Divas Live!
The Bette Midler and Kathy Najimy of newsletters—sorry, SJP—is luxuriating in the gospel of Barbra, leaning into Madge as American hero, and swilling the dregs of the Taylor-aid.
What would make the perfect women’s magazine? Juicy yarns, big ideas, deeply personal examinations of women’s lives—and none of the advertiser obligations. Welcome to the Spread, where every week two editors read, listen, and watch it all, and deliver only the best to your inbox.
Halloween Party Season is upon us, and we are in the mood—bobbing for Sekai Ichi apples, playing “Werewolf Bar Mitzvah” on repeat, and bedecking our Lewis the jack-'o-lantern in the finest André Leon Talley-inspired caftans money can buy. But your Spreaditors are having a little trouble agreeing which spooky-scary circa late-2023 duo we should be when we hit the circuit this weekend. Help your sisters out?
We’ve narrowed it down to the following:
There’s always room on our broom for you, dearest readers.
Boo,
Rachel & Maggie
P.S. It’s all going to be OK. The Crown is back November 16.
P.P.S. Trick or treat! Our grubby little hands are out for the digital equivalent of a fun-size Butterfinger: Please “like” this post…or else! (And if you haven’t already, become a paying subscriber!)
Where’s Kamala? Who’s Kamala? Where did she get her “punch-colored” wallpaper? And other mysteries.
The Atlantic and the New York Times Magazine have answered our collective call with a pair of profiles of the unprecedented veep—unprecedented in that she is the first woman to hold the second-highest office in the land and in that she’s got the lowest approval rating in the history of the poll—who’s still keeping a low profile even as 2024 looms. Both portraits set out to dismantle the easy answers (she’s a victim of her own word salad; she’s more comfortable asking questions than answering them; she’s not comfortable talking about her personal life; America is sexist and racist) but ultimately reinforce them. You can all but play fill-in-the-blanks throughout the analysis in both articles as they recount Harris’s crushing interview with Lester Holt (“We’ve been to the border.”) and clock the high frequency of departures among her staff. Still, both are worth reading for up-close scenes with Harris, which capture her in extremely different modes. For the Atlantic’s Elaina Plott Calabro—a very young woman (I spent significant time switching back and forth from her LinkedIn and counting on my fingers this morning)—Kamala attempts to conjure the warm aunt vibes that earned her goodwill while on Biden’s ticket; after traveling with the VP to a handful of American cities and in Africa, Plott Calabro is invited to cozy up with Harris in her residence (recently redecorated, Harris says, to “redefine what power looks like”1). The set piece feels forced by the Harris camp in a way that is telling and, to me—someone who’ll almost always sympathize with a type A woman criticized for her Tracy Flick tendencies—kind of heartwarming. But for the Times Magazine, politics reporter Astead W. Herndon gets a different Kamala, one in full-on prosecutor mode, cutting off her interviewer at the knees again and again during a sit-down in Chicago2. Herndon positions these exchanges as unflattering, exposing Harris’s evasiveness, but strangely, I found myself cheering for Kamala in them like I hadn’t since she was on the debate stage as a presidential candidate. Watching Kamala operate on her own terms, in a world full of chaos and despite a mushy job description, felt like a relief.—Rachel
Read “The Kamala Harris Problem” here.
Read “In Search of Kamala Harris” here.
It’s Barbra. Ms. Streisand if you’re nasty.
We often lament the cover story as a dying (or dead) art, but it turns out the form can still really zing. You just need a star who’s been famous for 600 years, is legendarily inaccessible, and is finally dishing about being propositioned by Marlon Brando. (“I’d like to fuck you,” the actor told Barbra Streisand in the ’60s, with his wife in an adjoining room. And they became the greatest of pals thereafter!) Spreadsters, Streisand did not come to play. She walks into her own Malibu living room where Vanity Fair EIC Radhika Jones is waiting to interview her carrying a folder with Jones’s name on it. (That’s called preparation. Future cover stars, look it up.) They get into eyeliner and fingernails, pick-up lines and projects that never got made, genetically cloned canines, of course, and the 992-page “deeply personal and dishy stream-of-consciousness” new memoir Streisand spent 10 years not just writing but “leaving blood on the page.” (It has no index, forcing name-checkers to read the whole thing to find the juicy tidbits: baller move.) I can think of three people in my life who need this book as a holiday gift and one of them is me.—Maggie
Read “Malibu Barbra: Inside Barbra Streisand’s World” here.
Order “My Name is Barbra” at our lil Spread Bookshop here.
There’s Something About Marty.
Martin Shkreli, the pharma bro who raised the price of life-saving drug Daraprim by 5,000 percent and in 2017 was convicted of defrauding investors (and who “has the biggest, warmest smile ever”), seems to have a Pete Davidson thing going on. Except, you know, creepier. First, from behind bars, he sparked up a romance with former Bloomberg journalist Christie Smythe, a relationship that was immortalized in a viral Elle piece in which Smythe posed wearing floor-length Vampire’s Wife dresses (those eerie images continue to live rent-free in this Spreaditor’s little brain—I mean, look at them!). Now, Madison Campbell, the cofounder of Leda Health (remember this tough profile in the Cut?) has told Vanity Fair about her love affair with Shkreli, who last year was released from prison early. While Campbell was all in, her investors weren’t so sure about the face of the company—which provides rape kits to sexual assault survivors—publicly dating “the most hated man in America.” Who’s next on Shkreli’s dance card? Only time will tell, but I for one would like to nominate EmRata.—Rachel
Read “‘Are You Dating Martin Shkreli?’: How a Pharma Bro Fling Upended Madison Campbell’s Start-Up”here.
I’m savage, classy, bougie, ratchet, sassy, moody….
Well, mostly moody but anyway: RB!! I can’t believe I was late to this one, because as you know dissecting angst around class—social, economic, intellectual—is an actual drug for me. Classy, the podcast by Jonathan Menjivar, was written up by Vogue in August, examined by Anne Helen Petersen last week, and is being devoured by me as we speak. From the show notes: “Menjivar was a blue-collar Latino kid who started working in media and became someone who likes oysters, wears cashmere socks, and is very conflicted about all of it.” Conflicted about cashmere? I’m all in. Episode one swings from the jaw-dropping story of a “life test” perpetrated by Upper East Side private school kids (you will gasp), to insight from sociologist Rachel Sherman who convincingly argues that all of our recent fretting about “entitlement” and how to raise privileged kids to be non-classholes is just a distraction—the question of how “good rich people” ought to be (according to Menjivar, this mostly results in cosplaying as the middle class) is window dressing on the real issue of income distribution. In episode two, Menjivar gets his former boss, Terry Gross, to share her own story of growing up working class, and if that alone doesn’t make you drop everything and listen then, friends, I never knew ye.—Maggie
Listen here.
The top ladymag of this week’s heap.
We originally conceived the Spread as a love letter to old-school women’s magazines—a place to celebrate the best of what they do, supplemented by women-related journalism from gender-general publications and corners of the internet. But this week, I’ve found the OG well to be bone dry. (If you’ve found a fresh, can’t-put-down-able piece of writing in Vogue, Elle, Cosmo, O, Bazaar, or any of their ilk, please do share!) But over at the New York Times Magazine? The proverbial DivaCup, uh, overfloweth. Sunday’s Culture Issue boasted a lineup that could have easily been at home in Elle circa 2017, and I mean that as a mammoth compliment: A gorgeous profile of American treasure Jesmyn Ward, who hosts writer and Harvard professor and newly crowned MacArthur Genius Imani Perry on a tour of her hometown, DeLisle, on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, in hot-as-actual-hell August. A cameo-studded feature on Vegas mom-magnet and Super Bowl star Usher, in which the Oxford American’s Danielle Amir Jackson insists his new music will be a thing (we also get to watch him roller skate). And—the pièce de résistance—a write-around investigating the magic of Taylor Swift by celebrity profiler-in-chief Taffy Brodesser Akner. Coming at us just a couple weeks after Jenna Wortham’s show-stopping valentine to Beyoncé’s Renaissance Tour (also a write-around), the existence of Taffy’s piece at first struck me as overkill; a feeling similar to the fatigue I’ve lately been experiencing from all the second- and third-hand exposure to Taylor’s Eras Tour. Then, as if a spell had been cast over me, I lapped up the whole damn thing, and now—poof—I get it—the assignment and the phenomenon: Swifties, dressed up like the version of Taylor from her album that currently most embodies them. Taffy, who takes her 15-year-old son to the show in Santa Clara, describes the fairy-dust effect: “The acknowledgment of girls as people to memorialize, of who we are and who we were, all existing in the same body, on the same timeline. You are your sluttiest version, your silliest version, your most wholesome, your smartest, your dumbest, your saddest, your happiest—all at once.” Long live the women’s magazine!—Rachel
Read “How Jesmyn Ward Is Reimagining Southern Literature” here.
Read "Can Usher Turn America on Again (to R.&B.)?” here.
Read “My Delirious Trip to the Heart of Swiftiedom” here.
“Je suis l’art.”
With T.Swift plastered everywhere you look these days, it’s kind of a relief to ponder Madonna Louise Ciccone, still the most successful female artist of all time, who’s the exact same age as Taylor’s mom. And can we just start with this, please:
“With the possible exception of Elvis, Madonna is without peer in having inscribed herself with such intensity on the public consciousness in multiple and contradictory ways,” Cathy Schwichtenberg wrote in The Madonna Connection, a 1993 book of essays summarizing the growing academic field known as Madonna Studies.
Madonna Studies! I finally found my major. Anyway, the publisher of cultural historian Mary Gabriel’s new 802-page mega-bio, Madonna: A Rebel Life, was wise to schedule its release to coincide with Madge’s first major tour since 2009, and both the Atlantic’s Sophie Gilbert and the New Yorker’s Michelle Orange give the book and its subject a go. What’s fun is comparing and contrasting two takes from Madonna fans of slightly different generations: Orange is a child of the ’80s who worshipped at “the hi-fi altar”; Gilbert had her Madonna-piphany in the Dick Tracy-era early ‘90s. Gilbert found Sex, Madonna’s 1992 experiment in coffee-table-book erotica, seminal; Orange found it disappointing (she argues Madonna only really works in cases where music, movement, image, and sound come together). Gilbert suspects the singer’s uncanny catwoman look of recent years is a deliberate act of rebellion, one more way of twisting and subverting what our culture expects of women. Orange finds the plastic surgery most surprising “for the way it has made her look not simply unlike herself but trapped, unfree.” But then, as Gilbert says, isn’t this evidence of Madonna’s own particular art—not as a singer, or an actor, or certainly as a director, but as a prescient provocateur, a living, transforming work of art in herself, one who knew from the earliest days of her career that she would become a global force? Gilbert writes, “People have argued about Madonna from the very beginning. That people are still arguing about her—over whether she’s too old, too brazen, too narcissistic, too sexual, too deluded, too Botoxed, too shameless—underscores the scope and endurance of Madonna’s oeuvre.” What do you think, RB, do you have enough appetite to dive into Gabriel’s tome? I’ve already committed to working my way through the Big Book of Barbra until roughly 2025.—Maggie
Maggie, I know you’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Madge this week, but I implore you to invest just 38 and a half minutes more, via a conversation with Mary Gabriel on the New York Times Book Review Podcast. (This rec originally came my way from Spreader Molly of Cambridge, Massachusetts—thank you, Spreader Molly!) Unlike Orange and Gilbert, Gabriel, who is 68, is no lifelong Madonna fan. And because neither Madonna herself nor her inner circle would agree to be interviewed, she essentially approached the book as if her subject was dead, excavating old interviews and artifacts as she’d done for her previous books (Ninth Street Women, about five women who changed the post-war art world; Love and Capital, about Karl and Jenny Marx). But Gabriel emerged from that door-stopper undertaking an absolutely massive Madonna fan! One who still listens to her music all the time! Which despite the many fascinating ideas and tidbits that come up during the interview, is, I think the biggest sell for the book of all.—Rachel
Read “The Meaning of Madonna” in the New Yorker, here.
Read “What Madonna Knows,” in the Atlantic here.
Listen to the New York Times Book Review Podcast with biographer Mary Gabriel here.
Half the population has ’m!
ICYMI, the guidelines for when to start getting mammograms recently shifted. Yes, again. In this, Breast Cancer Awareness Month, I am glad to say women’s magazines are still holding down their end of the bargain—in the health reporting department at least. I mean, did your doctor tell you the guidelines had changed? Mine neither. Writer Javacia Harris Bowser was diagnosed with breast cancer at 38 after getting a mammogram she thought she was too young and too busy to worry about. In Elle, she covers this spring’s “draft update” by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommending that women with average risk (no family history or other risk factors) should start screenings at age 40. This is the first major shift since 2009, when they upped the age from 40 to 50 because of risk of false positives leading to unnecessary biopsies, etc. But since that change, we have not only seen “continued alarming death rates among Black women” (40 percent more likely to die from breast cancer than white women) but also an uptick in breast cancer among younger women: According to Bowser’s reporting, the percentage of women in their 40s being diagnosed with breast cancer has risen 2 percent a year since 2016—and 90 percent of these cases are not genetic. Looking for more good news? Patron saint of all factoids Emily Oster gives us “An Owner’s Manual for Breasts.” Her interview with endocrinologist Dr. Gillian Goddard covers pain, lumps, and leakage; why boobs sag after pregnancy even if you didn’t breastfeed; what’s up with asymmetry; and why some of us (ahem) find our cups runneth over in midlife.—Maggie
Elle’s “For Breast Cancer, 40 is the New 50” is not yet on their site, sigh, but is available in Apple News and in the November print issue—the one with Phoebe Dynevor, whom Rachel is “not convinced about,” on the cover.
Read “An Owner’s Manual for Breasts” here.
Lastly, a random meditation: Why even have a Red Table if you’re hiding your most essential truth?
Last week, with the release of Jada Pinkett Smith’s memoir, we learned that Jada wasn’t actually cheating on Will that one time because, in fact, Hollywood’s most famous married people have totally been separated since 2016. Seven years ago. On the one hand, what business of ours is their marital status? On the other hand, is this not the couple who has made a performance—and a seemingly successful series—of talking out hard truths and their own family issues at the (red) kitchen table of life? Rachel is zero percent surprised by any bit of this, so Maggie will be pondering the meaning of truth and the actual bank account-/cultural currency-boosting powers of the celebrity memoir alone, if anyone is interested in joining her.
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The briefest CliffsNotes for the interiors people among us: Team Harris hired designer Sheila Bridges to redecorate Number One Observatory Circle, where the vice president resides; Bridges signed a nondisclosure agreement. There’s banquette seating in the curved turret room; Madame Vice President remarks that she “just love[s] circles.” The library, which previously had green-striped wallpaper, now has “punch-colored” wallpaper. We never said this was Arch Digest!
One example: When Herndon asked Harris where she falls on the moderate-to-progressive political spectrum, here’s how she answered: “Why don’t you define each one for me, and then I can tell you where I fit…If you want to say, for example, that believing that working people should receive a fair wage and be treated with dignity and that there is dignity in all work, well then, I don’t know what label do you give that one. If you believe that parents should have affordable child care? I’m not sure what the label is for that.”
Your headlines alone are worth the price of admission!!!
Someone let me buy this Alice munro hat right now