Armageddon Ain’t Just a Ben Affleck Masterpiece

The Susie Bubble and Bryanboy of newsletters (HAHAHA) is so fresh, so clean, and so sticking to Wellbutrin.

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!

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Spreadlebrities,

Well, well, well. Imagine our surprise when our former colleague Mattie Kahn took to the pages of Town & Country to bemoan the problem of, well…us. “It turns out Ronald Reagan was wrong about the scariest words in the English language,” Mattie writes. “There are four, not nine: ‘I’m starting a Substack.’” As both perpetrators and victims of what Mattie’s calling “inbox armageddon,” we take the point. While we’re trying to stick to our couple’s therapy training and not get defensive—even though this lights up many segments of our feelings wheel—we feel compelled to point out that when we started this thing 168 issues and 3.5 years ago, it was with the grand plan of unburdening you: sifting through the morass of “content” we’re all being constantly bombarded by to spoon-feed you just the crème de la crème. The Spread was intended as a solution to the exact problem Mattie’s writing about¹. But of course, back in the dark ages of 2021, we weren’t competing on this platform with

Tina Brown

and

Plum Sykes

and Selena Gomez’s

Rare Beauty

and

The RealReal

and

Allure magazine

and New York magazine². Or with America’s next great novelist (congrats to

Women of Letters

for a New Yorker story that, we’re betting, has already been life changing for her). Elderstateswomen like us will find the tipping point on which the newsletter industrial complex now teeters eerily familiar: we’re somewhere between freshness and authenticity vs. complete user overload and corporate land grab—just like the blogosphere of old in, what…2009? And yeah, it’s hard not to see the beginning of the end when brands looking for an authentic-seeming “value add” start pumping out newsletters.

What is the etiquette in this era of inbox bombardment? That’s what Mattie is asking (Town & Country, pinkies out, after all): Can you cancel your subscription to your friend’s Substack without effectively canceling that friendship? Do you have to do the paid version? Look, deep breath, everybody³. There will be no “crushing, overwhelming guilt”—as one T&C source described it—in Spreadlandia! Skip a few issues, if you’re busy. Unsubscribe, if you really must. And if you want the full Spread but that paid subscription is straining your pocketbook, let us know immediately by replying to this newsletter and we’ll send you a—as we say in the biz—comp sub, no questions asked. Sisters, life is too short. The Spread aims to sat-is-fy, not stress⁴.

Best wishes,

Rachel & Maggie

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The Diving Bell and the Pregnant Woman

Like you, we’re waiting and watching to see what happens to Adriana Smith, the 30-year-old woman the state of Georgia is keeping alive as a human incubator—despite the fact that she was only nine weeks pregnant when blood clots rendered her brain-dead back in February—until her fetus (legally a full-blown person, after all, in her home state) is viable. The case makes Sarah Zhang’s new masterpiece in the Atlantic all the more poignant. While Smith is clinically brain-dead and being kept alive on life support, Zhang writes about a very different case, that of Ian Berg, who drove his car into a tree at the age of 17, and for the 39 years since has been cared for at home by Eve Baer—the mother who has been “bathing him, pureeing home-cooked meals for his feeding tube, changing the urine bag that drained his catheter,” and otherwise maintaining “a mother’s belief” (this, for us, is the story’s ultimate gut punch) that her son is still in there somewhere. Zhang reports on the evolving science of consciousness that shows (mostly via fascinating fMRI scans) that many of the people we used to call “vegetables” can in fact see, hear, and, to varying and little-understood degrees, understand the world around them. She also questions whether this is, in fact, good news: To what degree do you want to be conscious, if you have little to no hope of ever improving? Again, Adriana Smith is brain-dead, not “minimally conscious” like Ian. But how much would she want to understand about what the state of Georgia is doing to her body—and her family—right now?

Read “The Mother Who Never Stopped Believing Her Son Was Still There” here.

“Hey girl, hey,” say clergy who took shrooms.

“...many of the religious leaders, men and women alike, experienced the divine as a feminine presence. Participants characterized God as “soothing,” “maternal,” or “womb-like.” A United Methodist pastor from Alabama called this “mind-blowing.” (Jaime Clark-Soles, the Baptist Biblical scholar in the study, told me, “God struck me as a Jewish mother at one point, which is funny, since I’m a Jesus follower.”) One of [Hunt] Priest’s fellow-Episcopalians, a man, reported, “I had a total deconstruction of patriarchal religion.”

Kudos to Michael Pollan, high priest of hallucinogens, for continuing to find new and different pathways to his chosen beat—and getting us every time. This time it’s about a scientifically flawed, possibly ethically compromised, yet COMPLETELY FASCINATING study in which more than thirty religious leaders, including a Catholic priest, a Baptist Biblical scholar, several rabbis, an Islamic leader, and a Zen Buddhist roshi, all took psilocybin (Pollan: “The joke about walking into a bar almost writes itself”) to find out: “Would the experience renew their faith, or make them question it?” Y’all, almost all of them saw God, which maybe isn’t a surprise; some experienced this as an erotic, sensuous experience (also not shocked); and a not-small percentage walked away with the (to us) head-smackingly obvious realization that, in the words of Richie Sambora and Ariana Grande, God is a woman. Now how are we getting shrooms into the water supply in DC?

Read “This Is Your Priest On Drugs” here.

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“When Martha Stewart gets a new cat or dog, the first thing she does is bite it on the mouth—“hard,” she specifies. “And it squeals. It knows then that I am its mother.”— from “Martha Stewart and the Show Chicken Breeder She Took Under Her Wing” in the Washington Post, here