All Dressed Up for Our Werewolf Bat Mitzvah
The Maleficent and Grand High Witch of newsletters is managing our schadenfreude for the ’90s, reveling in art-biz scandal, and craving testosterone. Plus: Let’s go to the movies!
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Greetings to you flesh-and-blood Spreaders, and sure, fine, to you bots, too (who are we to discriminate):
The call is coming from inside the house? While we’ve been over here worrying about actual people falling in love with AI “people” (including Maggie as she continues her emotional affair with her AI assistant “Claude”) and pop stars falling in love with Canadian ex-presidents, a quartet of grasping and notably wan young women were falling under the spell of a heretofore anonymous Substacker (huh!) who calls himself simply 01. This, according to a new—and super-popular—New York feature by Katie Roiphe (!) and recent Bennington grad Isobel Lola Brown. For years, these twentysomethings ran around Dimes Square collaborating on “art” and producing a “film” for this “transgressive,” anti-woke Substacker, whom they’d literally never met or even seen, and with whom they corresponded at all hours. One of the women fell completely in love, swapping violent fantasies with him over text—just darlin’—yet only saw his face because he accidentally turned on his camera during a FaceTime chat. Bystanders on the scene half-jokingly referred to them as “the Manson girls.” Turns out, this Wizard of Oz was a 40-something dude with a history of depression and the government name Jonty Tiplady (New York has a crackerjack fact-checking department, so we’re going with it) who lived in a small town near the coast of England. It’s a lot to take in, and one phrase keeps looping in our heads: DO YOU KNOW WHERE OUR CHILDREN ARE? Read “Angelicism’s Girls” if you dare.
Over and out,
Rachel & Maggie
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Play Misty for Me
Behold Harper’s Bazaar’s first “moving digital cover” (fine, why not!), starring industry-bending ballerina Misty Copeland, whose final American Ballet Theater performance is tonight. Lovely, right?
The Hot-Hot-Hottest Hormone of the Moment
Last week, the Cut published a piece about middle-aged women using testosterone and its little-known and perhaps irreversible side effects: facial hair, enlarged clitoris, partridge in a pear tree. Today, the New York Times Magazine, further proving our point that they might just be the best lady mag around, pulled out the big guns: a full Susan Dominus feature on the Big T, which droves of women claim has dramatically changed their lives for the better, giving them strength, stamina, and in some cases, orgasms. “One woman in her 50s told me that after years of revulsion at so much as the thought of her husband’s breath, she now looked forward to having sex with him almost every night; even in the middle of sex, she said, she was thinking about the next time they could have sex,” Dominus writes. (Dominus’s talent for gathering evocative quotes and anecdotes continues to go unmatched.) Testosterone for women isn’t FDA-approved, an issue that has opened the floodgates for med spas and nutritionists to fill in the gap. The sky-high doses of the hormone (higher than a man’s testosterone levels) that lead to that “world-changing” horndog effect also causes the (head) hair loss, (facial and body) hair growth, voice-deepening, and clitoris enlargement. Uh…ya win some, ya lose some?
Read it here.
“Fun, fun, fun, but still with beheading.”
We will follow Helen Lewis anywhere, even to a comedy festival in one of the most conservative Muslim societies in the world to watch Louis C.K., a man “famous for his foul mouth and his record of masturbating in front of a succession of unimpressed women.” Lewis writes that this “match made in heaven” is all part of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince MBS’s strategy to rebrand the country for a post-oil future. (Throwing 200 kabillion tax-free dollars at Cristiano Ronaldo to kick a soccer ball around is another key example, but don’t tell our sons we put it that way.) Lewis’s observations from the ultimate collision of cultures is by turns terrifying (when her companion points out that the event would be a perfect opportunity for a terrorist atrocity) and guffaw-inducing (when she laments not having had the presence of mind to shout “get your cock out!” when C.K. takes the stage.) And so satisfying: In the end, Helen Lewis is just so much funnier than the flaccid and unoriginal Louis C.K. Get this woman a Netflix standup special and a $20 million paycheck! In the words of intern Miranda, “this was so baller.”
Read it here.
You, sir, are no dummy.
In the wake of the chattering class’s meltdown about Jia Tolentino’s brief and perhaps misguided foray into Airbnb spon con, we tip our hats to New Yorker subject (not contributor) Jason Saft, whom Alexandra Schwartz has just dubbed “the man who sells unsellable apartments” in a story that’s as close to clickbait (for a certain demographic) as that magazine gets. Saft is capitalizing on the story by timing the return of his enormous NYC warehouse sale to this coming Saturday, 10/25. If you’re going, line up early—and can you pick us up a coupla those sweet studded trunks while you’re at it? Read it here.
If you save it, they will come.
Maggie here! Also no dummy? My civically engaged co-Spreaditor and movie fanatic, Ms. Rachel Baker, who teamed up with two fellow Charlottesville, Virginia, pals to save the local indie movie theater! How proud are we? Read about the small-town victory here.
Is “Buy Now, Pay Later” the new McMansionism?
In August, we got riled up about Annie Joy Williams’s Atlantic story about “Cute Debt,” aka the “buy now, pay later” schemes of companies like Klarna and Affirm, which are primarily marketed toward insolvent and apparently desperate young female shoppers. Now along comes Amy X. Wang in the New York Times Magazine with the real payola: The story of a young woman who fell down the BNPL rabbit hole to the tune of $50K in debt. Of course this woman was a fledgling magazine-world Workhorse, galloping her heart out to keep up with the Gstaad-going Showhorses at InStyle, “a place where employees’ appearances ventriloquized their ambitions.” Reading it, we angrily shaking our fists at underhanded Fintech marketing-speak that preys on unwitting consumers while also slapping our foreheads at consumers for being so (willfully, it seems) unwitting and so greedy. Come on, people! What employable adult in their right mind thinks they can rack up Miu Miu bags and R13 boots—no matter how many payments they’re broken into—without one day paying up?
Read “They Got to Live a Life of Luxury. Then Came the Fine Print.” here.
Keep reading after the paywall for magazine schadenfreude, the last word on female ambition, a real WSJ “get”, a she said/she said art world kerfuffle, and Gwyneth’s (unpaid) stint as a guest Spreaditor
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