A Sow in Opera Gloves
The Delia Deetz and Moira Rose of newsletters is chafing our nude nips on father-daughter drama, psychotic social workers, and performative pronatalism.
Welcome to Spreadlandia, where two veteran editors read it ALL to winnow out only the best: juicy yarns, big ideas, deeply personal essays, and hot goss—aka, the full Spread. Plus: original interviews, podcasts, and more. Come hungry!
Cherished Spreaditarians,
For more than a year now, our nipples have been hurting—you know, metaphorically. And since Sunday night introduced us to Chappell Roan’s pioneering nipple-ring drapery, they’ve ouched in an additional, more specific way. With gusto, you might say. (We too have heard about a MacGyver-level operation involving chewing gum and something called “power mesh,” but still: ow.) Jill Lepore’s personal story in this week’s New Yorker is a balm for all of it—an escapist Lanolin cream for a specific kind of 2026 ache. The essay is headlined “Living in Tracy Chapman’s House,” but that’s metaphorical to some degree, too: We learn early on that this “isn’t a story about Tracy Chapman, it’s a story about a house,” a six-bedroom duplex in Somerville’s Davis Square— “the Paris of the eighties”—that housed up to a dozen housemates at a time. (Chapman, who like Lepore went to Tufts, did live in the house but the two never overlapped.) Lepore creates a magnificent portrait of a gaggle of misfits trying to figure it out after college as the Reagan simmered, “trying so hard not to be normal,” and “yearning, yearning, yearning.” She writes, “I’ve been told that it’s the work of young adulthood to learn that you are in charge of your own life….but [that’s] for sure wackier and more fun in a house with a bunch of other misfits especially if at least one person knows how to make a decent frittata.” It’s a lovely way to spend a half hour, and after years of admiring Lepore, we can now say we are fully in love with her.
We’ve got a whole mess of reads for you today—from heavy duty to feather light. Please stick with us, and if you haven’t become a paid subscriber yet, there’s no time like the present.
Rachel & Maggie
P.S. Our hearts go our to our compatriots at the Washington Post today, where some 300 reporters were laid off, including—according to this raw and tearful video posted by longtime Spreadfave Jada Yuan —anybody who created “arts coverage that doesn’t involve Trump.” The features section? “Decimated,” she says. Another dark day for journalism. And a good day for whoever’s smart enough to snap up Jada!
Suffer the Little Children
In recent years, as MAGA has coopted and twisted the basic tenets of Christianity to suit its own purposes—nothing new about that, we know—your Spreaditors, who to varying degrees were both raised Christian, have wondered: Where did the good believers go? By which we mean, the progressives, the intellectuals, the people who support the real fundamentals of that faith, which by the way map pretty exactly onto the values of progressive Democrats? We’re talking about kindness, forgiveness, loving thy neighbor. The stuff we’re seeing people do in Minneapolis every day now, as their mayor pointed out in this interview (of course, they’re caring for their neighbor because that neighbor is under attack by their own government.) The stuff Emily Witt sees teachers and volunteers doing to feed, transport, and educate the destabilized “School Children of Minneapolis.” Anyway, it feels like it’s been a long time since we’ve seen anything more than a glimmer of a better Christianity in the mainstream discourse. But we saw it last week, in Texas Judge Fred Biery’s clever and finely-wrought 500-word decision freeing 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father. (The New York Times helpfully decoded the decision here—to be clear, we would never have gotten all the way here on our own!) Usually when court documents include Bible verses, we get itchy. But when Biery ended on John 11:35, “Jesus wept,” we wept, too. Elsewhere in Texas, we have 36-year-old James Talarico—yes, OK, he once told Joe Rogan he should run for president—who is earning a master of divinity degree at seminary while running for US Senate. That and Talarico opposes the legislation requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in classrooms. And he supports universal healthcare and LGBTQ+ inclusion (he says God is “nonbinary”). And and in this January interview with Ezra Klein, he points out that abortion is never mentioned in the Bible—so why would we foist this “Christian” anti-abortion belief upon people? (On that topic, he also pointed out to Rogan that before she gave birth to Jesus, God asked Mary for her consent, an important detail of the Christmas story if you ask us!) Allow JT to flip the script: “Everyone is religious,” he told EK. Including Trump, who is “very faithful” to the religion of “money and power and status.”
A Not-So-Modest Proposal
Whether it’s the ASMEs or the American Gastroenterological Association or another group—but please don’t make Katie Couric add this to what’s certainly her already lengthy to-do list—somebody needs to give Sam Anderson an award for his New York Times Magazine “letter of recommendation” for colonoscopies. It takes a lot of gall and poetic talent to recast the most maligned and invasive routine cancer-screening procedure as a short vacation, and Anderson does just that, calling his “the most fun I’ve had since the sunniest summer days of his childhood” and selling even the pre-colonoscopy prep as “as liberating as a spa day.” If this doesn’t save lives, we don’t know what will.
Read it here.
…. and in other media news, Puck’s Lauren Sherman has joined Bari Weiss’s merry band of hot-taking CBS contributors, along with a bunch of Substackers—cookbook author Caroline Chambers, chef Clare de Boer, Gen-Z whisperer Casey Lewis—and a host of longevity bros. Well, minus Peter Attia, who (oops!) lost his gig faster than you can say “Centenarian Decathlon” due to his starring and exceedingly yucky role in the latest batch of Epstein Files. (Read “The Longevity Influencer Who Went Into Withdrawal Without Jeffrey Epstein” in the Atlantic here.)
From the mailbag: “This episode really Spreads.”
In a reprieve from the drumbeat of Venezuela and Minneapolis content, the Ezra Klein Show this week gear-shifted into Full Spread Mode™ with Art of Gathering author Priya Parker in the seat. It’s a conversation between friends—Ez and Pri want us to know that they have gathered socially multiple times, OK??—about the shifting definition of hosting, why we as contemporary Americans aren’t naturals at this whole community thing, religion and togetherness, how to actually gather as adults with young children, and why gathering is inherently political. Parker’s north star for any gathering, she says, is that it has a “disputable purpose,” meaning that not only does it not have to be everyone’s cup of tea but it shouldn’t be everyone’s cup of tea. Spreadcon 2026, anyone? Bonus: While we generally don’t participate in “video podcasts”—kind of like we don’t do jumbo shrimp or deafening silence—it’s worth peeping this convo if only for Parker’s super chic dress. (If any of y’all can ID the designer, you know where to find us!)
Listen to “Is Your Social Life Missing Something? This Is For You” here or (just this once) watch here.
Keviiiiiiiiiin!
After we lost Diane Keaton (and yes we do mean we, personally, lost her), the sudden passing of Catherine O’Hara—right when she was swooping into another amazing phase of her career!—was almost too much for us. You’ve read the tributes. You’ve watched the clips. But have you seen this Vogue video from a few years back, where she walks us through her looks, from going shopping for Delia Deetz’s wild black-and-white wardrobe, to the Etsy crown made of zip ties she wore as Moira Rose on Schitt’s Creek? These women! Incredible. Indelible.
Allow Mother Ann to Enlighten You
We’d pay good money to hear Priya Parker’s review of The Testament of Ann Lee, the startlingly original musical biopic about the founder of the Shakers—a religious cult that touted celibacy in combination with ecstatic, communal dance. Set in the 18th-century, the movie, which was directed by Mona Fastvold (who co-wrote both this and The Brutalist with her, uh, verbose husband Brady Corbet), mashes up Shaker hymns and new songs as well as period choreography with modern moves, and stars Amanda Seyfried—who was robbed of an Oscar nom—as a British woman who after losing four children believes she’s the second coming of Christ. (We never said this one was light!) As Lee’s husband, Abraham, Christopher Abbott continues his career-long run of bad-boyfriend types, and as her brother, Lewis Pullman (son of Bill) demonstrates why he’s Kaia Gerber’s chosen one. It all adds up to a deeply moving old-world fantasia that’s risen to the number one spot on at least one Spreaditor’s 10 Best list. Get thee to the theatah!
Under his eye.
The Spreadie Award for best use of ChatGPT this week goes to Substacker Vivia Chen, Ex-Careerist, for serving up this pitch-perfect image of Usha doing her duty as a wife and a patriot (and aren’t they the same thing, after all?) by producing baby No. 4. To anybody who was holding out hope that this one-time progressive lawyer would some day come to her senses, this pregnancy—so beautifully aligned with a pronatalist agenda: the first sitting second lady ever to give birth!—says, “Nope! We good.” And if you thought conservative pols would shy away from the horribly crass phrase “Trump Bump” (at least in reference to their own wives and progeny)—that’s also a hard no, as Senate candidate and one-time Project 2025 architect Paul Dans demonstrated with this post featuring his pregnant (AGAIN) wife Mary Helen Bowers1 at the Melania premier.2
