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!
Spreadwatchers,
After dropping some very promising breadcrumbs in recent months, Lena Dunham announced on Substack yesterday that the no-longer-“girls” of her first and best show are coming back, baby, in a five-episode arc dropping… we don’t know when. Not only has Dunham herself recently enjoyed something of a cultural renaissance, she says the opportunity to revisit these women at forty was simply too rich to ignore:
There are so many ways to be forty—you can live with roommates and get drunk every night, or you can be a parent of four keeping a bustling household in check. You can proudly sleep around, or be in perimenopause and never want to be touched again. I have friends who are in marriage crises but think they’re too old to move on, and still others switching careers for the 9th time. There have been fortieth birthdays thrown at vineyards and fortieth birthday raves. Your parents can be sixty or ninety, alive or dead, ailing or lifting kettle bells (holler, papa!) Your kids can be heading to college or not yet born. It’s an age that sounds so theoretical for so long, so far in the future, that when you’re younger you imagine you might be an astronaut by that time, or a benevolent billionaire, or not alive at all.
Oh, the places we’ll go! The original Girls was birthed in the Obama years, back before most of us were in full-blown panic about the planet, the AI apocalypse, a second (and vastly worse) Trump administration, or the second (and arguably just as bad) adolescence of womanhood. In most parts of the country, you could still get an abortion with what, in hindsight, seems like relative ease. Gawker was still a thing; tradwives were not. Upstate was a cheap place to write your novel. There was no Ozempic. Your Spreaditors were still comfortably employed at legacy print magazines in New York City. It was what Denise Huxtable might have called "a different world"
The Cut rounds up everything we know so far about the new show here, but don’t get your hopes up: “Everything” ain’t much. (Don’t mind us, we’re just mad they got to the Che Diaz joke first!) How will these characters fare in the late 2020s? We organized our first 20 questions here; feel free to jot yours down in the comments…
Which of these characters can still afford to live in New York?
Who will get the fertility-struggle arc?
Will Hannah be afflicted with Lena’s many health issues?
Will Dunham’s body still be Girls’s unofficial fifth “girl”?
Did Marnie grow up to be a wedding-band singer, or is she a real estate mogul who teaches Hyrox on the side?
Is Jessa an underground MDMA therapy guide?
How many times will we hear the words magnesium, blepharoplasty, VO₂ max, Oura ring, sleep divorce, deep-plane, bone density, adult ADHD, therapy-speak, vaginal estrogen, mouth taping, boundaries, protein, Orna Guralnik, Wait Until 8th, strength training, quiet quitting, gummies, 529, peptides, seed oils, AI armageddon, creatine, non-alc cocktails, red light masks, and, last but not least, “my Substack”?
Lena already let slip that Jemima Kirke envisioned Jessa as being an RFK Jr. devotee. How do you write a disenchanted MAHA mom for a show we won’t see for years?
When we last saw Shosh, the friendship was “over.” Who caved first?
Grover is, by our calculations, around nine years old. Has he ever met his surf instructor dad, Paul-Louis?
When we last saw Elijah, he had just landed a part in White Men Can’t Jump: The Musical. Was that the start of a beautiful career on the ole Broad Way?
Ray was always a grumpy middle-aged man. Has he been reborn as a relentlessly upbeat wellness guru? Or is he running against Mamdani?
Did Hannah ever write her book? Or has she become the professor who mentions her essay collection a little too often?
We can assume that Adam Driver ain’t getting anywhere near this. Does fictional Adam live invisibly in Paris now, à la Samantha?
Is Riz Ahmed on board for this?
Is Margaret Qualley on board for this?
Is Taylor Swift on board for this?
Do the original four women even like each other now? Did they ever?
How the hell does Lena expect us to wait until 2028 to find all of this out?
And, most importantly, which of the Girls read The Spread?
Standing by,
Rachel & Maggie
“Calabasas Is the New Abu Dhabi”
Which publication landed the first excerpt from Vogue celebrity profiler extraordinaire Jonathan Van Meter’s long-awaited (authorized) bio of Kim Kardashian? It wasn’t Vogue. In the Cut, “The Three Marriages of Kim Kardashian” takes us back to a gentler time when Kim was a hot girl hawking QuickTrim diet pills and Sketchers shoes, and Kanye was a Celine-wearing Coachella headliner, the arbiter of cool. To her credit, Kim still gives him props for completely Svengali’ing her. As a reality star whom no one in Fashion would dress, she was one more thing he decided to make cool… kind of like Calabasas! Kim’s own quotes are the least interesting thing here, thanks to what Van Meter calls the “compulsory positive spin” she puts on every story. Luckily, her biographer knows how to dig, and wields court documents, internet rumors, and five-plus years of interviews with Kim and her entire circle to serve up details we actually didn’t know about the woman everybody knows everything about.
Read it here. Order Citizen Kim from the Spread’s little bookshop here.
