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Spreadpanions,

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

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

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

Rachel & Maggie

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

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

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

Mawwiage Problems

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

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

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

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

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

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Spreadmates,

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rachel & Maggie

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

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

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

Read “The Night My Marriage Fell Apart” here.

We thought “catching print” was about magazines!

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

Read “The Big Little Penis Panic” here.

“Death by FOMO is a pretty depressing epitaph.”

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

Read it here.

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

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Cherished Citizens of Spreadlandia,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hope you’re hungry!

Rachel & Maggie

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

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

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

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Spreademists,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wine? Someone say wine?

Rachel & Maggie

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

A Tale of Two Moms

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

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

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

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

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

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Dear Spreadswans,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RB: You mean trawler literally and metaphorically, right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MB: OH JESUS.

RB: And there you have it.

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

Rachel & Maggie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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1

Theme? The GOAT doesn’t do themes.

2

Somebody say tone deaf?

How we make the big bucks.

3

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Spreadsweets,

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

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

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

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

Steak knives out,

Rachel & Maggie

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

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

When Skin Is In

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

Read it here.

Our plastic-surgery-story diet starts today.

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

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

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

Paying to Play at Mary Kay

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

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

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Spreadsquad,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rachel & Maggie

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

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

Read it here.

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

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

Read it here.

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

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

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

When Cognitive Dissonance Is an Understatement

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

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

Buy the novel here.

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

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

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Singular Spreadbaes,

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

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

See you in the backseat,

Rachel & Maggie

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

The Beckhams laugh at your piddly “family drama”

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

Read it here.

Can a journalist be a celebrity anymore?

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

Read it here.

Tough to watch

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

Read it here.

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

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

Read it here.

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

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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

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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

And the Spready Award for the winning-est Beckham Family Meltdown Meme

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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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