Not On Our Watch
The Wayne Gretzky and Wayne Gretzky of newsletters—we only know one hockey player—is firing up the ice with a Hollywood tragedy, proteinmaxxing 2.0, and a heavy TV slate
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!
Spreadfluencers,
We have a confession: Heated Rivalry was the one that got away. The show caught fire in late November, and while we had the best of intentions to catch up on it over the holidays, one thing led to another, yada yada yada, and now we find ourselves surrounded by late-stage Heated Rivalry fever, gazing into the taillights of a television phenomenon that should have been ours. (An erotic gay Canadian surprise hit about sex and ice hockey with a raging fanbase of midlife moms: Has there ever been Spreadier fare?) Naomi “Nomi” Fry has already put the show in the context of E.M. Forster.1 Faith Hill is praising it for “taking sex seriously.” Blasberg’s got the selfies. British GQ has figured out how Hudson Williams shapes his “glorious glutes.” There have, apparently, been live-watch parties at bars across America; our invites got lost in the mail. So here your Spreaditors sit, in unfamiliar territory: the cultural caboose (we’re never afraid to mix a transit metaphor), discovering at the pace of, well, regular people. To ensure that we never let this happen again, we have prepared a rigorous viewing slate to get you (and us) through the coming eternity of daylight savings time and our national dystopian nightmare. Some we’ve seen, others we have not.
Pre-Oscar viewing obligations, in order of urgency. (This is serious, people: We’re T-minus 60 days from Sunday, March 15.)
Marty Supreme (in theaters now)
One Battle After Another (on HBO Max; streaming rental for $7)
Sentimental Value (streaming rental for $15)
Hamnet (in theaters now)
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (streaming rental for $5—it’s on sale)
Blue Moon (streaming rental for $15)
Sinners (on HBO Max)
The Secret Agent (in theaters now)
The Testament of Ann Lee (coming to theaters January 25)
It Was Just an Accident (streaming rental for $10)
KPop Demon Hunters (on Netflix)
Frankenstein (on Netflix)
No Other Choice (in theaters now)
Sirat (in theaters February 2)
Sound of Falling (coming to theaters January 16)
Wicked: For Good (streaming rental for $20)
Weapons (on HBO Max)
Train Dreams (on Netflix)
Watch “for fun”—aka unlikely (or ineligible) to be Oscar nominated
TV
His & Hers (on Netflix)
The Beauty (coming to Hulu January 22)
Pluribus (on Apple TV)
Movies
Die My Love (on MUBI; streaming rental for $10)
Jay Kelly (on Netflix)
Song Sung Blue (in some theaters; streaming for $20)
Come See Me in the Good Light (on Apple TV)
Hedda (on Prime)
Private Life (coming to theaters January 16; see Jodie Foster blurb below)
Nouvelle Vague (on Netflix)
Returning must-sees
The Pitt (back for season 2 on HBO Max)
Industry (back for season 4 on HBO max)
Landman (back for season 2 on Paramount+)
Shrinking (back for season 3 on Apple TV, January 28)
Bridgerton (back for season 4 on Netflix, January 29)
Get them on your radar now
The Moment (coming to theaters January 30)
Wuthering Heights (coming to theaters February 13—more on this later!)
The Bride (coming to theaters March 6—more on this later!)
Clearly, we’ve all got our work cut out for us. But you know what they say…
Together, we can do hard things,
Rachel & Maggie
P.S. If you’re having fun here—and are willing to forgive our brief moment of television negligence—don’t forget to hit the ❤️.
P.P.S. The new Hope Hicks is named Margo Martin. #alliteration #notourtype
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
After the wild success of her book Didion & Babitz—basically every celebrity on Instagram hailed it as their favorite book of 2025 (though in many cases we’d put money on the fact that it was the only book they read last year)—author Lili Anolik has trained her, um, clairvoyant (?) gaze and tapdancing prose on tragic heroine Dorothy Stratten. The 18-year-old Canadian bombshell/child was discovered by a literal pimp named Paul Snider in the late 1960s, elevated to Playboy pinup by Hugh Heffner, and made a Hollywood ingenue by director Peter Bogdanovich—all before Snider raped and murdered her at age 20. It’s a story so sad, seedy, and sensational that, good taste be damned, our culture has been turning it over for nearly 50 years: Stratten’s murder was the subject of a Pulitzer-winning article, a memoir by Bogdanovich, a TV movie starring Jamie Lee Curtis, and a major motion picture directed by Bob Fosse and starring Marielle Hemingway (Star 80.) Now it’s been resurrected once more for Vanity Fair. Anolik spends most of her piece analyzing the men who made and failed Stratten with her usual bulldozer confidence, drawing all sorts of wild assumptions and connections that make for an engrossing if occasionally queasy read. One example: Heffner, Bogdanovich, and Fosse? All those guys are pimps, says Lili. That’s entertainment?
Read “Forgotten Star Dorothy Stratten Lived the Hollywood Fairy Tale. It Ended as a Horror Story” here.
Let’s just gorge on protein powder till we die.
Prolific mag writer Rachel Sugar enters “New Year, New You” season with a protein-packed double-header: First, she published a paean to our protein-gram-counting moment in the Atlantic that—even as it poked fun at the phenomenon—compelled one Spreaditor to order up a box of Salted Peanut Butter David Protein Bars, stat. (That’s 28 grams of protein, 150 calories, and zero sugar, “basically a protein Scud missile wrapped in gold foil” according to the Times’ Protein Bar Arms Race, ICYMI). Meanwhile, over on Grub Street, Sugar (oh, the irony of that surname) chronicles the shocking demise of the “plant-based” aka vegan movement—which, like other forms of youthful idealism of the 2010s, is officially gone, dead, donezo. What’s up? Proteinmaxxing plus MAGA plus the general economics of running a plant-based restaurant (vegans don’t drink, and it takes a lot of labor to make eggplant compete with ribeye), plus the novelty of fake meat wore off, plus, perhaps, the death of hope and progress? “All the news was bad news; what were you supposed to do about it, eat a grain bowl?,” Sugar writes. “Real fur was once again in fashion, as was tanning, as was smoking. Steakhouses, avatars of mid-century American order, seemed to be the hottest openings of the year. Progress no longer appeared inevitable, and if the world wasn’t going to be better and the future wasn’t brighter, or maybe there was no future, then what was the point of all this sanctimonious restraint?”
Read “America Has Entered Late-Stage Protein” here
Read “How Veganism Got Cooked” here.
People Pleasers Anonymous
Technically, the anti-self-flagellation tome Are You Mad at Me? came out in August, but hey, if it’s still new enough for Katy Waldman to cover in the New Yorker this week—and to keep not one, but two, of our ladies’ weekends buzzing—then it’s fresh enough to Spread about. In the most overgeneralized terms, the book is about breaking the habit of being a people pleaser, aka a “fawn,” the kind of person who doesn’t know her own favorite color because she’s so busy chameleon-ing to keep the peace with the alphas in her life. We have observed that the book title alone is a fascinating litmus test: Bring it up in a group of friends, and see who lights up with recognition, and who doesn’t get it at all. Turns out it is also a subgenre, joined by the very similar sounding Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves—and How to Find Our Way Back, which is also by an Instagram famous mental health expert white lady from California (who is surprised? No one). While thinking that everyone is probably mad at you all the time can be a trauma response—solicitousness is a pretty smart survival mechanism—being a nice, flexible, and considerate empath isn’t all bad! “For some people, fawning is about being more of who they are—smart, generous, successful, funny, or beautiful,” writes Fawning author Ingrid Clayton. “For others, it’s about being less: vocal, ethnic, creative, self-assured, or able to set boundaries.”
Read “How to Recover from Caring So Much” here.
We won’t be mad at you if you order the books at our little Spread Bookshop here.
Testosterone: Not just for chicks!
It’s not just women getting a kick in the pantalones from Big T. Turns out the bro-osphere is doing its own form of hormone replacement therapy—and testosterone makes them feel like they’re “back in college again,” writes Katie Berohn in Elle. Take too much and it can also make them angry and physically aggressive. What could go wrong? While we’re here, we might as well ask: who caught last week’s Vanity Fair story with truly eye-popping (except not eyes) details about, um, the anti-aging of the penis? Tidbit: the podcasting founder of Bulletproof coffee, Dave Asprey, treats his junk to regular injections of stem cells and acoustic wave therapy. If that’s too costly, don’t worry, he suggests a completely free DIY therapy… that sounds like a scene from Dying for Sex. We were tempted to write all of this off as male fragility and vanity but, hey, with women (and tech) doing everything they can to turn back the clock on the ovary, maybe we’ve got no room to judge?
Read “The Adonis Injection” in Elle here.
Read “Why Bryan Johnson, Dave Asprey, and the Other Longevity Bros Are Obsessed With Penises” in Vanity Fair here.
Just Can’t Get Enough
The New York Times Magazine let Taffy Brodesser-Akner write 5,500 words on her new hobby: Attending the Broadway show Operation Mincemeat, which she has seen a whopping 13 times (12 of them by buying tickets with her own money). The article is in small part about the musical itself, but in large part about the sensation of becoming a fan—of falling in love with a work of culture and having an insatiable desire for experiencing it again and again. Given that the Spread is basically a revolving fanzine, we get it. (We also feel obliged to admit here that one of your Spreaditors has seen Rent on stage more than 20 times, and it’s the same one who’s seen Call Me By Your Name at least a dozen times.) Is this a crucial read? It is not. Is it a fine way to spend a plane ride from, say, CHO to LGA? It is. The cherry on top comes in the NYT comments section, where Brodesser-Akner enthusiastically engages with her own fans and critics as well as fellow “Mincefluencers.”
Read “Why on Earth Have I Seen The Same Broadway Show 13 Times?” here.
