Guys…They’re Just Like Us?
The Mary Magdalene and Sister Mary Clarence of newsletters is staring into the male soul, picking a bone with The Drama discourse, and passing the pumpernickel.
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!
Spreadsquad,
We come to you fresh from reading about the specific appeal of Vermont’s greatest export since maple syrup, singer-songwriter Noah Kahan, where the New Yorker’s Amanda Petrusich really puts her finger on it in a way that feels, at least for your Spreaditors, uncomfortably close to home. Kahan makes “music for people who own too much performance fleece to embrace the bombast of Taylor Swift but aren’t quite feral enough for the cacophony of Geese… the kind of thing that sounds really nice in a Subaru, on your way to work, with an iced coffee nestled in the cup holder.” (To which we say: 🚙☕👋 and mmm…) We expected a few gentle digs at Kahan’s fan base from this story. What we did not expect was the singer’s admission—which Petrusich writes about, but that he makes onscreen in Noah Kahan: Out of Body, the doc that Netflix released Monday—that he struggles with body dysmorphia and an eating disorder.
Old clothes haunt him: “I just want to fit back into my old pants. There’s a whole shame section of my closet that’s, like, ‘You are too fat for this now.’ Too fat for these, bro.”
No success is ever good enough to obliterate the body noise: The morning after a sold-out MSG show, working out with a trainer, he says, “I binge eat a lot of food when I’m feeling stressed, and then I get so hateful about my body and what I look like that I don’t eat for a while. I starve myself.”
The comments section is a killer: People think “it’s fine to call me ugly. You know, I make those jokes myself. But sometimes I want it to stop.”
No matter how many essays we read by men about their Ozempic journeys—and how many stories we skip past about about “looksmaxxing,” which is definitely body dysmorphia by a buzzier name—it never fails to stop us in our tracks when men speak this vulnerably, using language that sounds…just like us. Like the neverending hum in a woman’s head about how we feel in our bodies.
This is hardly the first time we’ve heard this from a lovable emo dude. Ed Sheeran revealed in 2023 that he struggled with bulimia: “There’s certain things that, as a man talking about them, I feel mad uncomfortable. I know people are going to see it a type of way, but it’s good to be honest about them. Because so many people do the same thing and hide it as well.” Rob Pattinson has opened up about body dysmorphia: “I get a ton of anxiety. ... Body dysmorphia, overall tremendous anxiety. I don’t have a six pack and I hate going to the gym. I’ve been like that my whole life. I never want to take my shirt off.” In his 2016 memoir, Zayn Malik wrote that while in One Direction, “I was suffering from an eating disorder... I’d just go for days—sometimes two or three days straight—without eating anything at all.”
Hard stats are tough to come by, but about as much as one half to one third as many men as women now report having eating disorders. And, given the double whammy of shame around revealing what is considered to be a “women’s condition,” the actual numbers are probably much higher. We expect men to have a hard time wrapping their minds around this one but, if we’re being honest, we have a mental block around it too. How do we adjust our thinking about body image issues—which feel, on a societal level, like a handicap inflicted on women by men, or at least by the patriarchy? By allowing men into this cursed “club,” would we be giving something up, or gaining something better?
You know what—if anybody could figure this one out, and set it to music, it’s Noah “Call Your Mom” Kahan.
Rachel & Maggie
“No one in the history of the world has lived better than we have. Even the old kings and queens. The least we can do is enjoy it. If we don’t, it’s offensive. It’s an offense to all the billions of people who can only dream that one day they could live like we do.” —Lauren Sánchez Bezos Victoria Ratliff, The White Lotus
Was Mrs. Bezos intentionally channeling our spiritual third Spreaditor, Mrs. Ratliff, in the New York Times this weekend, when she proclaimed her state of bliss to all the world—or is this just further proof that Mike White is a savant of the modern superrich? If you can make it past the Bezoses’ daily gratitude lists and Lauren’s praise for her husband’s physique (“He looks good, doesn’t he?” she says, slow-nodding for emphasis. “He looks good.”), you will find a pretty compelling theory on the ish of Sánchez Bezos. Writing about billionaires is fraught, and, predictably, not everybody agrees with us on this, but we thought Amy Chozick walked this tightrope quite well—treating her subject generously while capturing plenty of her bizarre, stage-y extraness, and making a case we’d never considered: that Lauren Sánchez Bezos has had real influence. (We’re not saying it’s good influence.) Chozick credits her with being the match that lit the flame of our current moment—more than just marrying the richest man on the planet, she married her world (reality TV, Hollywood flash) to his (once-mousy Silicon Valley superwealth), emboldening the billionaire class to live large with Dallas-style abandon. Bravo?
Read it here.
“She makes us look like interesting women doing interesting things.”— Zadie Smith
Maya Singer’s profile of designer Rachel Comey in Vogue is the palate cleanser you need after resting your noggin, however briefly, on Sánchez Bezos’s pillowy bosom. For 25 years, Comey has been designing “low-fuss, non-basic” fashion for women “who do things,” Singer writes: sound engineers, human rights activists, painters…Spreaditors! (When we’re good.) She’s kept her independent, woman-led label going while countless peers have fallen by the wayside, honing a certain smart, laid-back cool—and a version of “privilege” that, unlike everything written in the previous blurb, does not make us want to gouge out our eyeballs. Anybody casting about for a Mother’s Day treat might want to consider these or these or this. Just saying.
Read it here.
Spoiler alert: The winner is not Red Lobster’s Cheddar Bay biscuits.
The Atlantic has called itself “America’s leading destination for brave thinking and bold ideas that matter.” It is dedicated to “the American idea.” It has a gray beard that is kept neat with an antique shaving brush made of the horn of a buffalo slayed by Teddy Roosevelt. And it just published an eleven-thousand-word cover story about writer Caity Weaver’s quest to ascertain which restaurant serves the best “free” bread. The odyssey and its placement rocked our intellectual self-confidence enough to actually inspire us to read it—both for our own edification and in service to you, dear Spreaders. And after spending nearly 90 minutes with the text, carefully searching for layers and listening for the crashing symbols of Big Ideas, we found ourselves: occasionally chuckling, genuinely craving a chunk of salty focaccia, and as flummoxed as ever. Still, we’d be remiss not to mention that the section “What Celebrities Don’t Want You to Know,” which arrives about 40 percent through the story, is a highlight worth reading as a stand-alone: an artfully comedic performance of reporting via Hollywood that lifted our spirits. That is before we careened over to Whole Foods, bought a large boule, and promptly began—to borrow a word from the French—a’gnawin. Thanks for that, Jeffrey Goldberg.
Read “I Found It: The Best Free Restaurant Bread In America” here.
When Cognitive Dissonance Is an Understatement
Between the tale of Dr. Heidi Kling’s allegedly nonconsensual affair with a client in Granta and Sarah Goldberg’s SEC-defying shrink in AMC’s new Silicon Valley dramedy The Audacity (a show that if we’re being honest we give a C+), it’s already been a rich season for therapists behaving badly. But British novelist Lucy Ashe’s new essay for Bustle takes the cake in our book, in no small part because her story is boldly first-person, recounting her own extremely intimate and crazy-making obsession with a boundary-pushing therapist (not complimentary) she refers to as Dr. Webb. The yearslong relationship becomes all-consuming, inspiring Ashe to have sexual fantasies about him—that he then asks her to recount in session…you know, as part of the work—and also to write her latest novel, The Model Patient, which was released yesterday. It’s a gutsy story behind the story that’s a satisfying meal if not one with a tidy resolution.
Read “My Therapist, My Fantasy Lover, My God” here.
Buy the novel here.
Readers, there is so much more to devour, if you just hop, skip, and jump over this paywall! All the words you can’t use anymore (we’ve been doing talking all wrong, as usual); the dirtbag politician aesthetic we’d like to put an end to; a triple-scoop of takes on The Drama, with a cherry on top; our come-to-Jesus about Lena Dunham…
Join us on the other side, as the cult leaders say.
