Beach Blanket Mahjong, Anyone?
The Sandra Dee and Annette Funicello of newsletters is stand-up paddleboarding through the wilds of modern dating, celebrity, philosophy, and medicine. Yep, the doctors are in.
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!
Spread-a-lama-ding-dongs (and we say that with a lot of love):
Longtime Spreaders will have intuited that we jumped—literally, leapt—for joy this week when the byline of Jean Garnett popped up in the New York Times Magazine. Back in the Spread’s early days, Garnett published “Scenes from an Open Marriage,” a lushly beautiful essay about deciding to open up her relationship in the wake of the birth of her daughter (her husband just could not wait for the return of their old sex life, huh) in the Paris Review. It set tongues wagging around the internet and the dinner-party table, and became a foundational Spread read,1 the apotheosis of all the qualities we’re looking for in this endeavor: insightful, unpredictable, revealing, of the moment, deeply female. Also, as run-down-your-hands juicy as a late summer plum. Garnett works as a book editor by day, and also writes the kind of prose that really can’t be rushed, so she only gives us these snapshots into her life in dribs and drabs; we never know when they will arrive, which makes them all the more delicious when they do. We caught the next chapter as a subplot in her essay about being a twin, published in the New Yorker—that’s when we learned that, oh damn, the open marriage experiment had gone bust. Now, finally, our parasocial relationship with Garnett comes full circle (we hope that doesn't mean it’s over?) with “The Trouble With Wanting Men,” which finds Garnett freshly divorced and relearning that dating men (like marrying them, open-marrying them, and divorcing them) can suck quite badly.
Once again Garnett does not hold back on the details. She and her single friends indulge in the age-old tradition of sitting around in bars bitching about the wishy-washy weakness of the “studiously irreproachable” nice-on-paper guys they date—sensitive, evolved types who claim they simply cannot partake in the rituals and basic etiquette of a regular old dating relationship. (“I keep encountering and hearing about men who ‘can’t.’ Have these men not heard of ‘don’t want to?’”) We have a word now for the condition of women being utterly fed up with this shit: “heteropessimism” (which apparently wasn’t damning enough—the female scholar who coined it later amended it to “heterofatalism”). Garnett is more or less pondering whether it’s okay for a modern woman to wish her dude would, well, man the fuck up. And really, after countless reads over the past year and especially post-election about how haaaaaard it is to be a man, it’s refreshing to read one about how hard it is to put up with a man. But we can’t help but wonder (sorry, had to) whether it was ever thus. What did we do in our twenties besides sit around at brunch armchair-analyzing guys who acted like they couldn’t get enough of us, only to withhold, withdraw, ghost, and otherwise demonstrate, in the ultra-demeaning parlance of that time, that they just weren’t that into us? So, much like after her open-marriage essay—so alluringly written and yet, ultimately, a cautionary tale for your boringly straight and married Spreaditors—we are grateful for this peek into life on the other side. Every now and then, we appreciate the reminder of what it’s actually like over there.
Rachel & Maggie
Fuck Cancer
Amber Tamblyn’s moving tribute in the New York Times to Andrea Gibson, “The Poet Who Advocated Radical Tenderness”—who died last week of ovarian cancer at the age of 49—reminded us to go back to a 2023 episode of We Can Do Hard Things, which Spread reader Annie G. once mentioned was one of the best the show had ever done. Now we see why the trifecta of Glennon, Abby, and Amanda call it “the bravest conversation we’ve had,” and, yet again, why Gibson’s death is a profound loss to us all. Listen here.
Sink or Swim
Your Spreaditors will each be with our partners (and children) by bodies of water the week of August 4 (heads up, no Spread that week!) and will be bringing with us the marriage book of the summer, which has made a surprise landing on the New York Times bestseller list and is surfacing, so to speak, pretty much everywhere. British journo Sophie Elmhirst’s A Marriage at Sea is “lyrical narrative nonfiction” that reimagines Maurice and Maralyn Bailey’s 117 days lost at sea in the 1970s, when they sold their home and bought a boat to sail to New Zealand—but got capsized by a sperm whale, surviving on a crude raft. If the Baileys can make it through that, your Spreaditors have the fortitude to survive one measly family vacation, right? Read the New York Times review here and Jessica Winter’s piece on it in the New Yorker here.
Brain Food
Last night we fell into a Rachel Aviv special, and you know how that can be: engrossing. Eye-opening. Envy-inducing. The woman is just so good! This time, it’s about how patients diagnosed with schizophrenia can, on rare occasions, be magically cured—it turns out that what they really had all along were inflammatory or autoimmune conditions that scrambled their brains and, to large extent, ruined their lives… until one day, they didn’t. Aviv covers the history of schizophrenia as a diagnosis and the latest research, which indicates up to four percent of patients worldwide may be misdiagnosed, but also the unbelievable toll on not just the patients themselves but also the family members whose lives are also upended by these illnesses. Coming in at just under an hour, it also makes an excellent audio story. Read or listen here.
Make America Shriveled Again
Under “refuse vaccines” and “drink unpasteurized milk” and “deny women lifesaving health care,” we can now add “tan, baby, tan” to the list of things that are proven to be terrible for us that MAGA/MAHA/BAHAHAHA is bringin’ on back. Grab a beach umbrella, a wide-brimmed hat, and some SPF 50 and feel smug about all that collagen and elastin you’re preserving—you gorgeous creatures, you!—as you read Yasmin Tayag’s reporting on the apparently widespread re-embrace of sun worship in the Atlantic. Read it here.
The Truth Is What’s Constructive: Wardrobe Edition
One li’l article this week managed to light up our group chats like none other all summer: the Cut’s “We All Want to Dress Like Orna.” In addition to drooling over Dr. Guralnik’s architectural-shaped pieces, bold color interplay, playful little braids, the short-and-sweet piece by freelancer Aemilia Madden revealed the identity of the Couples Therapy star’s stylist: Her 25-year-old daughter, Ruby. Read it here.
The Pleasure of Food and Light
Your Spreaditors are a regular couple of Joey Tribbianis in that your girls love sandwiches—like, um, love. In “The Case for Lunch”—a valentine to the midday meal that “unlike breakfast…offers variety, but in contrast to dinner…tolerates repetition”—writer Lauren Collins makes the case that we may be responding to more than the sandwiches themselves: “With the day stretching out ahead of you, lunch can feel less transactional and slotted in than other meals,” she writes. “It’s a moment out of time—the August of the day. …The sweaty, surprisingly sexy meal of bustling sidewalks, office workers sprawled on the grass of city squares…” Delicious on every level. Read it here.
The L Word: Next Generation
In i-D, writer Tiana Randall offers a eulogy of sorts for the power lesbian—the Bette Porter-style hard charger who, Randall argues, has all but evaporated from the pop-culture firmament. Reneé Rapp and Chappell Roan, while excellent entries into the complex lesbian ecosystem, are at once powerful and very much not power lesbians, who she defines as “the art gallerist, the stylish stockbroker, the restaurant owner, the woman in the tailored suit jacket and heels, working in a male-dominated field, and excelling at it. But where has she gone?” From where we sit, she’s gone to the Hearst Tower, baby, in the form of Seventeen editor Willa Bennett. Long live the power lesbian!
Read “What Happened to the Power Lesbian?” here.
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