Confessions of an Analog Ostrich
The Buster Bluth and Kenneth Parcell of newsletters is back from Vegas *just* in time to catch total media “extinction”... WTF? Plus: Hope you’re in the mood for footnotes!
What would make the perfect women’s magazine? Juicy yarns, hot goss, 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.
Spreadosauruses,
How good are you at metamorphosis?
“Parachute in with your cleats on,” an ally told Kara Swisher when she was preparing to move to California to cover the “newfangled internet” in the ’90s. “They’ll never know what hit them.” It’s been a hard week for a pair of Spreaditors who are afraid of heights and still aren’t entirely sure what “cleats” are. Almost as if they were colluding, New York pubbed Swisher’s “How Silicon Valley Tech Bros Ruined Media” (an excerpt from her excellently titled upcoming Burn Book) and the New Yorker’s Clare Malone gave us, “Is the Media Prepared for an Extinction-level Event?” It’s feeling very Jurassic Park around here, and not the sexy kind.
The combined Swisher/Malone history lesson starts way back, around the point Craigslist wiped out newspaper classified ads—a harbinger that pretty much no one thought much of, other than Kara Swisher, according to Kara Swisher1. Then came the “relentless” digitization of music and movies and books; Google set out to “dominate all content without having generated anything but the delivery system”; and we got to a world in which most Americans distrust the media, get what passes for news from social media, and would rather cut their WaPo subscription than sacrifice one of the 14 different ESPN subs it takes to watch a single season of Professional Athletics. Now, with AI threatening “a complete hijacking of the content universe” (Swisher) we are looking at “nothing less than the end of the mass media era” (Malone). If it sounds hyperbolic, the New Yorker’s detailing of the massive layoffs in this latest annus horrible will convince you2.
But the two articles play the blame game quite differently. Swisher, true to form, swings her tommy gun indiscriminately, going after old media slowpokes3 and the craven Voldemorts of Silicon Valley4 with equal relish. It’s fun to read, but we appreciate that Malone gives the media world credit for spending 30 years “constantly reshaping itself” to keep up. She’d know. Malone is a millennial who has spent her entire career in our shape-shifting industry—whereas Swisher mostly jumped ship decades ago and has perhaps been sitting at too high a perch to feel the deep awfulness of that scramble. What’s happening now, at least one of Malone’s sources posits, is perhaps the inevitable result not of personal, corporate, or even governmental failure (though there’s failure aplenty, across the board) but simply of the existence of an Internet: “I don’t know if anything could have been done differently.”
At any rate, ye olde print v. digital faceoff of your Spreaditors’ era seems rather quaint today. It’s not print media that is facing extinction, it’s media, period: The ads have dried up. And as Swisher writes, “What do you need New York Magazine for if [Open A.I. et al.] can swallow it, digest it, and regurgitate it back up in ways both anodyne and dangerous like the careless Information Age turkey vultures they have always been?”
Our guidance counselor thinks we might be able to get gigs as backup dancers for the DunKings. We tried to explain that orange really is not Maggie’s color but she said beggars…choosers?
Blog life 4-ever,
Rachel & Maggie
PS: Happy Galentine’s Day to all who celebrate. (We don’t—Galentines isn’t so much a day of the year as a permanent lifestyle choice in Spreadlandia—but we’d still be grateful if cupid moved you to hit the heart button on this newsletter.)
PPS: Writers do so love to give this Hallmark Holiday the middle finger: Emily Gould just dropped this story on “The Lure of Divorce” and Anne Helen Petersen’s Culture Study podcast gets into the mood with “Is Divorce Really Contagious?” We’ll get back to you with more on both, soon….
“What kinds of relationships would you want in your life, if you felt you could ask for them?”
The Ezra Klein Show upholds the esteemed mantle of The Spread’s Favorite Women’s Magazine RN™ with a new episode starring author Rhaina Cohen, whose book The Other Significant Others came out yesterday. They acknowledge the media’s frenzied tryst with polyamory—a preoccupation that Ezra insists multiple times is “almost conservative”—but the focus here is on non-romantic relationships for which there are no handy descriptors: Nontraditional co-parents5, as well as important friendships that might rise to the level of life partner, reframed as an antidote to the loneliness epidemic—a case I bought hook, line, and sinker. It’s a beautiful, fast-moving conversation—these two have chemistry—but as usual my favorite bits are when known policy wonk Ezra reveals details about his personal life6 and/or his soul: Movingly, Klein considers the best friend he had to leave behind in a recent move to NYC to be a kind of life partner: “It was hard to talk about [the grief of moving away] with people, because, if I said I was moving away from my wife… I think the misery of that would be legible. People would really come to me, I think, with a lot of sympathy. But moving away from this other important partnership, like, oh, that’s sad, but you don’t make decisions about where you live based on your friends…It was interesting to me how difficult that experience was to convey. It made me think a lot about how few gradations we have in the language for people we love.” Cohen, too, speaks from personal experience7: She and her husband cohabitate with another couple and their children, to whom Cohen says she and her husband function kind of like grandparents: Despite the “bump in chaos…There are just so many ways that my life has been enriched.” Maggie, Your place or mine?—Rachel
RB, Thought you’d never ask! Gas up the Rav-4, I can have the whole damn circus of us there by breakfast-time tomorrow.—Maggie
Listen to the episode here.
Buy The Other Significant Others at the Spread’s lil Bookshop, here.
It’s a bad week for my grandmother’s status vehicle of choice, the Lincoln Town Car.
Kara Swisher derides old media’s “fleets of Town Cars”; a Washington Post story on the current crop of millennial fashion editors8 announces, “Town Cars are over.” Sprinkled atop the Swisher/Malone ice cream sundae of media doomsday-ism came a boomlet of stories on the latest paroxysm of fashion media, specifically: New York Times Styles gave us a full profile on “fashion editor personality” Gabriella Karefa-Johnson—the first Black woman ever to style a Vogue cover in, wait for it, 2021—who walked away from a job that maybe a million girls actually wouldn’t kill for anymore? Karefa-Johnson “didn’t want to be encumbered by the expectations of perhaps the ultimate establishment publication.” She said: “There’s so many things that these institutions represent that I’m not.” Meanwhile Edward Enninful, exiting British Vogue after six years as its EIC, threw himself the magazine equivalent of a Golden Jubilee, cramming 40 beautiful, diverse cover-creatures from his reign—from Jameela Jamil to The Oprah, y’all—onto one seamless backdrop. In a very Town Car-ian exhibit of social power, he actually wrangled them all to one single photo shoot… to produce an image so retouched, it looks entirely spliced together (which is why we’re sharing his IG page: it’s the only place to see that this is not CGI!) It’s a reminder of both the diversity Enninful championed and power he now wields—and why he’ll be charging luxury brands tippy-top “consulting” fees from here on out. The Spread is genuinely excited for the next era of British Vogue led by the chic and smart and, dare we say, rather Spread-y, Chioma Nnadi, even if she does get the very post-Town Car title of “editorial content director.” Cheers, Chioma! —Maggie
Read “Edward Enninful’s Mic Drop” by Robin Givhan in the Washington Post here.
Read “Some Fall Out of Vogue. She Walked.” by Vanessa Friedman here.
Read “The Millennial Women Leading a New Era of Fashion Journalism,” by Ashley Fetters Maloyhere.
The Golden Goddess of 125th Street
At 58, museum director Thelma Golden is such an institution that it takes a 98-year-old white art critic whose own papers sit in the MoMA archives to zoom out and wrap a profile around her. Or at least we’re guessing that was the New Yorker’s calculus in giving Calvin Tomkins9 the profile of Golden on the occasion of the near completion of her Studio Museum’s new Harlem building, scheduled to open next year. For my money, I sure would have liked to read Doreen St. Felix or Lauren Collins on (arguably) the most influential woman in art, but this one’s worth settling in and letting "Tad” (yes, Calvin is Tad) give us alllll the context around the 5-foot dynamo who’s reshaped the art world according to her priorities. As artist Rashid Jones puts it, “The landscape that you see today, which is filled with Black creative voices, that’s what Thelma built.”—Rachel
Read “The Art World Before and After Thelma Golden” here.
Beast Mode.
Nothing makes me feel more dead inside than a man with an overdeveloped “lat,” but in case it helps anyone else here get through Valentine’s Day, it seems the Schwartzenegger-esque “hunk” is back…as seen on Jeremy Allen White’s tightie-whities; Zac Efron’s manly meatiness (the aforementioned both beefed up for Iron Claw); Ryan Gosling’s triple-dip fake-tanned hulk in Barbie; and of course Travis whatshisname’s remarkably dense facial pelt and sparkle-suited brawn. Have at ’em, ladies and gents.—Maggie
For further research: “On the Troubling Return of the Hunk” in Vogue, here; “Playing the Pretty Boy” in Vanity Fair, here; “This Was the Year of the Sports Himbo” in British GQ, here.
Do we really need another nice profile of a nice celebrity lady?
YES. At least we do in the hands of Jazmine Hughes, who’s continuing the Spreadie-winning roll she began a couple years ago at the New York Times Magazine—this time over at the Cut, with an absolutely bangin’ profile of Julianne Moore. (Why did Hughes leave the Times Magazine, you ask?? Have you not been paying attention, we ask??) As with Hughes’s Viola Davis and her Whoopi Goldberg, the Julianne portrait fires on all cylinders: The quotes, the observations, and the writing10, which stopped me dead in my tracks more than once. Hughes goes hard and doesn’t let up; she is fully immersed in Moore’s oeuvre, allowing herself to be at once a full-throated fan and a laser-precise critic of Hollywood and, more subtly, of the celebrity profile in and of itself. This story and its accompanying fashion shoot were obviously booked back when Moore was assumed a shoo-in for an Oscar nomination for playing a lispy and generally baffling pedophile housewife in Todd Haynes’s May December (the movie was ultimately blanked save for original screenplay), but I bet the lineup would look different had the Academy’s acting branch been forced to read this profile before casting their votes.—Rachel
Read “Julianne Moore’s Desperate Housewives” here.
“It’s totally packaged for the 40-year-old woman who is risk-averse…It’s the new glass of wine.” You, too, could be your “best self” with the working gal’s new morning treat here.
The Year She Turned Pretty.
There’s always so much mediocre writing about female friendship11 that it comes as a great relief when theeeee Mary Gaitskill herself holds forth on the topic via the New Yorker. In a personal essay, “The Friendship Challenge,” the Veronica author offers a fresh twist on the Elena Ferrante narrative through her own adolescent relationship with gorgeous, stylish Sandrine—a hot-and-heavy friendship that our young Gaitskill (semi-consciously) throws a wrench into before things even have a chance to naturally sour. In addition to a grabby story, there’s a lot of detail about Gaitskill’s bio for stans to clamp onto, including her three-month stint at boarding school that I’d eagerly read another 10,000 words about12, and an invitation of a cliffhanger that begs for a followup.—Rachel
Read it here.
“BOTUS” stands for Beyoncé of the United States.
Thank you, Queen Bey, for swooping in to save us, as only you can, from the crushing monoculture of Swift mania. What I really crave to help me parse Country & Western Bey is a full Tressie McMillan Cottom op-e, but for now I’m making do with this New York Times blog post and this TikTok. Tressie says that by doing what she does best, “dipping into a genre, taking its most deeply-held tropes, and re-situating them in a distinctly Black, Southern lineage,” Bey is throwing down the gauntlet with Nashville itself. “She’s saying: Which of us is bigger? I don’t have to come to country music. I can bring country music to me. I’m Beyoncé.”—Maggie
Mass nightmare.
Though I’ve been a superfan of Jordan Kisner since “discovering” her in late 2021, I’ve not had the fortitude to read her latest for the New York Times Magazine, about the cluster of suicides that unfolded during the 2021-2022 school year at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and the professors and administrators’ response. My podcast app, however, had other plans for me: An audio version of Kisner’s Sunday Read-slugged feature was published over the weekend, and this morning, it was auto-beamed into my car after school drop-off. Hooked by Kisner’s tender introduction, I didn’t turn it off. The story is a feat in its sensitive telling, which subtly telescopes out into the wider post-pandemic mental health crisis without losing focus of these specific people and this community, and occasionally in its way, even finds faint rays of daylight in the nightmare.—Rachel
Read “The Unthinkable Mental Health Crisis That Shook a New England College Town” here; listen here.
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Reading Swisher skewering the Silicon Valley set while scrolling through photos of her palling around with all of them—Murdoch, Musk, Zuckerberg, Brin, Cuban—oddly calls to mind watching Truman Capote gather intel on his Swans in the new season of Feud: Don’t these people know what she does for a living? Test driving a new theory here: If the Titans of Tech are the true power players of our day… does that make Kara Swisher the new Truman Capote?
2023 saw 2,681 layoffs in broadcast, print, and digital news media at NBC News, Vox Media, Vice News, Business Insider, Spotify, theSkimm, FiveThirtyEight, The Athletic, and Condé Nast….Closures of BuzzFeed News, Gawker. Plus the Washington Post offered buyouts to 240 employees. In 2024, Condé Nast decimated Pitchfork’s staff and folded it into GQ. The L.A. Times laid off 115. Time cut 15 percent of its editorial staff; the Wall Street Journal downsized its D.C. bureau and Sports Illustrated laid off much of its staff. And it’s only February.—paraphrasing Clare Malone, the New Yorker.
Media Slowpokes: “The media has folded again and again to the memelords of tech in the hopes that they do not want what they clearly want, which is domain over all they survey.”
Tech Voldemorts: “...An army of fleece-clad adult toddlers, also mostly white men — some things are enduring — whose knowledge of media and history and, most important, what it took to keep a democracy humming was dangerously thin.”
Here’s Klein on the (recently back in vogue) conservative argument that the solution to America’s problems is for more people to get married and stay married—a conversation that scholar Brad Wilcox continues in the Atlantic this week with “The Awfulness of Elite Hypocrisy on Marriage”: “It does seem to me that even if the only thing you really cared about in life was getting people back into stable romantic partnerships, then being more imaginative about how to take the pressure off those partnerships and, particularly, to take some of the pressure of parenting off those partnerships — which richer families do with money — it just strikes me as a place where our cultural expectations have come into conflict with the things that we now say we value.”
We LOVED this from Klein, on a friend who lives in a commune: “She’s decided to choose the default in her life being the problems of community as opposed to the problems of not having community. That she wants the problems of connection rather than the problems of how to find that connection. And it seems so obvious when she said it that way, but I’d never thought of it.”
Cohen’s gut punch quote: “People are maybe making decisions but don’t realize that they’re making decisions. Like, when I’ve toured through my friends’ beautiful houses that are far away from all of their other friends, I sometimes wonder — ‘You’ve got this gorgeous kitchen, but what are you giving up to have this beautiful kitchen island and this renovated home?’ And I’m not going to be obnoxious and start that conversation with a friend there. But I do think that people are creating conditions where they are disconnected. You know, privacy and control have a lot of benefits. But when the car breaks down and you need to get your kids to daycare and you don’t know any of your neighbors in your cul-de-sac of five houses, you’ve given something up in the process.”
The Washington Post’s millennial fashion editors are Sarah Ball, 38, of WSJ. Magazine; Willa Bennett, 29, of Highsnobiety (and you can hear the squawking about that publication’s inclusion from here); our former colleagues Sally Holmes, 37, of InStyle, and Nikki Ogunnaike, 38, of Marie Claire; and Lindsay Peoples, 33, of the Cut. Curiously, the article doesn’t note that of the five, only two—Ball and Peoples—produce a physical product, but boy do these women have a lot to say about how much harder their jobs are now than back in the day when EICs, ya know, could just make 12 magazines a year and go to parties because they had publishers who put out their fires for them. Oh, what we wouldn’t give to be a fly on the wall of the Robbie, Cindi, Linda, Anne, Ariel group chat!
A bonus rec! I knew Tad was well-seasoned, but once I googled him halfway through reading this piece and came upon the big 9-8, I lost a good hour to the near century of information looping within the Russian dolls of Wikipedia. I primarily stuck with his marriages—there have been four, including to Susan Cheever and Dodie Kazanjian (the Vogue contributing ed makes a cameo in today’s piece), which, to be fair, averages out to about one wife every twenty years. Anyway, it’s superlative rabbit-holing!
Just look at this nut graf, y’all: “In real life, Moore, 63, is deliciously comforting, a massage of a person, with the sort of beauty that feels dreamed up by cosmetics executives or awards committees, painful not in its otherworldliness but in its proximity and potential — you could be this beautiful, but you simply aren’t lucky enough. As an actress, though, she reminds me of one of those ultrafeminine stealth defense tools, a dainty pink hairbrush that’s actually a stun gun.”
Even I’m too diplomatic to get into specifics here!
Hey Gaitskill Nation, Does this already exist?