Mrs. Robinson If You're Nasty
The Dustin Hoffman and Paul Simon of newsletters’ brain is foggy and bag is black.
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Spreaderberghers,
This weekend, we popped into an opening-night showing of Black Bag—Steven Soderbergh’s stylish and satisfying new banger of a caper starring Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender, costarring Yasmin from Industry and Simon from Bridgerton, and featuring cameos from Emma from One Day and the son from The Son.1 We say “popped,” because: This movie was only 90 minutes long! Our takeaways as we exited the theater: 1.) Damn, that Soderbergh is up to date on his TV-streaming; 2.) Who’s gonna write the trend story on lorazepam now that it has been prominently featured in three current pieces of pop culture—The White Lotus, The Pitt, and now Black Bag?2 3.) More short and suhweet cinema, please!
Next up for discussion in Spreadlandia? The FX series Dying for Sex, starring Michelle Williams as a woman who finds out she’s, uh, dying and would like to start having good sex, costarring Jenny Slate, Rob Delaney, and Sissy Spacek. Yes, the title pretty much says it all. Except that it does not say the premiere date—April 4—or beam that date onto your Google cal. Know what does keep you abreast of this kind of important pop-culture event? Your trusty Spread Culture Calendar™!
To new arrivals: Last fall we launched a calendar populated with movie releases, TV drops, book launches, and more to ensure that the culture-astute readers of this esteemed publication would never miss a thing. Just click on it, and your calendar is auto-populated with events that make life more worth living. (It’s also very easy to turn off and on to get a peek as needed, so never fear cluttering your calendar.) As a life-saving tool, this has worked really well… for us. But because of the nature of Google cal, it’s hard for us to see if it worked really well... for you all.
So we’re asking you to vote: Should we keep it up, and keep filling it in with upcoming launch dates for Spready TV, movies, and books over the next few months? Or are your lives and brains already too busy to look at one more thing? No judgment, we get it, safe space! Your candor could actually be therapeutic: We’ve got some new rejection goals we’re dying to meet.
At your service,
Rachel & Maggie
🎵We’d Like to Know a Little Bit About You For Our Files 🎵
First thing’s first: Let’s get into Gwyneth Paltrow’s Vanity Fair3 extravaganza. If we had spent these past couple decades Rip van Winkle-ing, then woke up yesterday and encountered this cover story, we’d have no clue that magazines were on a ventilator and that the celebrity profile had been officially pronounced dead. The cover shoot itself is a visual reference fest: We’re harking back to The Graduate, we’re winking at Basic Instinct, we’re alluding to that 2008 cover where Kate Winslet does her best Catherine Deneuve impression. And the story is a throwback, too: Writer Michelle Ruiz spins every Roman and Williams-sourced vintage blue-and-white plate within reach, and because she’s got real access, she’s able to make her job look as easy as Gwyneth does. Paltrow, who hasn’t fronted a movie in 15 years (she’s been busy Gooping and child-rearing), is here to promote Josh Safdie’s ping-pong movie Marty Supreme, and damn, every aspiring movie star should take notes. A large quotient of GP’s winningness has always been that she’s actually funny and also dishy, and in the span of the interview, which kicks off in the Montecito kitchen, she brings that lightness to bear as she praises Oprah, pseudo-defends Meghan Markle, casually disses Martha Stewart, talks at length about dating Brad Pitt, expounds upon her relationship with Chris Martin and how their blended family works, and laughs about shooting sex scenes with Timothée Chalamet (“I was like, ‘Okay, great. I’m 109 years old. You’re 14.’”). Ruiz doesn’t let Gwyneth off the hook, either. The star has always been at once aspirational and nervous-making, and that’s especially true at this moment as her Goopiness dances dangerously close to MAHA. And while she won’t go as far as signing off on RFK Jr., she does have a little something to say about raw milk that made your Spreaditors do this: 😳. And we don’t think she’s joking this time?
Read “Gwyneth Paltrow on Motherhood, MAHA, Meghan Markle, Making Out With Timothée Chalamet—and Much More” here.
Root, root, root for the home team!
Like a temporary tattoo hidden inside a box of Cracker Jack, Kaitlyn Tiffany’s story about women and baseball, nestled between all the usual seriousness in the Atlantic, hit us like a surprise treat. Yes, this is story about how a sport “as American as apple pie” has always excluded (our favorite) half of the population—and Tiffany finds a way to recount the history of a game that we’re not inherently interested in in a way that even we found compelling—but it’s also about the pure love of the game, wrapped up inside her adventure attending something you probably never knew existed: experiencing life as a Yankee (or, more precisely, a “Pinstripe”) at the team’s annual Women’s Mini Fantasy Camp. All in all, this was good clean, non-ironic, both-sides-of-the-aisle (OK probably not but a girl can dream) all-American fun that makes us feel like we might actually belong in this godforsaken country that has been doing everything in its power to alienate us. Touchdown! Er, home run!
Read “The Girls of Summer” here.
Foggy with a chance of incompetence.
The stew of “memory loss, cognitive slowness, diminished focus, and mental fatigue” known as brain fog is one of the 34 symptoms of perimenopause that we may or may not be experiencing at any given time; a long COVID holdover; and, apparently, a potential side effect of anxiety, dread, migraines, fatigue, ADHD, concussions, chemotherapy, a laundry list of conditions from lupus to fibromyalgia, and regular old dehydration. Given all that, it’s remarkable that your Spreaditors are (often) able to remember our own kids’ names. “Daily, I trudge to the cerebral filing cabinet to retrieve ostensibly known information, and find only wisps, remnants, deleted data,” writes Katie Arnold-Ratliff in the Cut, connecting the dots between the seemingly unlimited factors that can make it difficult for our brains to encode information like, say, where in the airport parking lot you panic-parked your Prius when you were running late for that flight. Her hypothesis? Perhaps the fog never lifted after Covid because “for many of us…the horrors never did, either.”
Read “Brain Fog Is Here to Stay” here.
Insider Trading
Even fashion’s favorite gossip girl, Puck’s Lauren Sherman, says Rebecca Mead’s New Yorker profile of Jonathan Anderson, which dovetails with the recent announcement that he’s leaving Loewe and the imminent announcement that he’s landing at Dior, is a must-read. (Whereas, typically, general-interest publications “leave those of us who know too much wanting,” as she wrote in her newsletter on Monday.) We’re sure this praise has nothing to do with the fact that she’s quoted in the story.
Read “What Will Jonathan Anderson Transform Next” here.
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