Put a Bow on It
The Julia Roberts and Anne Hathaway of newsletters tends grudges like pets.
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Spreadsweets,
A handful of the Spread’s favorite main characters—media villains, heroes, in-betweeners, the whole range—made headlines this week, and between the Muskpocalypse and incessant snow days in both Virginia and Massachusetts, these stories are really giving us something to live for.
First up: Pamela “gotta hand it to Ron DeSantis” Paul—the recently canned and supremely lazy-thinkin’ “liberal” New York Times opinion columnist who has been making Spread Nation want to tear out our hair for years. Before this newsletter was even a twinkle in your Spreaditors’ eyes, Pam was stuck deep in the craw of New York literary critic Andrea Long Chu. And damn, that long-simmering beef has turned out to be a melt-in-your-mouth gift to us all. On the occasion of Paul’s departure, Chu delivers a finger-lickin’ takedown that is virtuosic in precision and scope. In lines like “...for Paul, literature is a kind of glass container for the world, one that permits the safe pleasures of empathy without the distress of responsibility” and “Paul spent her first column after the inauguration complaining that people use the phrase ‘it’s all good’ in situations where it is not, in fact, all good,” you can just feel Long Chu compiling a mental outline for this piece, and then: boom—time to spew it all on the page.
Elsewhere in Grudge Town—though, to be clear, this would not, like, be a “package” anywhere but here (a great reason to go paid if you haven’t already)—Emily Gould parsed her own petty, years-long “rivalry” with Lena Dunham (quotes because, as Gould acknowledges, the two were not peers). Back in 2014, Lena had the whole Brooklyn twentysomething market cornered at exactly the moment Gould wrote a novel about Brooklyn twentysomethings; the book tanked, but not before being compared to Girls left and right. Now, Gould has moved on because Gould has grown up, but also, perhaps, because Dunham lives in London now; it would be tough to be so magnanimous if Dunham had a new hit show about, say, marriage and divorce in Brooklyn in one’s late thirties.
Which brings us to the
of it all. Over the past week, Sundberg, of our “rival” Substack got a substantial profile by Jessica Testa in the New York Times Style section, and a piece in Air Mail, too. Sundberg—who says her newsletter is about business despite it actually being about being hot, rich, and consumerist in Manhattan—is hot, now rich (she makes close to half a million dollars a year in subscriptions alone, plus untold sums in sponsorships, you know, “rivaling” your Spreaditors), and…30. Would she consider selling her newsletter to a traditional media company? She told the Times: “I don’t know if any traditional media company would be able to afford it, and it’s growing too fast for me to even consider.” Same, girl, same.Haunted by young Emily for days after that article’s publication, and reading her newsletter daily VERY CLOSELY hoping to discern her secret sauce—which to be honest kinda looks to us like boatloads of what back in the day was called “advertising” and then when the rules changed, “sponsored content”—your Spreaditors realized that we needed to take a breath and invoke our personal guru and professional mentor,
, whose Pulling the Thread newsletter is wise as hell. In her book On Our Best Behavior, Elise says that as women, when we feel a pang of envy, we should follow it, allow it to be our teacher, allow it to show us what we really want.And so we did. Guess what? Our envy told us to start our very own Substack! Wait…
Kisses, roses, all the things,
Rachel & Maggie
P.S. This weekend, Maggie will throw caution to the wind and host a Galentine’s viewing of the maybe great, maybe terrible new Bridget Jones flick. Who's in? Dress Code: giant underpants worn under or over trousers—players’ choice. Menu: Silk Cuts, subpar Pinot. Homework: Pandora Sykes’s five-part pod series on “the OG hot mess.” The London media superblonde interviews the cast, including Leo Woodall, Bridget’s fresh-faced new love interest (whom you’ll recall from White Lotus, if you’re a real Spreader). Friend-of-Spread Allison P. Davis—who basically went on a date with Woodall for Vulture—would like you to know that he “Really Is That Charming.”
P.P.S. Move over Cupid—turns out Maggie is actually the patron saint of Valentine’s Day, what with the Bridget Jonesing and her new and, to some, watershed article, which is part of Bustle’s Crush Week, about married women and their crushes. Read “Every Married Woman Needs a Battery Boy” here.
Still to come in this issue: Your new TV addiction… the truth about the feel-good hormonal high du jour… the haute accessory lurking in your giftwrap bin… a very American public school problem… proof that minds and hearts can change…and more! Hope you’re hungry.
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