A Female Fox Is Called a Vixen

The Lady Kluck and Little John of newsletters is laughing *with* Padma, fighting diet culture with Virginia, and getting in the middle of the Taylor-Tavi ruckus. Plus: A Spread original investigation.

What would make the perfect women’s magazine? Juicy yarns, hot goss, 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.

---

---

Sparkling Spreadsters,

No doubt you have already devoured “Let Them Eat … Everything,” the Virginia Sole-Smith profile in this past weekend’s New York Times. Our first reaction: Substacker Powers, activate! Our second: at last, Lisa Miller’s byline! (We had clocked Miller’s move from New York to the Times’s Well section, and have been waiting with bated breath—you know us!—to see what stories she would tackle there.) Sole-Smith, author of the blockbuster newsletter Burnt Toast and the book Fat Talk, is the current voice of fat acceptance and, in particular, of how to raise kids without body hang-ups—a cause that each of your Spreaditors, as moms, are really ardent about. Given VSS’s beat, what she chooses to feed her own kids while under the surveillance of a journalist is going to be… political. At this point, serving brownies, chicken, and broccoli for dinner simultaneously, without making a distinction between “good” food and “bad” sweets, has become the family dinner trend du jour, NBD. But she also gives her kids easy access to snacks at any time, and for some readers, that was radical indeed. We try to avoid the word triggering around here, but in this case it seems accurate—the concept of unlimited snacks strikes at the heart of what many believe is the 101 of raising “healthy” kids (quotation marks because healthy, like fat and fit, is one more increasingly vague concept these days). To be clear, the Spread is pro-Oreo. We love ’em, our kids love ’em. But we also know that whatever’s in them makes us shovel them into our maws like Cookie Monster. We want to shield our kids from the diet culture that left permanent scars on our own psyches. On the other hand, is it “diet culture” to moderate kids’ access to high-sugar, high-salt processed foods dreamed up by Nabisco executives to be as addictive as possible? 

While the chattering classes were debating these questions in the comments section, your Spreaditors got stuck on a very specific detail that, yes, sounds incredibly micro but struck us as maybe meaningful: The Times story includes photos of Sole-Smith’s home, her plants, her art (love), and her TikTok-worthy snack drawer, starring open containers of Goldfish and Cheez-Its. Had the lids simply been removed for the sake of the photo (in which case your Spreaditors really could have spent the last two days more productively engaged)? Or were we staring at wild snack-drawer abandon, with lidlessness a conscious choice—a symbol of her total-access policy? Clearly we had no choice but to launch a Spread Original Investigation™️, which has consisted of emailing around to various individuals who might have information on the subject. So far, no real leads.

Please send inside info to our dedicated tipline at thespread@substack.com so we can solve this query and sleep tonight!

Rachel & Maggie

P.S. As always, if you like it, ❤️ it.

Can we come over? We spy Welch’s Fruit Snacks, Goldfish, and Cheez-Its in the snack drawer at Virginia Sole-Smith’s house.

---

Here’s what paid subscribers are housing like Oreos this week…

• The 25-year-old guru outselling Oprah

• What the moon is doing to your uterus

• “Front bottoms” vs “back pussies” (don’t shoot the messengers)

• A instant book-slash-Netflix deal that we are serving up on a platter

• The ruthless, yearslong feud between two “American sweethearts” 

• What we wore to Posh’s 50th

• The first truly cute video we’ve ever shared…aww