Bosom Buddies
The Grace and Mamie Gummer of newsletters hits cruise control with imploded Beckhams, "celebrity" journos, three-hour motherhood, molting man-boys, and more...
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!
Singular Spreadbaes,
To those of you out there who are sane people living rational lives outside of the media bubble, it is difficult to explain just how surreal it is to see Anna Wintour play ball on the launch of TDWP2 with such gusto—such a sense of, dare we say… fun? (Is that, or is it not, a smile and 65% of visible face in this photo!?) One of your Spreaditors was a Vogue staffer around the time the first movie came out. In the office back then, it was The Movie That Dare Not Speak Its Name. To admit within earshot of the boss that you had seen it was considered, among underlings at least, career suicide. Now here she is, posing on the cover of her own magazine next to the most respected thespian of her generation—who is playing an iconic character based on her own mythology? Even we cannot keep up with these dance moves.
We’re bringing you the Spread light and sweet this week! Please feel free to bang that ❤️ and Spread the love.
See you in the backseat,
Rachel & Maggie
P.S. When Anna finally retires from Vogue (it’ll never happen but indulge us in the thought experiment) to become a therapist like everyone else leaving media, do you think they’ll move this sawed-off movie set Town Car into her West Village townhouse to serve as her “office”?
The Beckhams laugh at your piddly “family drama”
Nothing about Bridget Read’s lengthy dive into the Beckham-Peltz mishegoss in the Cut is going to make you feel better about the world in general, or about these individuals in particular. But who doesn’t love a story of wedding planner abuse, “£7,000 Wendy’s Frosty machines,” a “floating aisle”—we still can’t picture what that means, please send photos—and dueling superyachts? Between the casual racism of Nicola’s father, the wild materialism of Brooklyn’s people, and the desperate need for attention among everyone involved, we are starting to see why these are the “royals” of our times. Alana Hadid (the “other” Hadid sister) said it best when she posted on IG: “That girl doesn’t want privacy. She’s been trying to be famous for a decade.”
Read it here.
Can a journalist be a celebrity anymore?
It’s a question we’ve thought about a lot since Patrick Radden Keefe—New Yorker staff writer, author of Say Nothing and Empire of Pain—popped up on a private jet in the series finale of Industry. PRK has a new book out, London Falling, about a teenager who fell from a London high-rise into the Thames and turned out to be living a double life. He also has J.Crew modeling gigs, an A24 option on the new book, and a big fatty New York Times profile that really captures the way dudes relate to other, supersuccessful dudes in this industry, so we’re gonna say… yes?
Read it here.
Tough to watch
Vinson Cunningham is pretty much the only person we’d want to hear from on the “professional exercise, however unprecedented” of a grief-stricken Savannah Guthrie returning to the Today show in the wake of her mother’s disappearance. Though relatively brief, his essay inspired no fewer than four heavily-highlighted screenshots in our reading. Including this one: “Although Today has no official religion, its aesthetics—vibrant colors, kind words, total decent positivity—match that of an American public Christianity whose moral and imaginative hold lately keeps attenuating, until, suddenly, in the right, blameless hands, it seems briefly to brighten again.”
Read it here.
“I don’t want to be doing things for free that I don’t get paid for.”
Preach, Emma Grede! The Kardashian-adjacent British entrepreneur has delivered unto us a book called Start With Yourself. In WSJ, Chavie Lieber calls it a “Lean In for the post-girlboss era.” Call us crazy but we feel like we’ve heard that one before? What we hadn’t heard before was the term “max three-hour mum.” After slogging through the 9 a.m. to noon shift with her kids on weekends, Grede says, “I am done with these four.” She has the same strategy for child-rearing she does for limited-edition fashion collabs: focus on creating “high-impact, core memories” and leave the messy, boring in between to an army of nannies, cleaners, the personal chef, and your chief of staff. (Assistants are for losers.)
Read it here.
Paid readers, keep on chomping… over the paywall and through the woods you’ll find more delicious Spreadsnacks: Times Mag vs. T Mag—who’s winning? What men want that JFK, Jr. had lots of. Praise for a woman you never thought you’d hear us praisin’. And a new #relationshipgoal (it’s French, so it must be better)…
