Oooooooh, Barracuda.
The Seabiscuit and Secretariat of newsletters returns to the watercooler for chitchat about cleavage for Jesus and one gargantuan puddle.
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.
Spreadsanthemums,
If since we last met you’ve been too distracted by the soft launch of “American Riviera Orchard”—which henceforth will be replacing “Red Leather, Yellow Leather” and “Unique New York” as your Spreaditors’ vocal warm-up of choice on podcasting days—to keep up with the real news, allow us to get you up to speed: Since 2019, the Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Woman of Leadership Award, powered by the Dwight D. Opperman Foundation, has been bestowed upon Diane von Furstenberg, Barbra Streisand, Elizabeth II, and other queens of this caliber. This year, the Opperman folks experienced a bout of claustrophobia—the idea that yet again they would select women and only women for this honor was just too much to bear. And hadn’t they recently heard something about gender being just a social construct? Something-something Judith Butler something-something? That got ’em thinking: Who was in charge here? Couldn’t they honor whomever they damn well please?! Yes, yes, we can, they reassured one another. Oppermans gonna Opperman! So they popped their tops and called up some people who really deserve the RBG banner. Worthy individuals like Sylvester Stallone (ex-Californian), Eric Trump (Barron’s brudder), Elon Musk (X Æ A-Xii’s dad), James Woods (the actor, not Claire Messud’s husband), Michael Milken (junk-bond messiah), Kid Rock (Bawitdaba), and Rupert Murdoch (Vegemite-and-fascism sandwich). And, you know, for the mix: Martha Stewart (love ya, girl). And then—deeeeeep sigh—RBG’s actual family had to collectively press pause on Feud: Capote vs. The Swans, which they too have been trying to finally finish, dig up the Opperman people’s number, and tell them, ever so calmly: Nope.
Yep, that’s it. That’s the news.
Rachel & Maggie
P.S. OK, fine, not all of these guys were on the recipient list, but half honest-to-god were! Can you separate the chaff from the chaff? Here ya go.
Our King speaks.
We applaud Harper’s Bazaar for pairing the formidable Regina King with another woman of gravitas, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Salamishah Tillet, for the magazine’s April cover story. King is officially there to speak about her turn as Shirley Chisholm for the new Netflix film Shirley—a project that she stars in and that she and her sister produced. (Who else here has been hoping for a Hollywood examination of Chisholm ever since Uzo Aduba played the trailblazing former congresswoman and presidential candidate in 2020’s Mrs. America?) But more crucially, the interview is the first King has granted since her son, Ian, died by suicide in 2022, and the result is a brave, heartbreaking outpouring that challenged our ability to finish the piece.
Steel your nerves, then read it here.
“How do you report the police to the police?”
“One of the most powerful pieces of journalism I have ever read,” is what Caroline Kitchener, who won a 2023 Pulitzer for her abortion coverage, tweeted about an explosive new Washington Post investigation. “Americans have been forced to reckon with sexual misconduct committed by teachers, clergy, coaches and others with access to and authority over children. But there is little awareness of child sex crimes perpetrated by members of another profession that many children are taught to revere and obey: law enforcement,” write reporters Jessica Contrera, Jenn Abelson, and John D. Harden, who found that over the past two decades, “hundreds of police officers have preyed on children”—most frequently, girls aged 13 to 15. In heartbreaking detail, they show how New Orleans cop Rodney Vicknair used the power of his badge to befriend, groom, and then abuse “Nicole,” who when they met was a 14-year-old weighing “barely 100 pounds” who still had a large stuffed giraffe in her bedroom—and who had originally needed his help because her mom called the police after she claimed she was raped by a friend.
Read it here.
Plot twist at the Xerox machine.
If you, like your Spreaditors, love nothing more than a workplace-drama series or novel, Critics at Large has your number. (Also: If you still haven’t watched Halt and Catch Fire, we are shocked—please do so before returning to this newsletter, thanks.) On the occasion of Adelle Waldman’s quite-buzzy novel, Help Wanted, about the lives of big-box store workers, the panel—plus Spreadored book critic Katy Waldman—dig into the subgenre as cultural barometer. Its next (final?) frontier: Remote-work fiction.
Listen here.
How to turn a puddle into a giant, terrifying end-of-days symbolic lake.
When what at first glance appeared to be an unusually beautiful essay on real estate—couple buys dreamed-of first home, only to learn there’s a sinkhole just outside their front door that, when it dissipates, “leaves behind a residue like black mayonnaise”—kept zooming out, out, out to encompass geography, motherhood, Blackness, redlining, ambition and how allll of that intersects with the biggest picture of all, the climate crisis, well, we needed to know more about this virtuosic writer. Emily Raboteau’s Atlantic essay, which blends the journalistic and the personal, is excerpted from her upcoming collection, Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against “the Apocalypse.” In a Q&A with fellow author Wendy S. Walters in the spring issue of Bomb, she discusses the impossible task of talking to kids about climate “while still leaving room for hope.” And in Orion, she talks linguistic code-switching with writer/activist Aya de León: “I can’t tell you how often I have to fight editorial to let me jam a bit of slang up alongside a ten-cent SAT word. But that’s my genuine voice, you know?” More of this, please.
Read “Did We Fall in Love With the Wrong House?” here.
Read “Emily Raboteau by Wendy S. Walters” in Bomb here.
Read “Mothering Against the Apocalypse” in Orion here.
A five-minute read that’ll live rent-free in your brain for far longer.
For the Yale Review, novelist Catherine Lacey delivers an essay as breathtaking as it is brief, about grief’s ability to mutate and inhabit the quotidian—in her case, when the death of her sibling transmogrified into an obsession with fastidiously labeled, utilitarian… jars. Yes, jars! She writes: “...I could not help but label myself; I was a sister who was missing one of her sisters. Labels exist for other losses—orphan, widow, widower—but there is no word for losing a sibling or a child. I began to feel that no one could understand me except other people missing a brother or a sister (the man who could define me so well had lost his brother), and I clung to my label-less label, made huge choices under the semiconscious assumption that it explained me entirely.”
Read it here.
Keziah explains it all.
Spreaders, we can be vulnerable1 together, can’t we? After last week’s admission that we kinda-sorta don’t *get* the gestalt of literary firebrand Lauren Oyler (in particular her New Yorker anxiety essay) several of you thanked us for our service: You, too, weren’t sure if you were in on the joke or, wait, was it a joke? If you want revenge on Oyler for giving you that icky feeling, X is getting a real kick out of (the no less feared/fearless) Becca Rothfeld’s lengthy, scorching review of Oyler’s new book in the Washington Post, “Lauren Oyler thinks she’s better than you.”2 Yoikes!3 But if you’re willing to try to get the Oyler thing after all, we point you to our wise old (young) friend, the novelist and highly prolific Vanity Fair writer/editor Keziah Weir—who nods to all the ways a journalist might trip herself up when writing about the kind of author who puts “books coverage” in scare quotes, but seems to establish a rapport in this Q&A (and, guess what, they even reference the Emily Gould non-divorce divorce essay. Now… DRINK!).
Read “Lauren Oyler Cares a Lot, Actually” here.
Also, for a feel-good read from a truly good person about how she found her calling, check out Keziah’s essay—which she posted today on her Substack,
—here.A recent spate of great-on-paper, super-Spready streamers have left us cold.
Just gonna say it: Kate Winslet’s new HBO spoof, The Regime? Not doin’ it for us. Everybody’s talking about The Girls on the Bus, a political drama inspired by the Hillary Clinton campaign (!!) but… no. Now that Truman’s ashes have hit the auction block4, our queue is sparse. So, while we hate to put undue pressure on our lord and savior Allison Janney (as beguiling as ever in People, here), we’ve got a lot riding on the Kristen Wiig-penned Palm Royale, which debuts on Apple+ tomorrow—not a moment too soon.
Preview here.
Horny for…ugh, we’re too depressed to make a joke.
What could be sexier than loving Trump, toting guns, lighting the New York Times on fire, and waging war on transgender individuals? Well, duh. Doing that stuff while praising God! Oh, and flashing cleav in a micro-mini and four-inch platforms. The latest from the New York Times’ Ruth Graham has an intriguing headline, but—fair warning—the actual story may make your heart sink.
Read “Piety and Profanity: The Raunchy Christians Are Here” here.
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Vulnerability, by the way, is one of the concepts Oyler goes after most vociferously in her book.
“All of the fruit that Oyler picks is so low-hanging that she would do better to leave it rotting on the ground.”
This is the latest battle in an ongoing skirmish between Oyler and Rothfeld, who also wrote a takedown of Oyler’s previous book in the Spectator here.
If, like us, you were horrified by the notion of bodily remains being auctioned off like one of Babe Paley’s lesser baubles, read Rachel Monroe’s “The Place to Buy Kurt Cobain’s Sweater and Truman Capote’s Ashes” in the New Yorker here.
Now I have so much reading I want to do I have no time to tell you anything except I LOVE YOU. God, you're good. xo
Thank you for sending me into the Oyler-Tolentino dispute!