Batten Down the Hatches
The Mel B. and Mel C. of newsletters is giving everyone a wide berth.
What would make the perfect women’s magazine? Juicy yarns, big ideas, deeply personal examinations of women’s lives—and none of the advertiser obligations. Welcome to the Spread, where every week two editors read, listen, and watch it all, and deliver only the best to your inbox.
Beautiful passengers of the Good Ship Spread-a-lot,
Hoo boy. Your cruise directors are in equal measure inspired and tired. Last night we stayed up reading and it was an especially late one. In the tradition of David Foster Wallace—well, kinda, let’s put a pin in that for a sec, shall we?—writer Lauren Oyler embarked on a vacation cruise and wrote 10,500 words (knots?) about it for Harper’s1. This was not just any cruise. This was a Goop-branded wellness cruise. The resulting piece, “I Really Didn’t Want to Go,” is a delicious, jaw-droppingly confident, occasionally shocking, often crying-emoji-funny, everything-everywhere-all-at-once odyssey that is also a layer cake of meditations on capitalism, self-care, celebrity, media in general and the literary world specifically, the patriarchy—and, oh yeah, the emotional drama surrounding the throuple in which Oyler has recently become entangled in Berlin (Boyfriend 1 is gay; Boyfriend 2 is…perfect). Also, you know, very large boats. There’s a lot going on here, and that’s not all…
Hey, you in the back—pass us that pin we put in the David Foster Wallace thing a few lines back, would ya? Oyler runs circles around the assignment to reimagine DFW’s “iconic” (to certain types) 1996 Harper’s cover story, “Shipping Out.” She manages to skewer Wallace’s dick-swinging while herself luxuriating in every writerly indulgence she can get her hand on (the other hand is busy chain-smoking).
The story left us tossing and turning, mulling our own literary ambitions, and brainstorming what a Spread-branded cruise might involve, other than a really top-shelf strain of norovirus. Then—like an ice-bucket challenge poured directly onto our shared skull—we remembered that unlike Goop, the Spread is not yet worth $390 million and therefore probably not quite yet the branding opportunity Celebrity Cruises is after. Also we’re not sure Spread People are Cruise People (one more reason we love you guys). Instead, maybe we should gather our beloved readers for, like, coffee (for paying subscribers) and the finest tap water (for non-paying subscribers) to “hype” the Spread “brand” in major media markets such as New York City, Charlottesville, Virginia, and Amherst, Massachusetts? Yes, we’re business geniuses. Keep an eye out for a get-together in your city, then pick up our Forbes cover at a newsstand near you!
Move fast and break things,
Rachel & Maggie
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PPS: You’re getting the (technical term) quick-hits version of the Spread this week, because Maggie’s on spring break and has the sunburn to prove it.
Scan-dahhhhl! When Linda Evangelista revealed her “disfigurement” via CoolSculpting last year, we all wanted to believe that the side effect was really, really rare. (Especially since half of your Spreaditors have undergone the fat-freezing procedure.) And yet! According to the New York Times, it may be more like “common” or even “frequent” (italics ours). Read “A Beauty Treatment Promised to Zap Fat. For Some, It Brought Disfigurement” here.
Twin tears: Maybe we’re hormonal—maybe we’re always hormonal?—but Elena Sheppard’s essay in the Cut about being struck by Bell’s palsy a week before delivering her twins, rendering her indefinitely unable to smile, really broke the levee over here2. So, seeking a lighter read, we turned to “Outsourcing My Orgasm” by Jenny Powers, also in the Cut. Um, joke’s on us? Despite its snappy title, Powers’s essay is a tale of the heartbreak of aging, and the balm that can be found in self-acceptance and seizing (so to speak) control in one’s life. Whew. Read “The Week Before My Sons Were Born, I Lost My Smile” here, and “Outsourcing My Orgasm” here.
Love risotto: Sweetbitter author Stephanie Danler has a wrecking ball of an essay about relating to her—abusive, alcoholic, and now immobile—mother through the safety of cooking, a chore/joy that they both talk about a lot, but neither actually do. Read “On Pretend Cooking” on her Substack here.
Fat company: Sick of hearing about the Ozempic craze? Neither are we! Which is why it was smart for the Ezra Klein Show to peg their recent episode with neurobiologist Stephan Guyenet to our current weight-loss-injection moment. They do get into the semaglutides of it all—RB was humbled to discover it’s actually pronounced ”seh-MAG-lew-tides”—but the bulk of the program is spent on the science of obesity itself. It’s a fascinating lesson in biology, behavior, and capitalism, full of concepts and facts that even we —two former women’s-magazine editors who’ve worked on a heap of diet/exercise/health stories—had never learned before. Listen to “Our Brains Weren’t Designed for This Kind of Food” here.
Oooooh, fashion: We all knew Cher Horowitz’s high-tech closet from 1995 would become a reality sooner than later. As if! This time around, Avery Trufelman’s phenomenally well-researched podcast series Articles of Interest investigates why, 28 years later, our wardrobes are still organized analog. Listen to “The Clueless Closet” here.
Sidenote to anyone who read Maggie’s book, The Kingdom of Prep, and has an appetite for more: Drop everything and listen now to Trufelman’s previous season, “American Ivy,” which dovetails almost eerily with MB’s book and makes Maggie feel a strange connection with Trufelman…though the closest they’ve come to meeting is this fun co-episode of The Next Big Idea podcast, “Preppy: The Surprising Origins of American Style.”
Pump it up: What if both parents of a newborn could share the burden—and the joy (we hear?)—of breastfeeding? As Sarah Zhang reports for the Atlantic, with the right course of hormone treatment, non-birthing parents are entering the lactation ring. (Equality is great but just asking: How helpful will it really be for both adults in the house to be hopped up on extra hormones…?) Read “The Moms Who Breastfeed Without Being Pregnant” here.
Hot guy time machine: For Esquire, self-proclaimed Blink (Black Twink) Brian Broome writes about how it feels to be a young and gorgeous gay man, and then—boom—an invisible middle-ager. The particulars are different, but the gist is achingly familiar. (Though FWIW, we think he’s holding up nicely, according to his website.) Read “What It Was Like to Be Young and Beautiful” via AppleNews here.
Repro convention: In the New Yorker, Emily Witt grabs hold of a little topic we’d like to sum up as…THE FUTURE OF THE HUMAN RACE. Witt surveys the fertility technology landscape through a handful of cutting-edge scientists and tech execs with plans to do wild stuff like create human eggs in a lab. This is a MAJOR story with MANY threads, and this is likely not the last you’ll hear about it in the Spread. Go ahead, read “The Future of Fertility” here; more soon!
And finally, a piece of candy: For Oprah Daily, comedian Jenny Mollen, the spawn of “a fitness-obsessed father and Malibu Barbie,” uses a trip to the plastic surgeon’s office as a jumping-off point for an honest and hilarious musing on aging3. (“While my goal wasn’t to look like a sexy baby, I wouldn’t have minded being mistaken for that baby’s au pair.”) The piece isn’t that deep, and that’s part of its charm4. Read “In Pursuit of Perfection” by Jenny Mollen via AppleNews here.
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There’s a great riff about how Harper’s magazine is not the same as Harper’s Bazaar that feels like it was written expressly for us, Spread Nation.
It also reminded us of playwright Sarah Ruhl's devastating 2021 Vogue story about her own case of childbirth-linked Bell's palsy, "When I Lost My Smile,” which Maggie wrote about in the Spread’s second-ever issue.
“I just want to wear spaghetti straps without a bra; I want to get warnings instead of speeding tickets; I want people to fall out of their chairs when they learn that I’m a mother of two; and I want my Barry’s boot camp instructor to straddle me when I’m doing a bench press. I want the respect of being over 40 but the power of being under 30.”
“I spent the best years my body will ever see in a velour tracksuit, only to reach my 40s and learn that black-tie now means a bikini covered in full-length fishnet.”
I would've written this comment sooner, but I just spent the past hour and a half (slow-ish reader) on that Goop cruise story. You guys are a goldmine of great suggestions and now I don't know what I'd ever do without you. xo