Boo. Hiss. Purr.

The Morticia Addams and Lily Munster of newsletters is toasting our wins, drowning our sorrows, and blowing the whistle on fashion's fave fitness instructor.

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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Y’all.

It’s been a week. Because we are at our core glass-half-full-of-skin-contact-wine types, we’ll start with the good. The very, very good! On Friday, we released our rip-roaring podcast interview about the life and times of Spread fairy godmother and American hero

E. Jean Carroll

—the cherry on top of our burgeoning podcasting career. The interview, recorded over wine and Zoom with Auntie E. on Tuesday, October 22, was a banner moment in the Spread space-time continuum, and we hope you’ll celebrate our idol with us by listening if you haven’t already. This woman has tales to tell! And she told ’em. On this note, a hearty hullo to readers coming to us for the first time this week, after E. Jean posted about our chat. Welcome to Spreadlandia, folks! Make yourselves at home.

Also last Tuesday: we learned that the book proposal we’ve been tinkering with over the past few months is likely dead in the water. We spent our precious Spread Retreat putting pen to proposal for The Bibles: Inside the Fashion Magazines That Propelled, Curtailed, and Confused American Feminism. The idea was to hold the (well-shod) feet of women’s magazines to the fire, and thereby create a road map of our ever-shifting idea of what a woman “ought” to be—and how that ideal has been disseminated, adopted, and (oftentimes) rejected for a newer model over time. The Bibles was a project we were both genuinely excited to dig into and, we were fairly certain, a surefire success. Goes to show how much we know. A few hours before we were scheduled to speak with E. Jean, we heard back from our trusted agents: Cut bait ASAP! They informed us that books about the media biz do not sell—full stop. Quote: “Even if you like to read a magazine, you don’t want to read about that magazine.” Instead, we were encouraged to mine a corner of the lady-nonfiction landscape they’re calling “mid-century glamour” in search of a new topic...or to pursue The Bibles as a “passion project” (read: nonprofit). Triple sigh.  

Then, still on the same long-and-winding Tuesday, if you can believe it, we encountered an Amanda Mull piece from Bloomberg Businessweek, headlined—kid you not—“The Print Magazine Revival of 2024.” Mull argues that “people never stopped enjoying magazines, even as the economics of producing them got more tenuous” and points to a list of brands that have made forays back into print this year as well as the Atlantic, which announced that it’s upping its output from 10 to 12 print issues in 2025.

Folks, in the parlance of Auntie Eeee, we are tormented, driven witless, whipsawed by confusion. On the one hand, it’s life—not every idea you pitch will be a winner. On the other, in the wake of this revelation about “media books,” we’ve been wondering if we might be a bit dense… slow to pick up what this entire industry has been putting down for the past 10-odd years? Our thinking has been that if you like the kinds of stories we cover, then theoretically at least, you like…magazines. But maybe we’ve got this all wrong. Does the “magazine” gene in the Spread’s DNA double helix even matter to you, our readers? Does the term “women’s magazine” entice, or repel? We should probably pair this dark night of the soul-baring with a clever quiz to get actual data, but we didn’t make our deadline for that this time around. Maybe one day! For now, reply to this email, or in the comments, with your passionate feedback, please. Consider it an escape from the real news that’s happening this week. 

And on that note, Spreaders, we’ll see you next on the other side—Wednesday, November 6.

Stay strong,

Rachel & Maggie 

P.S. We’re dropping the paywall this week as a welcome to all of our new readers!

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Because this is a highly stressful time to be an American woman and we are all processing at different speeds, we’ve organized today’s Spread into two mini-buffets: one of election-related stories, one that steers clear. If you just can’t take another read involving anything that starts with a T and ends with a rump, skip down to the second batch.

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#1. If exposure therapy is your chosen path, stare into the belly of the beast with two humdingers:

The Call Is Coming from Inside the House

Brace yourselves for

Laura Bassett

’s very good Elle profile of blogger-turned-MAGA superstar Jessica Reed Kraus. Since her Hillary Clinton-supporting days of 2016, Kraus has morphed from California mommy blogger to tawdry celebrity court watcher to RFK-loving, Olivia Nuzzi-hating MAGA “journalist” on this very platform, hijacking the phrase “just asking questions” as a misinformation-era mantra. We’ll quote Bassett here because it hurts too bad to paraphrase: “The 44-year-old now earns seven figures as the top culture writer on Substack, where she boasts nearly 400,000 subscribers (roughly 20,000 of them paying $7 a month) and is covering—or what she constitutes as covering—the 2024 election from an ‘independent perspective on the campaign trail,’ as she says in her Instagram bio.” Ouch doesn’t even begin. Bassett delivers a wise psychological portrait of Kraus, who’d be a lark of a batty, self-aggrandizing character if her whole enterprise weren’t so dangerous. Read it here. 

“Oh snap!”—generationally appropriate response to Maggie’s new story 

…in Harper’s Bazaar, which reveals that the founder of Ballet Beautiful—a fitness regimen that seemingly most of the NYC/LA upper crust once loved to torture itself with—is married to a major architect of the nightmarish ultraconservative agenda that is Project 2025. What do you do when you find out that your (seemingly liberal) fitness instructor is, in fact, married to a person who would like to erase the terms sexual orientation, gender identity, abortion, and reproductive rights from every federal rule and agency regulation; who equates being transgender with pornography; who advocates against gender-affirming health care at any age; who defines family strictly in the “biblically based” Leave It to Beaver sense; who wants the FDA to rescind approval of chemical-abortion drugs; and who believes states should track anyone who has an abortion…just for starters? Read it here. 

P.S. We know that you, of all people, know. Of course you know. But with the countdown on, here are some not-so-gentle reminders that though Trump tries to condemn Project 2025, 140+ people involved in its creation worked in his first administration—and the “conservative LinkedIn” that they created, fully stocked with vetted MAGA loyalists, is ready and waiting, should he be put back in office.

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II. OK, enough of that! Now put your fingers in your ears and: la la la la la…From here down, we guarantee ASMR-grade content that is 99.9 percent Trump free, to soothe your election-addled souls and give your doomscrolling thumbs a needed break.

Is the Work Wife on the Endangered Species List?

Your Spreaditors are concerned. We’ve lamented what a bummer remote-work realities must be for entry-level employees especially—how on earth would they find their “pledge class”?¹ But we have been too busy hyping our own blessed union, week in and week out, to notice that out in the world, work-wifedom is categorically on the wane. For Marie Claire (which we are covering for the second week in a row; hi

Nikki Ogunnaike

),

Samhita Mukhopadhyay

—who also has a piece in Bustle this week about being a just-bitchy-enough boss—reports on the sad state of affairs, which totally tracks and has left us bereft for the next generation. Mukhopadhyay urges remote workers to find connection elsewhere. Might we suggest Substack?

Read “Work Wives Are Going Extinct” here. 

Every Day Is Mother’s Day Around Here.

This week, Jennifer Weiner put the blame for the crushing and impossible pressure that chews up young stars onto all of us—the audience that pays to consume them. And, fair. But, uh, what are we supposed to do with/about that, Jennifer? Relatedly, Glamour interviews a lineup of women who, yes, did put their kids into that same spotlight—but also, strikingly, have had to spend the rest of their lives vigilantly on the front line, making sure they survive it. Tina Knowles,² Mandy Teefey, Maggie Baird, and Donna Kelce (moms of, respectively, Bey, Solange, and “bonus daughter” Kelly; Selena; Billie; and those podcasting bros in tight pants) have a lot in common, with one major difference: While the first three are still protecting daughters in an industry that wants to eat them alive, Donna had a pair of muscle-bound sons who, she says, have had a powerful organization—the NFL—fighting on their behalf with lawyers, trainers, experts, what have you. No one’s saying the NFL is perfect here (the concussions alone!) but the point stands that the Kelces’s survival in a billion-dollar industry wasn’t just up to their mom. 

Read Weiner’s piece here. 

Read “They Raised the World’s Biggest Superstars. Now They’re Telling Their Own Stories” here. 

Flash talk!

Spread-beloved

Hillary Kerr

invited Spready lady, Alloy cofounder, and former Marie Claire editor-in-chief Anne Fulenwider on her Second Life podcast, where they discussed two of our favorite topics: the magazine biz and perimenopause. They did not, however, discuss All Fours—highly sus given that we know Hillary read and loved it and that meno-culture is literally Anne’s job. Can we get a follow-up book club, gals? Listen here. 

Get off our lawn. 

“People” are going crazy for the long-simmering Amelia Dimoldenberg-Andrew Garfield flirtation that came to a well-negotiated crescendo when Garfield sat down with Dimoldenberg for her Chicken Shop show to promote his We Live in Time movie. Back in our day, we walked five miles to school in the snow and a celebrity interviewer could only get a chance to hard-flirt with a famous guy if it was part of a high-access assignment for a red-blooded American print magazine! Those were the days. 

Officially the Only Thing You Need to Read About Mormon Wives 

…that you’ll like, even if you’ve already read everything about Mormon Wives. Describing the MomTok ecosystem for the Atlantic reader who, it would seem, may never have heard of it, Sophie Gilbert writes, “This looks like progress—women making money, at home, with the flexibility to set their own schedule and pick their own projects. But underlying this portrait is a darker reality: The only women who get to succeed at this kind of ‘work’ are the ones who look the part.” We can’t think of a lot of things more satisfying than when Gilbert synthesizes, like, fourteen different cultural threads. This time, it’s “modern beauty standards, the social value of femininity, and the fetishization of mothers in American culture”—but also what reality TV expects of women; the difference between MomTok and #tradwives; and why, for instance, Mormonism reviles “toxins” but can’t quite manage to make a stand against Botox. 

Read “MomTok is the Apotheosis of 21st-Century Womanhood” here. 

The Original “The Substance” Lady

People mag, with a little help from Jamie Lee Curtis, has tracked down Susan Powter—the ’90s workout lady whose tagline, “Stop the Insanity!” is now a litmus test for when you were born—after decades of bankruptcy, anonymity, and a stint delivering Uber Eats. A documentary is under way, but we’re more excited for the eventual, inevitable, scripted biopic. Maggie wants Florence Pugh to star; Rachel is convinced it’s Naomi Watts in an against-type turn.

Alison Sivitz, aka Bald Ann Dowd, is neither bald nor is she the actor Ann Dowd. She says her style role model is Alexa Chung (duh). 

From the Department of Why Didn’t We Think of That Fun Lil’ Story Idea

The Cut’s Cat Zhang has brought us a Q&A with “Twitter oracle” Bald Ann Dowd, the influential, pop-culture-obsessed X persona of a 25-year-old named Alison Sivitz. (We’re not using “obsessed” willy-nilly; girl has seen Oppenheimer 25 times.) Our takeaways: We need to carve out some time to rewatch Hereditary and study the Jack Antonoff/Lena Dunham/Lorde PowerPoint (better late than never), and we hope to find Sivitz living her dream in a writer's room soon! Another good idea from the Cut people: Emily Gould’s new Book Gossip newsletter—Gould’s second newsletter and third column launch at New York mag in recent memory. This one feels a little Brooding, a little Line Sheet, and we’re loving it. Keep it up, Em!

Read “Roll Out the Red Carpet for Bald Ann Dowd” here. 

Funny not funny.

We couldn’t quite put our lip gloss wand on why SNL’s Chloe Fineman/Ariana Grande dual spoof of a Jennifer Coolidge commercial for Maybelline was funny but not that funny… until Faran Krentcil elucidated us via Business of Fashion: It was product placement! Now we’re wondering who else is pay-for-play. Spirit Halloween?

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1. Another shout-out to

Hillary Kerr

for reminding us of this excellent term. 

2. Knowles ladies being masters of PR jujitsu, the Glamour vid was released the week that Ms. Tina intro’d two of her girls—all three in shoulder pads that a Kelce would envy—at a Texas two-step for Momala and announced her upcoming memoir, Matriarch. We did some digging and the regal, presidential-portrait-grade art on the cover is by Nigeria-born artist Kelani Fatai Oladimeji, who as of today had fewer than 10K IG followers and who we predict will soon have… way more.