Roll Over Beethoven

The Lassie and Rin Tin Tin of newsletters is taking refuge in *Lights! Camera! Action!* and only feeling a little bad about it…

We’re here to reclaim the “women’s magazine.” Every week, two veteran editors read it ALL to bring you everything we believe women’s media should be: juicy yarns, big ideas, deeply personal essays, hot goss, and the odd shopping tip—aka, the full Spread. Plus: original interviews, podcasts, and more. Come hungry! 

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Spreaders Supreme, 

In the parlance of our Spread-spawns’ preschool teachers, our feelings are not organized. Part of us is tempted to wallow endlessly in the op-eds where, as of this morning, we were literally being advised to panic. Part of us is tempted to cut the cord like the handful of high-information citizens we know who have, in recent weeks, deleted the New York Times and WaPo apps from their home screens altogether. (Okay, not an option for a Spreaditor. Still, we see where they’re coming from.) More than anything we feel a stronger-than-ever desire to escape. We’re too norovirus-averse to board the four-year “Skip Forward” cruise,¹ but we do feel a spark of—is it? Could it be?—actual joy about the arrival of The Most Wonderful Time of the Year. The holidays? Bah! We’re talking about Culture Season. This is always our favorite time, but in the year of our lord 2024, we find the usual anticipation heightened, as if the only place we have any hope of feeling good is within the safe confines of (cue Nicole Kidman AMC ad) a darkened theater. 

Of course, accompanying this excitement is a pang of guilt, too, one that our therapy trio on Critics at Large put their collective finger on this week: Is it okay to want to be swallowed whole by art/culture/comfort TV right now? Is there a moral cost to watching Bake Off while democracy burns? Their convo is too sprawling to do justice to here—give it a listen—but ultimately they land in a place that works for us: This next administration will be a marathon, not a sprint, and we’re gonna need as much good art and culture (and Cynthia, Nicole, Mikey, Amy, et al.) as we can get to sustain our wounded spirits through it.

On that uplifting note [insert bumpy segue here] please escape with us to the morning, not so long ago, when we looked in the mirror and found something new: a forest of wiry hairs, sprouted on our chinny chin chin. Not ideal, but par for the course. Then, when we got out of the shower, we spotted six more nipples than usual dotting our torso. Huh. A tail had sprouted from our lower back, too. Suddenly, we were overcome with a craving for raw meat. We ached to chase squirrels and run with wild abandon down our suburban street. Our Nightbitch era was upon us. Howl, growl, the whole nine.

This, of course, is a metaphor for what can happen to one’s body and sense of self after having a child. It’s also the premise of Marielle Heller’s new movie, an adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s novel about “feral motherhood,” Nightbitch, which comes out the week after Thanksgiving. The movie—notice that we’re not using the word “film”—is a fable about “Mother” (played by an extremely game Amy Adams), an artist who has traded her professional life for stay-at-home motherhood and lost herself in the process. If this sounds a little Teen Wolf, that’s because it is a little Teen Wolf (sans car surfing or basketball): A broad comedy wherein hormones are a catalyst for self-discovery. Sure, the reviews have been mixed, but one Spreaditor who’s seen it found that whether this piece of pop culture is “good” isn’t the point. This is an entertainment that will sink its teeth into you—as much fun to think about, read about, and debate as it is to actually watch. (For the reading piece, start with Emily Nussbaum’s two-plus-years-in-the-making profile of Heller, herself a mother of two young children, in this week’s New Yorker; it’s about as Spready a story as they come, packed with ideas about marriage, ambition, Hollywood, and, yes, the body.)

So that’s where we escaped this week. Spreaders, please share with the circle: Where are you looking for sustenance? Maggie’s go-to comfort food has been soothing audiobooks of Ann Patchett’s back catalog; for Rachel, it’s rewatching Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers and Call Me by Your Name for the 37th and 87th time, respectively. (His new movie Queer’s wide release is scheduled for December 13—woot!) 

We’ll take the Milk Duds and the Twizzlers, 

Rachel & Maggie

P.S. Clearly we’re not the only ones trying to figure out what feels “right” to talk/think about right now: Today’s Daily goes deep on… the itty bitty titty committee in a follow-up interview with Lisa Miller about her Spreaditor-beloved story on the “astonishing jump” in women downsizing their breasts, published almost nine weeks ago.

P.P.S Help your fellow Spreaders out—please share your comfort recs! And, while you’re at it, your favorite podcast episodes of the year. We’ll be back next week with our traditional recipe for Thanksgiving week: A list of pods you can enjoy with your loved ones or deploy to tune them out. As you wish.

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Go ahead, catch Wicked fever.

Somebody say awards season?? After our dreams were dashed by Into the Woods (Rachel caught an entire REM cycle in the theater) and Cats, we were afraid to hope for much from the latest years-in-the-promoting, zillion-dollar big-screen movie musical but FOLKS, the reviews are in! Are they perfect? No! But they include words like iconic and sugar rush and “huge in every possible way” (and if that's not what the doctor ordered, well…). We have sworn off hope-y change-y predictions around here, but we think you can afford to go out on a limb and get mildly excited—maybe even choose an on-theme outfit: Rachel and Maggie are feuding over who gets to be Madame Morrible—about Jon M. Chu’s Wicked, which Cynthia Erivo (one half of our favorite Hollywood power couple) shills here in the pages of Elle, as only she can. (Photo by Felix Cooper.) 

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Here’s what paid subscribers are tearing through like a Victoria’s Secret catalog circa 1997 (you know, the ones with “English matron” Stephanie Seymour wearing the dark green robe on the back cover)…

• Is Vanity Fair having an identity crisis? 

• We found it: the best show on TV in ages.

• A super-mega-star’s revenge tour.

• A breasts-out shocker. 

• The art-world’s “bada-bing Betty Boop.”