Cool Your Slice
The Margot Tenenbaum and April Ludgate of newsletters is affecting disinterest—are you convinced?—about the Deep South, Lizzo 2.0, and facelift hysteria.
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Spreadizens,
For several weeks, we’ve been feeling a little guilty about Anna Holmes’s Atlantic story paying homage to the “We Do Not Care Club”—influencer Melani Sanders’s viral videos in which she deadpans to the camera, reeling off a list of concerns large and small about which she and her spiritual team of perimenopausal and menopausal women have (in the parlance of an earlier internet-y era) “no effs left to give.” Things like, say, bras and hard pants and shaved legs and what’s for dinner—the whole long tally of domestic drudgery and patriarchal expectations. To which we say, loudly, Yes ma’am! Hear, hear! Except. Has it ever felt harder not to care? Not only are your Spreaditors not great at not caring about many of the things Sanders checks off; we’re also failing spectacularly at not caring about the countless ones she doesn’t—as an ever-expanding list of lurking threats keeps being added to our plate of worry, a plate that seems full, yet always has room for more. Where to start? Sure, you’ve got vaccine access, school shootings. Today came the renewed anxiety, in the wake of the murder of Charlie Kirk, that a boiling point of political violence may be upon us. But there are also the pervasive, largely beyond our control, and confusingly MAHA-adjacent health concerns that, little by little, have succeeded in infiltrating our brains: We’re talking about the black plastic spatulas of it all. The guar gum in our kids’ yogurts. The YouTube in their frontal lobes. We don’t know about you, but for us, the combined load of all this worry, all this relentless need to care, has crystallized a need for control. And Spreaders, the results are not cute. When did we become the kind of women who feel guilty for even throwing our kids’ synthetic clothes—laden with microplastics, it seems—in the dryer? For slipping CheezIts rich with “autolyzed yeast” in their lunch boxes? And now, on top of this teetering pile of angst, has crept the meta worry about all this worrying, which anyone can see is unhealthy for us, and for our kids too.
The trick, it seems, is to care yet somehow to resist tipping over into a constant state of panic. (The Wall Street Journal suggests beta blockers1—which will make you appear chill or at least a little more like it.) But in the Bulwark’s Focus Group podcast this week, host Sarah Longwell tells the Atlantic’s Ashley Parker that she believes that the Americans who are anything less than anxious at this moment are the ones who are bonkers—and/or not paying attention.
Light flattery in the form of solidarity? It’s a start.
Shakily yours,
Rachel & Maggie
P.S. This morning, hours after the 31-year-old Kirk was killed, we tried to get down to work. At the top of our reading list was GQ’s issue on the State of the American Male, sold with a darling and silly cover shoot of fun, sincere, manly Texan Glen Powell. It was a little hard to process from beneath our vibrating cone of doom—there’s that anxiety again. All to say: We’re going to parse (and stew and hand-wring) on this one and come back to you next week, hopefully with a cogent thought or two. If you have a hot take of your own in the meantime, give us a ring.
A Hideous, Kinky, Fashiony Life
Fashion designer-cum-podcaster Bella Freud—great-granddaughter of Sigmund and daughter of Lucian—has won the Rebecca Mead treatment in the New Yorker, and it’s a pleasure. Freud, who is 64, has had a wild life marked by the in-and-out existence of her beloved painter/womanizer father (he had 14 kids total with an unspecified number of women). If you’ve read Hideous Kinky, her sister Esther’s semi-autobiographical novel about their childhood, or seen the Kate Winslet movie adaptation, you get the tenor of her early years (chaotic); Mead’s story fills in the rest. The peg is Freud’s podcast, Fashion Neurosis, for which she puts the industry’s biggest names (Kate Moss, Alessandro Michele, Juergen Teller) and other culture stars (Marina Abramović, Karl Ove Knausgaard) “on the couch” (get it?) for nonlinear explorations of their minds via clothes. It’s like Where Should We Begin? meets Women in Clothes, with enough id, ego, and superego on display to make great-gramps proud.
Read “An Unrepressed Podcast Hosted By Freud’s Great-Granddaughter” here.
What’s the story, morning glory? What’s the word, hummingbird?
Have you heard about the secret to making friends? The Rachel and Maggie of behavioral science, Maya Rossignac-Milon and Erica Boothby, have a New York Times Opinion piece that gets to the heart of why interactions between most people are perfunctory at best while chit-chat between others may blossom into deep connections: The former stay in the small-talk lane, the latter are able to riff. (And when we say “riff,” we don’t mean Jason Mraz-style scatting—though we kind of do? Bless that little avocado farmer’s heart.) According to Rachel and Maggie Rossignac-Milon and Boothby: “If two people stray from the script and riff off each other, they might begin to feel that electric buzz of being in sync. It’s like being a kid again: Children skip the boring ‘getting to know you’ phase and jump straight into pretend play — transforming into dragon-slaying knights or shipwrecked sailors.”2 Or 1940s jazz singers: Ah ba ba dat di wa waa bop bop bop bu—yeahhhhhhh!
Read “You’re Probably Doing Small Talk Wrong” here.
Are you Team SMAS or Team Deep Plane? Don’t pretend you and everyone you know haven’t been texting about it all week.
In “The Forever-35 Face,” Bridget Read3 applies the full reporting skills and column inches afforded by New York’s seasonal fashion issue to a topic typically given an, um, lighter hand in traditional women’s mag pages. Among the things we can’t stop thinking about in the week since we first read it: The moment when a surgeon slides his finger under a patient’s cheek “all the way to her nose” allowing her features to “move freely and in one piece, like a Halloween mask.” The editorial restraint it took to leave this kind of surgical gore to the last third of the story. What it means for the rest of us that rich 43-year-olds are now having the kind of radical facelifts that were once the preserve of Upper East Side 65-year-olds. The living-in-a-simulation possibility that actually, maybe everyone, everywhere has already had plastic surgery and nothing is real anymore, and what does real even mean at this point? What one doctor means when he refers to a patient’s “tremendous amounts of jowling”—and whether we have it too. And the fate of this blonde4 who emerged from surgery looking like her own daughter. Bridget, we need the follow-up, and maybe a screenplay: What is her life like now?
Read it here.
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