DRUMROLL, PLEASE: IT’S THE SPREAD 100
The Coen Sisters and the Safdie Sisters of newsletters is counting down to Chinatown (except not actually *Chinatown*). Plus: Tyra Banks’s Karen cut, and the new Virginia Woolfian dream.
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!
Sprulture Vultures? Spreadephiles? Sproovie Buffs?
However you identify, welcome back!
We’ve returned from Spreaditorial Retreat 2025 a bit crazy-eyed, having spent 14 days of summer1 watching 500 hours of screentime in order to make good on our promise to deliver the Spread’s 100 favorite movies of the 21st century. Yes, our 100 is inspired by the New York Times’s recent list; while we thank them for their service, we think you’ll agree this one is… so much better. Of course, getting here was no easy task. Difficult decisions have been made. Darlings have been killed. Our friendship was tested (not really, we actually realized we were made for each other, all over again—except for that time Maggie gingerly suggested we consider cutting Arrival and Rachel started foaming at the mouth). Anyway, we hope you’re happy because baby, we did it all FOR YOU!2
For those who, unlike Maggie this week, have functioning HVAC, we invite you to get started here with our easy-breezy-beautiful and interactive (yes, we are tech wizards) list of the Spread 100. Why not make a personal copy of the doc, check off the boxes as you go, and feel like the culturistas you are? Peruse it here:
Aaaand action!
Rachel & Maggie
P.S. We know we already told you to order E. Jean’s BESTSELLING new book, Not My Type, but let us add that the audiobook is a deeeeeelight that has had both Rachel and her mom in stitches. (Just listening to E.’s special twist on the syl-la-la-la-bles of Trump defender Alina Habba, esquire’s name? Priceless.) Crossover generational appeal? Check!
As Rachel gets her big kids back from sleepaway camp and Maggie prepares to send her littler kids off—her youngest is a first-timer—we wondered how anyone, even Jessica Winter, who incisively and prolifically covers parenting for the New Yorker, would attempt to put the Camp Mystic nightmare into words. Turns out, Winter doesn’t have answers, exactly, and neither does the New York Times’s Ruth Graham, who lives in Texas, has been covering the floods, and yesterday published a short consideration of the significance of summer camp amid unfathomable tragedy. Both writers, however, are sending their own daughters to overnight camp this summer, and we appreciate them for processing aloud with us. The Times also has a list of where to donate to the relief efforts; the Kerr County Flood Relief Fund is also a solid option. Another way to show support: mourners across the country are tying green ribbons around trees in honor of the Camp Mystic community (green is the camp’s signature color). Photo courtesy of Spread reader Katie Stadler, a lifelong camp friend of Rachel.
Who Wears the Pants?
We felt a little spark of that old (and increasingly rare) lady-mag smugness when we spotted the Atlantic doing Claire McCardell. The mid-century fashion pragmatist has long been a mainstay of fashion mags, who periodically remind readers that McCardell gave us side-zips (getting dressed without a man to zip you up!), ballet flats, women’s jeans, and the pockets (pockets!) in those pants you’re wearing. (Your Spreaditors have both written and edited many of these McCardell squibs over the years.) But that smugness faded fast when we realized they’d set the Julia Turner to the task of writing what will indubitably be the best of many reviews of Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson’s new, “lively and psychologically astute biography,” Claire McCardell: The Designer Who Set Women Free.
Read “It Has Pockets!” here.
Order Claire McCardell at the Spread’s Bookshop here.
Great Minds!
This week your faithful Spreaditor Maggie published a piece in Bustle about the ultimate happy-marriage solution: Duh, just don’t live together! The story inevitably includes references to both All Fours (drink!) and Virginia Woolf’s cri de coeur for every woman to have £500 a year and A Room of One’s Own for the sake of creativity but also just… wholeness. As it happens, the story came out the very day that increasingly prolific Spreadfave Xochitl Gonzalez reflected in the Atlantic on finally reading Woolf’s seminal text. In her college years, as “a working-class Latina plopped onto an Ivy League campus,” Gonzalez had little time for the standard white-lady feminist canon. And didn’t it go without saying that women needed their own money and space to make art? “Many times, I felt I had to set aside my interests as a woman in favor of my interests as a person of color, and I blamed much of that on the exclusionary white lens that, until recently, dominated feminist discourse. And I placed all this emotional baggage onto poor Virginia Woolf.” Read about cracking A Room for the first time in the 2020s, and discovering “a piece of another woman’s soul” here.
Read “Sex, Love & Twice the Real Estate” here.
Circle of Fire
We were rereading a little-circulated Maggie O’Farrell novel, Instructions for a Heatwave, this summer because have you felt it out there, and had just rediscovered a character in the book, Monica, who is so traumatized by her mother’s terrible pregnancy and early parenting of her own younger sister that she ends her own pregnancy to avoid having to suffer through that herself—right when Emily Jace McLaughlin delivered her own story about “counting down the weeks until my execution date,” ie: anticipating the birth of her first child. In the Cut, McLaughlin writes about discovering the details of her own traumatic birth (resulting in a broken clavicle that has never been quite right and a lifetime’s worth of weird energy with her mom), and then learning about her mom’s own traumatic birth, and facing the fear of repeating those horrific ordeals herself. She finally learns there’s a name for that kind of terror: “Tokophobia — it sounded like a joke. Defined as the pathological fear of pregnancy, this debilitating foreboding can lead women to avoid pregnancy altogether, request C-sections, or sterilization. Its recoil can follow trauma, cultural narratives of birth as violent, forceps deliveries.” If that wasn’t bad enough, the truly awful postpartum twist in McLaughlin’s tale prompted the return of a truly original thought that both of your Spreaditors shared after our traumatic childbirth experiences: Imagine if the continuation of the human race was dependent on men enduring this shit!
Read it here.
Discover the full Maggie O’Farrell oeuvre in our Bookshop.
The (SATC) Empire Strikes Back
Anyone who’s up to date on the latest (and, we think we can all agree, final) season of And Just Like That… will understand why the original IP is now coming out of the woodwork to speak up for itself. First we had Candace Bushnell really feeling herself and her cellulite-free stems in Sag Harbor. Then son-of-Ephron Jacob Bernstein caught up with the OG Mr Big, former Condé publisher Ron Galotti, who now spends his days cosplaying Aiden somewhere up north (Vermont? Canada? Is there a difference?), riding tractors and wearing Crocs. CROCS, people. It’s a rich text. Big gets in some unnecessarily low jabs at Bushnell—what hole in your soul are you trying to fill, sir, 30+ years after the fact, by telling a reporter that you never said “I love you,” and once ordered Candace to come over and clear her stuff out of your place after you met the woman you did love? (IRL Natasha alert!). Carrie lovers get the last laugh when Bernstein tosses in a lit match: Turns out Galotti is hoping to publish a memoir. He calls it “Goodbye Mr. Big.” Guess what? No one’s buying.
Read it here.
Are your group texts consumed with “Annie” Hathaway’s face and presumed plastic surgeon? Same, same.
Tyra (Hate) Mail!
America’s Next Top Model devotees (guilty) will lap up season—sorry, cycle!—nine contestant Sarah Hartshorne’s no-holds-barred account of her 2007 cast’s model makeover day, or in the words of Hartshorne and her buddy on the show, Bianca, “New Weave Day.” In the nearly 20 years hence, much has been made of Tyra Banks’s deranged and loudly articulated on-screen raison d’être: to break the girls in the name of good modeling! You know, smize through it, ladies! And Hartshorne is as solid a narrator on the page as she was in the ITM booth, explaining how the “Rihanna” haircut she was given on the show (that now reads as full-on Karen) ultimately maimed her chances in the real world of plus-size modeling, a slice of the industry that is said to go for “fat, happy girls with fat, happy teeth and hair.” The piece is an excerpt from Hartshorne’s forthcoming memoir (get a load of that cover!), and comes with a handy-dandy follow-up Q&A from the Vulture folks.
Read the excerpt here.
Make room on the Spread 101.
That stampede you hear is screenwriters racing to put their stamp on a true-crime story that is—in our elevator pitch, at least—Phantom Thread meets Apple Cider Vinegar: The case of “mushroom murderer” Erin Patterson, the Australian woman convicted of deliberately killing her in-laws via beef wellington laced with deadly fungi. Look, we don’t condone it, we just know great material when we see it.
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Shoutout to 500 Days of Summer, which would have made this cut if this was the 150 Spreadiest Movies of All Time. Also on the floor: Spotlight, Midsommar, Easy A, Frances Ha, The One I Love, Hustlers, Ghost World, All of Us Strangers—oh lord, don’t get us started again!
the BathTub Art was worth waiting 100 Spread issues for!!!!
The legitimacy of the Spread 100 is secured for all time by the inclusion of Bring It On
Thank you