"And That, My Friend, Is What We Call Closure"

Decoder Ring’s Willa Paskin connects the dots from the death of print to Stormy Daniels to why The Air Fryer Journal is the only mag on sale at Whole Foods.

We’re here to reclaim the “women’s magazine.” Every week, two veteran editors read it ALL to bring you everything we believe women’s media should be: juicy yarns, big ideas, deeply personal essays, hot goss, and the odd shopping tip—aka, the full Spread. Plus: Original interviews, podcasts, and more. Come hungry!  

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Superb Spreadfam,

For years, a special kind of rage has overtaken us every time we stand in line at CVS—and not just because they’re taking forever to fill our Lexapro and, while we can put a man on the moon, we apparently still cannot get OB tampons on American shelves. We’re talking about the feeling that comes from staring at the covers of Clay Aiken magazine, The Rue McClanahan Special Collector’s Edition, Volume II, and The Bacon Diet, in the same sacred spot where, once upon a time, we gazed upon House Beautiful, Allure, and Gourmet, debating whether to go highbrow with Vogue or Bazaar, or to buy the one thing we might actually be able to shop, Lucky. Or, wait, ooh, OG Domino! Before you call us a broken record, hang tight—believe it or not, we’ve recently approached something like closure, largely thanks to an episode of Willa Paskin’s Slate podcast, Decoder Ring. Nominally, “Can the ‘Bookazine’ Save Magazines?” explores the phenomenon of those rando, highly specific publications—now basically all you see on newsstands—that are also known as Special Interest Publications (SIPs). But in a larger sense, Paskin takes on the shrinking of print publishing in general, and also the shocking behind-the-curtain machinations of a single publisher, A360 (no relation to Anderson Cooper or Gloria Vanderbilt) that played a role in the “catch and kill” Stormy Daniels cover-up and also now, weirdly, controls the supply chain of basically all remaining magazines. Something about all that reporting and contextualization had an ayahuasca-like effect on your Spreaditors, freeing us up to come to terms with the death of print (howdya like that cliché, Ms. Sherman?) as an inexorable fact, and we mean that in a good way.  

Willa is a Spread woman to be sure: She cut her teeth at dearly departed Radar magazine, blogged and edited at early-days Vulture (where she and Rachel first intersected), wrote features for places like the New York Times Magazine and Elle, and eventually landed as TV critic at Slate. Six years ago, she made the transition to podcast personality with the launch of Decoder Ring, a show that aims to solve cultural mysteries. The highest compliment, coming from us: Decoder Ring eps are a little bit like supercharged CBS Sunday Morning segments, going deep on timeless topics that we didn’t realize we wanted to know so much about. Also a high compliment: The show is an especially brisk way to pass the time on family road trips. Indeed, it’s what we like to imagine Paskin’s own road trips feel like (she happens to be married to the New York Times’s interviewer extraordinaire David Marchese). 

Turning the page,

Rachel & Maggie

P.S. We hope you’ve been loving our interviews; we’ve been having fun doing them! And we’ll be back next week with the full, tradish Spread, chockablock with reads, listens, and more.

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The publication that inspired an investigation.