thinkers—including some well-known Spreaders—came out in defense of Olivia Nuzzi2, objecting to the slut-shaming tone of the attacks on her3. Perhaps most impassioned (and, sadly for her cause, least cogent) was Lisa Taddeo, who called the “attempted patriarchal mass murder of [Nuzzi’s] career and her personhood… a freakish lynching, the likes of which we will look back upon with a daze” in an Air Mail screed that, like American Canto itself, could have used a little more time on the stove and a heavier edit. In the Nation, Joan Walsh—a veteran who knows all the players involved—offers a more complex take that calls out Nuzzi, Lizza, RFK, and Keith Olbermann (seriously, what a tool) for their sins, but still holds space for empathy for Nuzzi, child of an alcoholic mother who has been “preyed upon by older men” at least since she was 19 or 20.

Fun holiday party drinking game for the number crunchers out there in medialand: How many employees of the Nation, the Atlantic, the New York Times, the New Yorker, etc, have expensed their subscriptions to Lizza’s Substack this month? It’s almost like he’s still on the mainstream media payroll! (On that note, insiders tell us that a paid subscription to the Spread is a Strunk and White-level professional tool that no modern journalist should be without, hint hint.)

Maybe it’s piling on, but we cannot stop replaying this mesmerizing and possibly medicated (?) clip of Nuzzi musing on the curse of beauty via JonBenét Ramsey in the audiobook….

Read “Olivia Nuzzi and the Sport of Kings” here.

Read “I Still Feel a Tiny Bit Sorry for Olivia Nuzzi” here.

Fluids and secretions and odors, oh my!

Truth be told, comedy that waxes poetic about vaginal discharge and pubic hair “as thick as a wicker goddamn basket” is a stretch for us, and—one has to imagine—for Lorne Michaels, too. Two stories, one by Naomi Fry in the New Yorker and one by Callie Holtermann in the New York Times Magazine, are here to tell you that the funny-lady-in-a-wig Sarah Sherman you thought you knew from SNL is the performer on, like, level 1. Her own comedy—now featured in an HBO special called, for good reason, Sarah Squirmy—is so wildly gross and body fixated that even John Waters calls her his “gore-gore girl.” It’s hard to tell if even the writers of these twin profiles actually enjoyed seeing it. How does a nice Jewish girl from Great Neck who went to Northwestern become the gross-out queen of fringe4 (on the mainstage) comedy? And can your Spreaditors stomach Sarah Squirmy long enough to find out? This notion, from Fry, at least made us want to give it a shot: “This dirtiness is the crux of the matter for Sherman. In a sanitized, AI-forward, Kardashian-centric world, in which women are only allowed to have hair on their bodies if it’s appended to a gimmicky ‘micro string thong’ retailing for $32, Sherman’s weird, gloopy DIY comedy is a kind of oasis, suggesting that another way is possible.”

Read “Sarah Sherman is Grosser Than You Think” here.

Read “How Sarah Sherman of ‘SNL’ Plans to Make Audiences Squirm” here.

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

The city magazine editor in us literally fist-pumped when we saw a recent first-person story published in the Washingtonian: “I Invited Sally Quinn to Judge My Dinner Party”—swoon, right? So obvious, so excellent. (We’ll spare you the details of our fantasy about the editorial meeting that greenlighted the perfect pitch.) Writer Sylvie McNamara rises to the occasion, so to speak: A thirtysomething who has recently ended her marriage and moved into a rental, she hits all the requisite beats about why we all need more parties in our lives (stats, expert opinions on loneliness), then barrels through with the “experiment,” inviting 11 guests, including the grande dame of DC bread-breaking, over for dinner. At the gathering, Quinn, in full performance mode, is a generous celebrity guest and hits all her marks, even picking up McNamara’s conversational slack when duty calls. Sylvie, consider this your official hand-written thank-you note.

Read it here.

Designing Democrat

There’s a lot to like about interior designer and Bravolebrity turned tough love-dispensing liberal podcaster Jennifer Welch, who was profiled in the New York Times this week by Spread-beloved critic Amanda Hess: Welch’s podcast, which she cohosts with her former Sweet Home Oklahoma costar Angie Sullivan and strikes us as a mash-up of Pod Save America and We Can Do Hard Things, takes to task pandering Democrats (Cory Booker, Rahm Emanuel) and has enough sway that they are beating down her door for a guest slot. Also, she looks a lot like Juliette Lewis would if Juliette Lewis had careful highlights and a real knack for working a Chi. But perhaps our favorite detail about this woman? When her youngest child left home for USC this fall, Welch, refusing to fall prey to the empty-nest blues, flew the coop herself: With her husband at home in Oklahoma City, Welch embarked on a “midlife gap year” in Manhattan, renting an apartment in midtown in order to focus on her dual businesses (podcasting, interior design). Could an Eat Pray Podcast or Under the Midtown Sun be on the horizon?

Read “Is Jennifer Welch the Democrats’ Toughest Critic?” here.

Hamnet is…the most controversial movie of the season?

Maggie was an early champion of Hamnet, the book, and Rachel, by the grace of the Virginia Film Festival, an early champion of the movie. And while neither of us, if we’re being honest, is a real Hamlet guy (yeah, that’s right, we said it), we always have a healthy Appetite for Discussion (also, yeah, that’s a Guns N’ Roses allusion, and yeah, we’re making that gesture where we pretend to lick our fingertip and then touch our hip and it sizzles—what’s it to ya)! Two recs: First, the Critics at Large episode “Does Hamlet Need a Backstory?” is a must-listen for anyone who needs to really dig into Chloé Zhao’s Shakespearian weeper. Regular listeners will not be shocked to hear that smarty pants cohost Alexandra Schwartz hated the movie, sensitive new-age guy cohost Vinson Cunningham loved the movie, and everywoman cohost and Sarah Sherman chronicler Naomi Fry (whom we just heard, hot on the heels of her Hacks cameo-in-absentia, has a tiny part in Marty Supreme—wut!?) fell somewhere in between. (Honestly, the big takeaway when it’s all said and done: Dang, Vinson, you are a lovely human—will you marry us?) And second, while Jessie Buckley has been making the rounds, our favorite press hit yet comes in the form of webshow One Nightstand in which Buckley and friend-of-Spread Charlotte Owen literally laugh, cry, and otherwise get into it over the course of an hour.

Listen to the Critics at Large ep here (or wherever), and watch the One Nightstand ep here.

Extra credit: Read James Shapiro’s “The Long History of the Hamnet Myth” in the Atlantic here.

The clothing equivalent of a Nancy Meyers kitchen.

We may not be Sarah Shermans but we are colorful people, y’all! Iconoclasts! Or, fine, at least… individuals. So we tried to resist Jenni Kayne and her 50 shades of high-priced beige—until the day a fancy friend passed along a pale gray cloud of a cashmere sweater to one of your Spreaditors, a garment-slash-comfort animal that shall not be removed from her body until temperatures hit 75. So soft and enveloping is this sweater that this Christmas, she will buy it its own seat on the airplane if need be, though we’re not sure it can survive coach. If she dies this winter, please bury her in it. Point is, there may be something to this Jenni Kayne thing after all. In Inc., Amy Odell covers the phenom, which did $140 million in revenue this year and has but one investor: the designer’s billionaire dad. (She “doesn’t remember” how much seed money he initially gave her, and apparently that fact could not be reported out. Huh.) Did we mention there are mini donkeys in her yard—er, on her “property”?

Read “How Jenni Kayne Built a $140 Million Business on California Chic” here.

Barbie Is a Psy-Op…

Sounds like something Kash Patel would say but, in this case, may be true? In the Nation, Tarpley Hitt writes that Lilli, the blond Barbie predecessor whose image graced German newspaper covers in the 1950s, was the brainchild of a media conglomerate run by that country’s postwar Rupert Murdoch, a known Nazi sympathizer. In her book Barbieland, Hitt writes that Lilli was “the Mickey Mouse of postwar Germany,” with a sexy twist: Initially conceived as a heavily made-up call girl and marketed as a “clever joke” for adults, she was a toy/sex symbol that men carried around when “cruising for girls and having beers at local pubs.” (Nope, not creepy at all.) Eventually kids caught on and future Mattel founder Barbara Handel bought a Lilli on vacation, brought her home, Americanized her, and erased her from Barb’s official company lore to prevent legal challenges—and, perhaps, to erase her worrisomely Aryan roots?

Read “My Search for Barbie’s Aryan Predecessor” here.

In Case You’ve Not Yet Met Gwen:

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Spreaditor Rachel getting a head start on her 2026 Halloween costume:

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Welcome back, Spreadlings!

Top of this morning’s Spreaditorial agenda: Should we subject you, our beloved readers, to yet more Nuzzigate? On the side of enough is enough: Our skin is a mess from all the scrubbing it takes to remove the ickiness of 51-year-old reporter, supposed grownup, and father-of-two Ryan Lizza cashing in on his revenge fantasies in paywalled Substack posts parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 and, as of tonight, this supposed backup aka “strategy memo.” Not only has Lizza attracted reporters to his front door (cue his Livvy-lookalike twentysomething girlfriend’s thoroughly staged Starbucks run), but Semafor reports (clearly via Lizza himself) that Part 1 alone got him 724,000 page views.1 (Which is amazing since everyone we know is doing everything they can to pass the story around without having to go to his site because of aforementioned ick factor.) We’re not sure how to feel about the fact that right here on Substack is unequivocally where this story is popping off, specifically because it’s a free-for-all platform, absent all fact-checking or journalistic standards, where you can say whatever the hell you want. Also, apparently, a self-sustaining mediaworld personal-PR backscratching loop: Just picturing the Substack overlords doing ecstatic donkey kicks when Nuzzi’s publisher taps Feed Me for a softball reader-submitted AMA—and then backflips when Lizza chooses the Feed Me chat to tease Part 4—sends us back to the showers for another scrubdown. (We recommend Josie Maran Sugar and Argan Oil Scrub in Bohemian Fig; a great stocking stuffer!)

On the side of let-’er-rip: Over Thanksgiving we did have a whole lot more fun armchair-analyzing the three individuals (one of whose actions, of course, have far-reaching consequences) at the center of this shitstorm than, say, doomscrolling about the demise of the planet, democracy, immigrants, women’s rights, what-have-you. Yesterday, pondering the simultaneous Dec 2 timing of the release of American Canto and the Vanity Fair Hollywood Issue—and whether editor-in-chief Mark Guaducci will simply allow Nuzzi’s VF contract to “lapse” or will have to take more immediate and more strongly worded action to save himself from being sucked down in her wake—was a way cheaper pastime than pressing “buy now” on that red-light mask we desperately need now (this story has aged us considerably—hint, hint loved ones).

Importantly, three weeks into this thing we are finally getting what we asked for. The big brains have come out to play in a series of meditations, each more scathing than the last. Do you need to read Michelle Goldberg in the Times, Molly Fischer in the New Yorker, and Helen Lewis in the Atlantic? Not unless, like us, you’re in deep. All three lament the book’s heavy dose of Didion, its overwrought language about fiery Cali sunsets, and what Goldberg calls its “grandiose postmodern pastiche.” Mostly, though, these rule-abiding journos are mad that this tell-all doesn’t tell all: In it, Nuzzi never takes responsibility for her crimes—not against her ex, but against the institution of Journalism. Not for the first time, we have to call this round for Queen Helen, who as a Brit and as the most wickedly funny writer out there, is poised to give this story what it desperately needs: scorching humor. Among her snort-inducing observations: “Journalists obviously shouldn’t sleep with their sources, although luckily most of us are so hideous, the subject simply doesn’t arise. (Once, an actor made a half-hearted pass at me at the end of an interview, but apart from anything else, it was 3 p.m. on a weekday afternoon, and I’m not an animal.)” Helen, consider this us making a wholehearted pass.

So fine, we indulged in another episode of the Nuzz. But at this point we feel about this story the way we felt about Thanksgiving dinner by 5:20 p.m. last Thursday: Please, for the love of god, no more. If Lizza is planning a Part 5 and beyond, count us out.

Our Master Cleanse (remember the Master Cleanse?!) starts now,

Rachel & Maggie

Stick around, we’re just getting warmed up! In tonight’s issue:

• The next chapter in our favorite open-marriage story

• Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet birth story

• When did “inflammation” become public enemy No.1?

• O.G. celebrity Rachel Zoe: She’s baaaack!

• #MeToo: Don’t call it a comeback?

🎵“Divorce is divorce, of course, of course…” 🎵 (What? No Mr. Ed fans here?)

Nothing says “It’s the holiday season” like a fresh crop of essays about marriage and whether or not to end one. Since the start of Thanksgiving break, we’ve been treated to several; whether you find them depressing or inspiring is something of a Rorschach test. Here’s the rundown:

1. In Times Opinion, Spreadpal Cathi Hanauer, the woman responsible for not one but two Bitch in the House anthologies, one-ups Gwyneth and Chris by consciously uncoupling from her husband of 33 years and the father of her children. Now she’s moved back to New York City, where she lives alone! She is sleeping well! She is dating! She is still on her ex’s health insurance! Which, honestly: sexy! Rating: 📚💃🤷‍♀️✈️

2. Also in Times Opinion!! (Seriously, we’d read that they were beefing up over there but had no idea the MidLife Desk was so bumpin’!) Lizzy Goodman—another Spread pal, if you can believe it—declares Lily Allen’s post-divorce album West End Girl to be more than the definitive breakup album of the All Fours generation (no, that was us who just declared that—feels accurate, no?) but the definitive midlife crisis soundtrack for all elder millennials. Lizzy writes that Allen captures “the sense of looking back at your old life, knowing it’s gone, and finding this new one full of horrors that your younger self couldn’t even have imagined but that are also sort of mesmerizing and hilarious.” Rating: 🍷💪😜🙃🧀

3. In the Cut, Monica Corcoran Harel applies a modern workplace coinage to a depressing and age-old marital dynamic: “The Women Quietly Quitting Their Husbands” is just another way to frame the decision to live an emotionally separate life from one’s husband while staying married. We emerged from the piece feeling sad for our peers who are stuck, and especially for our grandmothers’ and mothers’ generations ahead of us, who felt really stuck. Rating: 💔😭🧟‍♀️

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Must We Hate On Madeline?

The Spread equivalent of Dickens serializing Oliver Twist in Bentley’s Miscellany? Jean Garnett, popping up every now and then to drop a few more breadcrumbs about her open marriage-cum-divorce-cum-dating life. The latest installment is inspired by Lily Allen, whose relationship flame-out has attracted only slightly fewer column inches than Ms. Nuzzi’s. (See aforementioned Lizzy Goodman piece. Also, last week, one loyal Spreader sweated it out with a bunch of elder millennials at a SoulCycle class devoted to Allen’s breakup album, West End Girl.) This time, Garnett is challenging “the idea of straight open marriage as a thing done by men to women” as portrayed in Allen’s song “Madeline.” We take her point, but must confess: You can count us among the “alarming number of readers” of Garnett’s initial story—in which, as we recall, her then-husband needed sex so badly after the birth of their child that they decided to open the relationship—who were “determined to apprehend it as a story about the domesticity-destroying capacities of the male sex drive.” Yeah, that largely seemed like a thing done to her by him. Was that our bias talking, or the way it actually read?

Read “Postscript to an Open Marriage: On Lily Allen’s West End Girl” here.

Hamnet’s Other Mother

It’s been weeks since one Spreaditor saw Hamnet2 and she’s still weeping, mostly silently but with the occasional guttural crescendo, as one does. Luckily an old-fashioned profile of director Chloé Zhao by Spreader Michelle Ruiz is helping her process. The story has all the elements: gorgeous writing, solid access, evocative secondaries from the likes of Paul Mescal and Steven Spielberg, a Norman Jean Roy portrait (above) that we literally want to frame and hang, and a few surprises. The generally woo-woo Zhao, who is the second of the only three woman to ever win the Academy Award for Best Director (for Nomadland), reveals that she’s obsessed with the theater of the Oscar race, which “she likens to Halloween, a reality show, and a war zone.” The big theme of the piece, however, is motherhood. To direct a movie about a mother losing a child, as a childless person, Zhao said, required a decision: “I’m going to come in and work in a way as if I were the mother that I wish I had. When you feel like you are loved by that kind of mother, you’re not afraid to show your emotions. You’re never going to be judged. You’re seen unconditionally,” she tells Ruiz. Now on the other side, she says that for the first time in her life, she wants children of her own. “I think the reason why I have not had children is because I didn’t think I would be a good mom,” she says. “I didn’t think I could do it.”

Read it here.

A Bananas Move

We are not Bravo people or Rachel Zoe people, but we can appreciate her as a trailblazer both in reality TV and in introducing the masses to the now wildly mainstream concept of “celebrity stylist.” A dozen years since The Rachel Zoe Project wound down, Zoe is joining the cast of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. For the Cut, writer Louis Staples, who is becoming the journalist of record for the Housewives, spent an afternoon with her at BravoCon (it is what it sounds like) on the eve of the premiere. We’ll shut it down here.

Read “Rachel Zoe’s Homecoming” here.

Knocked Up

We don’t usually quote SmartLess around here, but we’ll make an exception for Claire Danes. On getting pregnant at 44:

“I did not foresee this at all, and it was weird. Suddenly I felt a kind of funny shame. Like I was naughty. Like I had been caught fornicating past the point I was meant to. No, it was weird, like I had discovered an edge I wasn’t quite conscious of, like I was going outside the parameters a little bit.”

In a world filled with celebs using surrogates (Are celebrity surrogates a thing? Like, you know, celebrity chefs? Now that’s a million dollar idea…), it’s almost quaint that Danes ground out the baby-havin’ old-fashioned way, no?

Listen to the full ep here.

Body News! Get Your Body News Here!

• Everybody’s throwing around the word “inflammation” these days—influencers, medical professionals, Spreaditors (it’s just a feeling, you know?). But what actually is inflammation? Less clear! Erica Schwiegershausen reports on the culprit of the moment. Read it here.

• In Amanda Hess’s Spread-beloved book, Second Life, she gets into the contradictions and complications inherent in the unassisted birth movement via the Free Birth Society. Now, the Guardian is out with an investigation of the group, revealing connections to infant deaths the world over. Read it here.

• A new drug called zuranolone—which JLaw called out by its brand name, Zurzuvae, a few weeks back—is wildly effective in treating postpartum depression, which new data shows is quite different from other severe mood disorders. Survey says: BRING IT! Read about it in Scientific American here.

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“Reports of patriarchy’s death have always been greatly exaggerated. But so, too, have reports of feminism’s.”

In the Nation, the ever reliable Katha Pollitt asks the question that’s been on many Spready minds since the Epstein emails rolled out (and for many of us, long before): How dumb do you think we are? I.e.: Are we supposed to believe that all of these captains of industry and Nobel laureates who palled around with the financier just… didn’t notice? Or is it that they didn’t care? Meanwhile, Rebecca Traister declares an end to the end of #MeToo. Despite claims that the movement overreached, and the rise of an antifeminist backlash of openly sexist men and butter-churning women, here we have Trump losing his battle to squash the emails, and there we have Larry Summers stepping down. MeToo is still alive, Traister writes, in part because things like “quiet, piggy!” keep happening. “A year after Donald Trump’s reelection, we are beset by daily reminders of why MeToo, and feminism more broadly, came to exist in the first place. And why, despite the fondest wishes of those whose authority it threatens, it is not likely to go away anytime soon.”

Read “Why Did So Many People in Epstein’s Circle Look the Other Way?” here.

Read “Me Too Forever” here.

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Spreadstars,

Let’s say it together: Wow, that happened fast! We thought we’d have to wait until at least 2026 for the gift of Olivia Nuzzi to keep on giving again. But lo, just in time for the holidays: Her literary personal history-slash-“account of the warping of America,” American Canto, is on its way to the printer (it pubs December 2, and if you’re going to pre-order, please do so from the Spread Bookshop here). We decided to take a page from (i.e. rip off entirely) Emma Specter’s addictive Vogue column and share “40 Thoughts We Had While Reading the New York Times’ Nuzzi First Look,” which captured the “modern iteration of a Hitchcock blonde” cruising around LA in her Mustang convertible—and had the chattering classes (hi) stackin’, tweetin’, and ’castin’ at breakneck speed. There is also the bonkers book excerpt in Vanity Fair (with a photoshoot almost identical to the Times’ shoot); play-by-plays in the Guardian and the Washington Post; and Slate rehash so deep that we needed a shower after reading. But for us, it was the Times Styles story that took the cake. Read along with us here.

1. [Friday afternoon, fifteen different people text us the link to the story, all at the same moment.] Oh boy oh boy oh boy! A Red Ryder carbine action, two-hundred shot range model air rifle!

2. Is this a spot for Celine eyewear? Or wait, the Ford Motor Company? It’s a Mustang ad, surely. Or maybe Rolex? Where is a Matthew McConaughey voiceover when you need one?

3. Oh, to be flies on the wall during the meeting at the Times where somebody’s like, “I know, let’s put her in the driver’s seat!”

4. How many times has RFK Jr. watched this clip?

5. How many times has Cheryl Hines watched this clip?

6. Cheryl Hines is friends with Tig Notaro but also Linda McMahon. Nothing makes sense. [Thursday morning update, via Spreadfan : “Hard pass,” says Tig, restoring order to a small yet meaningful part of our universe.]

7. Literally any woman writer they could have assigned to this would be far more judgmental. Or at least skeptical. Or you know, journalistic.

8. How would a Spready woman write about the phenomenon of Olivia Nuzzi and her erotic capital? We hope to find out in the coming weeks.

9. Nope, can’t do it. Even for the sake of our Spread readers, we cannot linger on an unbearable intro about love and the “blue as a flame” eyes of the man who might be the reason we all get measles at Disney World this year. Scrolling on!

10. The sheer ballsiness of calling this book American Canto.

11. Dude, we’re not getting any proof—no text messages, no receipts? Dare we call that a bit… Trumpy?

12. Avid Reader Press does love a hot blonde who declines to provide backup.

13. The fact that the writer met Nuzzi “sitting under a pine tree in Los Angeles last month.” So specific, so utterly random.

14. Yep, copies of the King James Bible and The Divine Comedy are just resting on my dining room table, too! Nothing to do with a Times reporter dropping by!

15. How is this woman still only 32?

16. How was she only 24 when New York hired her as its Washington correspondent?

17. What would have become of this story if Nuzzi wasn’t a “Hitchcock blonde” with what looks to be a 19-inch waist?

18. Reimagine the digital affair between RFK Jr and someone age appropriate and salty like, say, Maggie Haberman.

19. To what extent did Olivia Nuzzi herself stage direct this interview, the setup, this landscape1, this black leather jacket, this choice of writer? Like, omg, is she in the driver seat on this whole thing?! Is she…a genius?

20. Gosh, it would be to fun read Nuzzi-style reporting—dishy, sly in a way that pretty much nobody else is doing these days—on Trump 2.0.

21. “​What is a politician?,” she writes in the book. “Any man who wants to be loved more than other men and through his pursuit reveals why he cannot love himself.”

22. Man men man men man men….

23. Enter from stage left, ex-fiancé Ryan Lizza.

24. Nuzzi, Lizza, Nuzzi, Lizza, Nuzzi, Lizzzzzzzzzz

25. The height of her intimacy with RFK Jr was watching him floss on Facetime?

26. If a tree falls in the forest and exchanges a lot of texts but never gets laid, can you call it a sex scandal and write a whole book about it?

27. She knew he took drugs that deliver “near death experiences.”

28. She knew he was 39 years older.

29. She knew about the bear carcass.

30. And the worm which he seemingly only knew wasn’t a worm because the New York Times reported it.

31. And yet “she liked him just the way he was.”

32. “If it’s just sex, I can survive it,” he told her. Oh he is an actual Kennedy after all.

33. “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” casually cued up on her Spotify playlist. ✔️✔️

34. Did we already know that “mentor” Kara Swisher was the one who ratted her out to the New York higher ups?

35. Thank god we are not getting too deep down in the muck of Nuzzi v. Lizza.

36. But also…it doesn’t seem possible that LIzza will docilely give her the last word. [Cut to Monday’s Substack post, “Part 1: How I Found Out,” which includes a whole raft of new accusations].

37. So Nuzzi’s book about her affair pays off the shared Lizza/Nuzzi debt to Avid? (Booky folks, please call our 24-hour tip line at 1-800-SPR-EADY.)

38. She got hired as Vanity Fair’s West Coast editor before she told them she was writing this book?

39. Bam, Mark Guiducci! Suddenly everywhere, all at once.

40. Should we write her a thank-you note? This is too much fun.

On Friday, we would have called this round for Olivia, but so much can happen in the life of a political scandal over the course five long days. Add one unearthing of a popstar alter ego named Lizzy and a new Mark Sanford rumor thrown onto the fire by Lizza (who wants you to know he’s having THE BEST YEAR OF HIS LIFE and that he once built a shoe rack for Nuzzi). Now who’s actually seating chart seems slightly less clear.

Jesus, take the wheel.

Rachel & Maggie

P.S. Actual press release subject line of the week: “Do You Argue with Your Partner More in Winter? 6 Proven Foods to Stop”

PPS: If you’re having fun here, please hit that ❤️ button!

We’re just getting warmed up! Also in this issue:

• The real life Victoria Ratliff, at your service

• Hilma af Klint, controversial cool-girl artist of the moment (d. 1944)

• Big Child-Free Energy

• How to deal with your parents’ 17 sets of china.

• Through the “Looker” glass

• Tina Brown, in the house

• Patti Smith, on the mic

• A catastrophic event that will definitely impact your kids (how’s that for fearmongering?)

• Lena Dunham unrolls the tape

What happens when your coolest, wisest aunt sits down for a chat with your ex-boyfriend (whom you insist you are wishing well!)?

Patti Smith doesn’t want to be one of Ezra Klein’s many friends. (Anyone else notice how he’s always talking about his “many, many” friends who just happen to be convenient, real-world examples of whatever issue is at hand? Like, we know the guy is popular, but…) In the 78-year-old godmother of punk’s interview on the Ezra Klein Show, she is crystal clear that she’s no fan of his Abundance agenda, and her remarks are a masterclass in the classy sick burn (“We could get into a very unhappy discussion because you and I are on different sides of the fence ….So I can’t get into a discussion with you about that because we have different ideas,” she says, before coolly dipping at least one big toe into her argument). Still, in the latest installment of EKS-as-women’s magazine, Klein has done his homework—he’s read Just Kids “many” times!—and excels in letting the “shamanic” Smith really talk. She has a great riff of on her relationship with Bob Dylan (“we circled around like two pit bulls, sizing each other up), and at one point, when reflecting on the staying power of 1975’s Horses, she is moved to tears, considering how many of her closest co-conspirators of that era are no longer around (Robert Mapplethorpe; Sam Shepherd; her brother, Todd included). Close EKS followers will note that contrary to the show’s typical video format, Patti’s interview is audio only—how’s that for a flex?

Listen here; read it here.

Literally and spiritually wrestling with the burden of STUFF

With the holiday deluge about to rain down upon us all, writers are digging through our collective feelings about all the stuff we don’t know what the hell to do with. Like: the 10,000 Pez dispensers and a leftover stash of Studio 54-era small-c coke that one son inherited from his mom in Chris Rovzar’s Bloomberg Businessweek story about the $90 trillion Great Wealth Transfer, and +/- $90 kabillion worth of dust collectors, knick knacks, and novelty salt shakers being passed down from Boomers to their Gen X and (non-home-owning) millennial spawn. If this keeps you up at night, take heart: For the right price, professional organizers will come to your rescue!

Meanwhile, Wirecutter makes a welcome break from its usual format for Annemarie Conte’s exploration of the tsunami of stuff we return to Amazon and other retailers, and its strange afterlife. Comforting: It’s not actually just shipped directly to some floating dump in the middle of the Arctic Ocean. Disturbing: Instead it piles up (and up and up) in wholesale-pallet warehouses, from which it can be purchased in bulk and “flow back into the system,” largely via resale businesses. Conte convinced her editors to spring for a 450-lb pallet of mystery crap for $742, which she and three colleagues spent two whole days dissecting and cataloguing. Family, friends: Maybe this is the year we get serious about those “experience” gifts?

Read “Boomers Are Passing Down Fortunes — And Way, Way Too Much Stuff.” Bloomberg, Chris Rovzar” here.

Read “We Bought a 450-Pound Mystery Pallet Packed With Returned Goods From Amazon and Beyond. Here’s What We Found Inside” here.

Just say White Lotus and “richer than god” and we’re there.

Forgive us, readers, for taking this long to connect the dots between lorazepam-popping, nightgown-loving Victoria Ratliff—the Spread’s early 2025 spirit animal—and her real-life inspiration, Patricia Altschul, the 84-year-old Charleston matriarch and high-powered art dealer better known as the “dowager countess” of Bravo’s Southern Charm.2 We really fell down on the job there. Luckily Airmail is here to set us straight, on the occasion of Altschul’s new memoir, which is of course titled, Eat, Drink, and Remarry. Our question: WWPD if her husband was indicted for financial fraud and her sons engaged in a little light incest on a tropical vacay on which she has, dear god, run out of meds!?

Read “Diary of a Southern Grande Dame” here.

“The show proved especially popular with women, many of whom reported feeling a mysterious warmth spread through their lower bodies, accompanied by an irrepressible urge to weep.”

Maybe this orgasmic quote explains everything? A few years back we wondered why, suddenly, everyone knew about Hilma af Klint (that’s af, not of, get with the program!), an artist who had been barely a footnote in our art history classes and yet was popping up in posters and Ikea collabs and Guggenheim retrospectives—starring in the kind of cultural resurrection she never came close to in life. Alice Gregory digs up a humdinger of a story of the mystic/artist, whose legacy—what it stands for, and who has the rights to it—has become “something of a national debate” in her homeland of Sweden. Required reading for all art fans, especially those who have a replica of af Klint’s beautiful, exquisitely female-feeling geometric compositions hanging in their dining room (you know who you are!).

Read “The Strange Afterlife of Hilma af Klint, Painting’s Posthumous Star” here.

When I’m not writing? “I see friends and get exercise”

No we did not shed actual tears this morning reading about novelist Maggie Shipstead’s gloriously and intentionally child-free, financially secure literary existence (hiccup) but it did remind us to share Katey Townshend’s recent MacLean’s essay about having a tubal ligation at 35 to ensure she’d never procreate. (Bad news for those barefoot-and-prego MAGA types: a 2023 survey found that a third of Canadians between 15 and 49 years old planned not to have kids.) Both Townshend and Shipstead describe something that is tough to describe: An absence of longing. And something that is easier to describe: Just not being that into kids. And something that is perhaps most enviable and elusive of all: Knowing oneself well enough to understand what you want in life, and taking steps to preserve it. We’d say more about that, but we’re running late for drop off/pickup/pediatrician/orthodontist/soccer practice/art class oh you get the drift…

Read the Culture Study interview with Shipstead here. It’s a followup to this earlier post titled “Big No-Kids Energy.”

Read “I Don’t Want to Have Kids. I Had Surgery to Make Sure I Can’t” via AppleNews here.

The Tina Diaries, Cont’d

When Tina Brown popped up in the New York Times Magazine’s Interview column-slash-podcast, we were pre-delighted and pre-relieved. The chat delivers: Brown, 71, is as funny, effervescent, competent, and wise as ever. The eternal straight shooter talks about how sad it is that young journalists have to think about the business side of the industry, weighs in on the Bari Weiss of it all, and responds to the strange, sideways comments Graydon Carter made about her in his recent memoir. (Suddenly, the great Graydon looks a little smaller.) The pleasant bonus is that interviewer Lulu Garcia-Navarro’s own delight, relief, and admiration for Brown is palpable—you can feel her buttons popping over the chance to interview an idol who lives up to the hype.

Read “Tina Brown Thinks the Uber Rich Have It Coming” here; listen here.

Look! JoCo’s being “bold” again!

A different larger-than-life, blonde Brit editor has launched a thing. Spread interviewee, lover of leopard prints, and Daily Beast “chief creative and content officer” (enough with these titles—we get it: very busy and important, all) Joanna Coles announced The Looker: a new vertical that’s “a bold new destination” for nonjudgemental stories about beauty and plastic surgery, which…fine. Upon further investigation, The Looker (which we keep calling “The Looksist” for absolutely no reason beyond it having a nice ring to it) is a digital mashup of More magazine and XOJane, which…yeah, sure, why not! Headlines in the first batch of stories include “I Got Braces at 60 and Never Looked Better” and “I Had Surgery to Remove My Man Boobs and Life Has Never Been Better.” She may not lead with it, but JoCo’s first job in lady magazines was as executive editor at More, a magazine whose absence we are really feeling as we settle into our own personal More eras. Just yesterday you could have overheard two Spreaditors musing that “we” should bring back More for the express purpose of putting Leanne Morgan on the cover. Join us in manifesting?

Read the announcement here; check out the wares here.

An A+ Story on an F of a Catastrophe

As you know, we’re “excitable” people. But it’s rare that a magazine story gets us so wound up that we’re unable to rest until we spread the word. And last night, we stayed up late, texting around Andrew Rice’s New York story on the jaw-dropping decline in learning among public school children—a phenomenon that began before Covid. Honestly, it makes Nice White Parents feel like a quaint prequel. (When we saw the new New York cover, our thought was: nothingburger. Thank goodness we pressed forward!) Rice’s reporting and number-crunching is thorough, but his writing is (as usual) so buoyant that the piece reads more like (an absolutely devastating, enormously consequential) thriller than a slog.

Read “The Big Fail” here.

Cutting Through the Tape

When we first saw that Lena Dunham had written a Vogue column about face-taping, we rolled our eyes: Why would we want to hear Dunham, post-looks queen of no-judgement that she is, go on about vanity? But turns out, that’s the point: When she cops to being recently rattled by her aging face—and by getting Kybella, mmmhmmm—it feels like a real confession. Plus: While countless beauty essays reference or attempt to channel Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck, in Dunham’s case, it’s earned.

Read “The Quixotic Promise of Face Tape” here.

In celebration of Alison Roman season, we will be taking off next week to give thanks and digest. See you in…wait for it…wtf…it can’t be…December!?

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