Blush, Bashful, and a Big-Ass Buffet
The Annie Banks-MacKenzie and Buttercup of newsletters talks mothers, marms, and maids. Also, PSA: From here on out, we will no longer be swinging from the chandeliers, thank you very much.
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Glorious Spreadmaids of honor and dishonor,
When the football player called last week in his hour of need—things were going south between his beloved and the mothers of her godchildren, he said: could we help?!—we rose to the challenge. Far be it from your Spreaditors to point out to a tearful and garishly dressed giant that we are, ahem, slightly too seasoned to play flower girls. After all was said and done, when we emerged into the light outside of Madison Square Garden in the wee hours of July 4th we had the scoop and were ready to dish! Then we remembered that we had signed away the rights to our story in that NDA. Rachel’s burner phone had been confiscated in a body cavity search. And that b Selena Gomez had driven away in the Chevy Chevelle we won in the wedding raffle. Thus our report has been heavily redacted. We’ll leave it to you to fill in the blanks…
Per the football player’s self-destructing Signal message, we entered through a secret underground passageway to find that Madison Square Garden had been transformed into an [adjective] princess forest, where the trees were hung with [number] carats of [endangered gemstone], the moss underfoot was flown in from [planet], and Kristin Chenoweth was singing “Taylor the Latte Girl” from atop a [number]-foot [noun] made of [edible noun]. During the ceremony we dutifully dropped our petals and our demure eyelids, trying not to make direct eye contact with the groom’s brother, who kept mouthing the words to [song title] and pointing at [family member]. Afterward, we were led—in our assigned dresses in shades of blush (Rachel) and bashful (Maggie), the better to complement the bride’s [adjective] [noun], which cost upwards of [number] [currency]—to our place of honor between [celebrity] and an ice sculpture of [other celebrity], both of them crying. Already, our services were badly needed: [D-lister] had just buttonholed [A-lister], Karlie Kloss had just backed into the champagne-glass tower (oops), and [mid-lister] was trying to pick up the bride’s married cousin, who had on the same dress as [WAG] (the horror!). By midnight we’d lost [Spreaditor’s name]‘s shoes, the [gemstone] encrusted [nouns] we stole from the bathroom, and all sense of [abstract noun].
That’s when we woke up in a cold sweat, and remembered that we’re actually not Swifties much less Kelcinators. But it was fun while it lasted! We proceeded to spend America’s entire 250th birthday hoovering a well-balanced—hell yeah—spread of T&T circus coverage from bed. Highlights from the buffet: “In Defense of Taylor Swift’s Bad Taste” in Mother Jones (lol—glad somebody’s having fun over there), “Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s Marriage Plot” by New Yorker political scenester Tyler Foggatt (sure why not), “Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s American Royal Wedding” by Spreadfave Amanda Hess (part of the entire vertical the New York Freakin’ Times stood up for the extravaganza), and a scathingly delightful post from new-to-us-writer Beatrice Hazlehurst’s Hot and Dangerous, “Taylor Said Let Them Eat Cake.” We were officially stuffed.
Now pass the Pop-Tarts,
Rachel & Maggie
“Hey, do you have five minutes (to bang)?”
Never thought we’d get our sex tips from the New Yorker, but hey, who else is giving us extended access to the president and CEO of “The Billionaires’ Vagina Club,” aka Stanford-based, waiting-list-only OB/GYN Dr. Sallye Greenwald? She’s on a mission to extend not her clients longevity per se, but their “sexspan.” (Orgasms in your eighties? Doable!) What are the Priscilla Chan Zuckerbergs of the world getting from their lady doctors that the rest of us are not? For starters, an hour or two of her time per visit. Full body MRIs. Thousand-dollar GRAIL bloodtests that may detect cancer years before it appears. For Olympic athletes, Greenwald has used ovulation meds to make sure they’re competing on days 9 through 14 of their cycle, when energy peaks. For college-age daughters, she’s freezing eggs when they’re nice ’n’ fresh, at 21. For the peri-meno set, she’s stacking forms of HRT to a degree that your Spreaditors found destabilizing. The story’s writer, Melanie Thernstrom, is a Greenwald patient (and married to a private equity player—yes, we looked it up, no we’re not sorry): she’s on an estrogen patch, a ring, a cream, oral progesterone, and testosterone cream. And then there are the sex tips Greenwald doles out—which brings us back to our headline. Stop aiming for “swinging from the chandeliers” sex (if in fact anyone does aim for that; who outside of Greenwald’s demo even has a chandelier?) and go for five-minute get ’er done sex, with silicon lube and a vibrator—which will get you an orgasm and a nicer day in your relationship. Married straights: Skip the fireworks and “stick to super-heteronormative, vanilla, white-picket-fence sex that has data behind it.” #Toldya.
Read it here.
Vagina Monologues
Sadly, because of our essential role in the royal wedding, we were unable to make it to a performance by the three-woman band that goes by the name Ménage àh Twats “dressed in glittery vagina costumes,” singing “a parody to the tune of Lorde’s Royals: Night sweats, hot flash, never getting good sleep / Dry puss, moustache, feeling like a crazy / We don’t care …” Such was the lineup at Menopunkapalooza, a music festival in Portland (of course) that was star-studded with purple-haired, face-melting riot grrrls from bands like Built to Spill and Calamity Jane, plus medical professionals dispelling fake news about HRT—and about which, we feel, the name really says it all. The Guardian took things up a notch with what may be the headline of 2026: “It affected my confidence in my pussy’: gen X punk legends rage at menopause festival.”
Read Lisa Tozzi’s piece here. And prepare yourself: The festival founder has a documentary in the works with icons of the punk rock/culture scene talking about menopause. Viva la Revolution!
Mother, May I?
Rachel Aviv revisited a host of her haunting New Yorker explorations of mental health and found a throughline: Many of the stories focused on mothers and daughters. Looking back at the ones she wrote before becoming a mother herself, she began to see things differently: Whereas before, she tended to identify more with the daughters, now she was starting to see things more from the mother’s point of view. Her new book on mother-daughter relationship revisits stories we’ve loved over the years, and takes its title from one of these complex intertwinings: You Won’t Get Free of It is a line from an Alice Munro story—and Aviv wrote the definitive article on Munro’s betrayal of her daughter. Also in this book: Aviv’s own story of being hospitalized for an eating disorder at six years old—the youngest child, she was told, ever to be hospitalized for the disease. That started a relationship with intense therapy, and a dance with her own mental health, that no doubt explains the empathy she brings to such an endlessly complex beat.
Listen to her talk with NPR’s Tanya Mosely here.
Order You Won’t Get Free of It from the Spread’s l’il Bookshop here.
Read Melanie Thernstrom’s [DRINK!] New York Times review here.
The egg factory is open for business
Someone alert the middle-aged punks (we’re sure the Silicon Valley billionaire vag’s are already in the know): The long-accepted biological wisdom that mammals (including us) are born with a fixed number of eggs—the whole reason we face infertility and menopause, and need loud concerts to reclaim our hot flashes and top-dollar docs to treat our dried out bits—might be… wrong? In Scientific American, Starre Vartan reports that since 2004, biologist Jonathan Tilly has been arguing that ovaries harbor “oogonial stem cells” or OSCs capable of generating new eggs well into adulthood, maybe even after menopause. Skeptics call the methods shaky; believers say they’ve watched these cells form actual follicles in human tissue. Nobody’s produced a viable human egg from an OSC so far, but at the University of Edinburgh, researchers are growing lab-based “organoids” engineered from a patient’s own OSCs, in the hope of turning back the clock on our eggos.
Read it here.
GLP-Infinity and Beyond
A week off for your Spreaditors yielded another pile-up of GLP-1 fare, again ranging from the medically exciting to the socially exhausting: Elle’s Katie Berohn reports that—in addition to decreasing the risk of heart and kidney disease—Ozempic and her kin may also decrease your chance of breast cancer and its recurrence: “A retrospective analysis of more than 110,000 women between the ages of 45 and 80 with a BMI above 25 showed those who took GLP-1s were about 30 percent less likely to develop breast cancer than those who weren’t taking the drugs.” Which, dang, girl! Meanwhile, shock jock Caroline Calloway couldn’t wait to tell us about her journey down to a paltry BMI of—beep beep boop (calculator sounds)—19.8 over in hipper-than-thou Byline. The crux: “First Ozempic will make you skinny and then being skinny will make the world kinder to you if you’re a woman. And then after that, if you have a hedonistic brain chemistry that skews always towards addiction like a fucking heat-seeking missile, GLP-1’s will subdue you in a way that feels like peace.” This, of course, precipitated the kind of finger-shakin’ we like to see from the New York Times’s marm-in-chief Jessica Grose (complimentary)—the kind of thing it is exceedingly comforting to find in our inbox at dawn’s first crack. “[Calloway’s] uncomfortable candor is a useful illustration of how the widespread availability of GLP-1s has further warped the way mainstream American culture views women’s weight,” Grose writes. Then things get interesting: “For women who were already employed or partnered when they started taking a GLP-1, [Harvard economist Rebecca] Diamond found that very little changed, suggesting that the ‘obesity penalty’ for women is largely a first-impression prejudice. ‘The markets that respond are the ones where someone forms a fresh impression of a woman’s body weight: a prospective partner, or an employer considering an applicant who is not employed,’ Diamond explains. If weight is just one piece of information balanced with other factors, it has less impact.” Thanks, Mom! Can’t argue with math…right?
Read “Could Ozempic Lower Breast Cancer Risk?” here.
Read “The Drug That Made Me Want Less” here.
Read “The ‘obesity penalty’ is all too real” here.
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What your mother-in-law isn’t telling you about her woodwork and your effect on it
The juice-y juice on Candice and Brandon Miller
The young woman who made social media addiction a thing—who says she is still addicted to social media
And more. See you on the other side!
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