Subscribe now

Sun-kissed Spreaderiñas,

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

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

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

XOXO,

Rachel & Maggie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Spread: How did they react to the story?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Spread: Oooh, a book?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2

Subscribe now

Spreaderific Sisterhood,

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

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

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

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

OK can we please get back to talking about women?

Rachel & Maggie

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

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

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

Read more

Subscribe now

Glorious Spreadmaids of honor and dishonor,

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

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

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

Now pass the Pop-Tarts,

Rachel & Maggie

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

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

Read it here.

Vagina Monologues

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

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

Mother, May I?

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

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

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

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

The egg factory is open for business

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

Read it here.

GLP-Infinity and Beyond

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

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

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

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

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

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

• A definitive exploration of the Nancy Guthrie tragedy

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

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

• The juice-y juice on Candice and Brandon Miller

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

• And more. See you on the other side!

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

Read more

Subscribe now

Spreadkittens,

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

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

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

Cannonball!

Rachel & Maggie

🔑 KEY 🔑

⚡: Out now

🍿: In theaters

🎥: Movie

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

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

Read more

Subscribe now

Serious Spreadvestigators,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love ya more,

Rachel & Maggie

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

Beef, Season 3

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

Read the story here.

Tonight We’re Gonna Party Like It’s 1855

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

Generational Energy

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

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

Hassle and Flow

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

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

Single and Fabulous

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

Read it here.

No Other Choice

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

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

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

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

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

Speaditarians,

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

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

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

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

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

Popping our chill pills,

Rachel & Maggie

Erika Kirk’s Bigger-Tent Party

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

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

“Totally Normal Person”

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

Read it here.

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

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

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

Still spitballing here: Maybe “Fathtrescnence”?

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

Read it here.

Read more

Subscribe now

Spreadpanions,

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

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

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

Rachel & Maggie

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

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

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

Mawwiage Problems

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

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

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

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

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

Read more

Subscribe now

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!

Read more

Subscribe now

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)

Read more

Subscribe now

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!!!

Read more

Subscribe now

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.

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

Subscribe now

1

Theme? The GOAT doesn’t do themes.

2

Somebody say tone deaf?

How we make the big bucks.

3

Subscribe now

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.

Read more

Subscribe now

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.

Read more

Subscribe now

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)…

Read more

Subscribe now

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!

Read more

Subscribe now

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?

Read more

Subscribe now

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.

Read more

Subscribe now

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.

Read more

Subscribe now

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.

Read more

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming…hope you’re hungry!

Subscribe now

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.

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

Subscribe now