From the Mouths of Babes
(And by “babes” we mean Ross Douthat.) The Frances and Lisa Houseman of newsletters pachangas our way from Parma to New Haven to Montecito.
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.
SpreadFam,
Occasionally, a convergence of articles comes along to pull back the curtain and reveal that, yes, it’s us, your Spreaditors, standing here with our meaty paws on the levers of modern society (oh hey 👋, hi there 👋). That happened this week with a story you’ve probably already group-texted about: Kerry Howley’s New York cover feature outing “jacked” wellness prophet and podcaster Andrew Huberman, PhD,1 as a cad with control issues who does not, in fact, run his own “Stanford lab” (not one that physically exists, at least) and peddles supplements that his own pod guests have debunked—with major emphasis on the cad part. (If nothing else we can say that Huberman’s productivity eps may be worth revisiting: The man maintained six different girlfriends at one time, and kept them all in the dark without breaking a sweat. How does he get it done!?)
This story spun us, y’all, not least back to
’s February Pulling the Thread post in which SHE CALLED IT. OK, she didn’t call this, but Elise did do the math on the “fraternity” of wildly popular uber-male podcasters (Peter Attia, Sam Harris, Tim Ferriss, and, yes, Huberman) whose advice is gulped down by zillions of women, but who do not return the favor—rarely booking female experts on their shows. Huberman has said his audience is 50 percent female, yet he had the poorest record of the bunch, interviewing only a dozen women in two years of weekly shows. (She hilariously linked to two “optimized” white dudes, Attia and Huberman, talking to each other about, “Menstruation, Menopause, and Hormone Replacement Therapy for Women.” Can’t make this up!) Read more on the subject from Elise today, following Huberman’s defrocking, here.Meanwhile, reading the New York Times this morning, we did a double take as Ross Douthat—not typically our cuppa—got even more meta with it, connecting the dots between three recent New York cover stories (the Huberman, plus Allison P. Davis’s four-headed profile in polyamory, plus Andrea Long Chu’s hot-button argument in favor of trans children’s right to puberty-suppressing meds and surgery) in an attempt to Venn-diagram the current liberal sexual ethic: In a pro-permissiveness yet post-#MeToo world, what are the rules on sex now? (Is “a responsible, spreadsheet-enabled, therapeutic version of the sexual revolution” just wishful thinking and, more to the point, would that be…a turn-on?)
To recap, what we’ve got here is an intersection of guru-ism and self-improvement; ego and infidelity; our fave bougie-hippie lifestyle choice, #polyamory; media analysis; and liberal sexual ethics. How Spready can ya get?
Always glad to have you here with us, at the crux of it all,
Rachel & Maggie
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No matter how swish your digs, mom guilt will find you.
These past couple of years, we’ve gotten our backs up thanks to report after report about how in some countries, postpartum support comes in the form of luxurious hotel getaways where women get pampering, nourishment, and lots of sleep while qualified nurses tend to their newborns. Born in Taiwan and raised in America, Clarissa Wei has now written the definitive, first-person account of the phenomenon, after checking into a center in Taipei for a month after the birth of her son, and…dom-dom-dom! Such hotels are a common experience2 in Taiwan—that for the average woman is the investment equivalent of an engagement ring—but soon after Wei arrives, she realizes she may have traded something even more valuable in exchange for the focus on her physical recovery: her freedom. Turn up the volume another few (or dozen) notches and this is an A24 horror movie waiting to sweep Sundance.
Read “Life in a Luxury Hotel for New Moms and Babies” here.
The Oprah special “was, as we call it in academia, a rich text.”
Over the past few months we’ve taken a break from GLP-1 coverage because we are frankly sick.of.it. But Tressie3 + Oprah is a must-read event. In the wake of O’s primetime special/Ozempic ad, “Shame, Blame and the Weight Loss Revolution,”4 Tressie McMillan Cottom addresses an extra-complicated side of an all-around thorny topic: Oprah is both “a woman so successful that she redefined the term not just for women but specifically for Black women born to unglamorous means and expectations” and America’s “dieter in chief” whose yo-yo relationship with her own body was so constant, it became the meta-narrative of her entire show—and now she’s thrown her (diminished) weight behind a class of drugs whose high price and inaccessibility “compounds obesity’s inequality problem.” What do we have the right to expect from Oprah? “In some ways, it is a triumph of its own kind that a Black woman took [the thin body as moral body,] a foundational idea of white supremacist thinking about aesthetic virtue and turned it into her own private fortune.”
Read it here.
Our new favorite white noise (we mean this as a compliment).
We can’t exactly remember how we stumbled upon Matt Rogers and Spread trailblazer Bowen Yang’s Las Culturistas podcast interview with Mandy Moore, but dang, we are better for it. The episode is less an interview than a 90-minute fawning session, during which Yang and Rogers gush over the finer points of Moore’s music career (Mandy Moore vs. So Real) and filmography (A Walk to Remember, Saved!, This Is Us). Moore is as game as any elder millennial would expect her to be (very), and the result is something like a fan’s lullaby; a positive, sing-song soundtrack that helps us doze off at night in a snap. Proof/admission: We still haven’t made it through the last 15 minutes of the episode.
Listen to “Mama’s Singing” here.
Objet d’literary it girl.
Last week, we brought you Catherine Lacey’s crushing essay for the Yale Review about glass jars (but really about grief). Under the same Objects of Desire slug, Leslie Jamison is now weighing in on her obsession with antique medical slides (but really about friendship and hope). Which is to say: hot column alert!
Watch this space.
“We’ve become, like, pro-child and anti-natal. We’re so pro-child that you can’t have many children.”
The Ezra Klein Show has treated us to a one-two punch of episodes about children—who’s having them and why, and how we’re raising them today—in modern society. Both conversations, with demographer Jennifer D. Sciubba (who, it must be said, has a bangin’, soul-soothing southern accent) and sociologist Caitlyn Collins, respectively, are so satisfying, answering so many burning questions that we hadn’t ourselves managed to put into words, that we found ourselves breaking our own rule and texting episode links to friends mid-listen (we try to make everybody wait for the Spread).
Listen to “Birthrates Are Plummeting Worldwide. Why?” here.
Listen to “The Deep Conflict Between Our Work and Parenting Ideals” here.
When Molly goes to Italy, we stow away in her trunk.
For the New York Times Magazine, Molly Young sprinkles her delightful prose all over Hilde Soliani, a wild-woman perfumer who hails from Parma, Italy, and concocts fragrances such as “the smell of snow” and “gelato and parmesan cheese.” The subject is a slam-dunk for Young, who has been wearing zany scents like “Miss Tranchant,” which smells of oysters and butter, since the pandemic’s fragrance boom, and a gift to readers who want to take a short vacation from hard news, with top notes of travel writing, middle notes of fragrance culture, and base notes of how high-end fragrance actually gets made. It’s not Young’s first time to strike out on an olfactory safari for our reading pleasure: Who else remembers her 2011 New York Mag profile of Manhattan’s worst-smelling block, Broome between Allen and Eldridge? Totally stinks! (Except, you know, in Young’s hands it’s a pleasure cruise.)
Read “The Mad Perfumer of Parma” here.
Missing Miranda.
“Sometimes you just need a good cry,” said no one to us ever. We’re not sure what possessed us to opt into writer David Frum’s heartbreaking story about the life, illness, and death of his daughter, Miranda, but it’s a beautiful tribute and a lesson in writing about grief—in Frum’s case through the organizing principle of Miranda’s dog, Ringo. The waterworks came and went. The story, we can’t shake.
Read “Miranda’s Last Gift” in the Atlantic here.
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CliffsNotes: “Huberman sells a dream of control down to the cellular level. But something has gone wrong. In the midst of immense fame, a chasm has opened between the podcaster preaching dopaminergic restraint and a man, with newfound wealth, with access to a world unseen by most professors. The problem with a man always working on himself is that he may also be working on you.”
One of Wei’s sources estimates that in Taiwan, 65 percent of postpartum parents check into such a place!
For the record, Rachel absolutely was not stalking Tressie when she happened to spot her at 8 p.m., on Wednesday, March 20, at the bar of Mediterranean restaurant Smyrna in Charlottesville, Virginia. But in our world this is a celebrity spotting of the highest order!
“‘It’s not your fault.’ It seemed to me that companies like WeightWatchers that profited from the shame cycle of yo-yo dieting should start with, ‘I’m sorry.’”—Tressie McMillan Cottom