Shake Your Moneymakers
The Jennifer Grey and Olivia Newton-John of newsletters is considering cohabiting and embracing our “codependence” with some fancy footwork.
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!
Disco Spreadshimmiers,
You know how celebrities marketing meno books and pills and unguents are always saying, “How come no one told me about this perimenopause thing?” We’d like to officially call bullshit on that, or at least put a moratorium on the idea. Readers, they knew this was coming. Everybody knows this is coming. (Anyway, as we’re about to tell you further down in this newsletter, menopause has been solved! You can check that anxiety right off your list!) You know what people actually don’t tell you is coming in midlife? It’s the fact that the weddings that crowded your calendar and drained your bank account in your 20s and 30s will go the way of the buffalo. You won’t notice this at first because you’ll be so busy adulting—getting up at 5:30 a.m. for daily blood draws down at the IVF clinic: a real distraction!—but at some point you’ll poke your head out of the bunker and realize it’s been a criminally long time since you went DANCING. You’ll need a fix badly, yet you honestly won’t know where to get one. And the fear of being shut out of da clerb (sorry) like Leslie Mann in This Is 40 will be real. Children, there will come a day when you will stumble across your old favorite tube of glitter eyeliner only to find that its contents have gone dry and desiccated, and as condescending as you are about wallowing when other people do it, you will find it hard not to whine about whether your nighttime self—the you who once felt so free and fluid and full of potential on a dance floor—has dried up, right along with it. Well, Maggie published this story in the New York Times Style section this morning about a possible solution, the Earlybirds Club, which has provided two of the best nights out she’s had in years. And since we always like to keep you in on the fun, we asked the event’s cofounders to put together an Earlybirds X Spread Dance Mix. (We even cued it up for you here on Apple Music and on Spotify.) Play it alone in your kitchen or gather a group of likeminded dancing queens. And don’t judge it: These tunes are not new, and they’re not trying to be “cool,” and there’s a reason for that. Life’s too short. Might as well dance your ass off to music that feels good and makes you move.
Consider it an Rx for, like, life.
Rachel & Maggie
P.S. The award for best non-Onion Onion headline of 2025 goes to Marie Claire for “Lea Michele Attempts to Dispel Longstanding Rumor That She Can't Read.”
P.P.S. Whether you love to dance or you love to Spread, let us know by hitting the ❤️ button up top. Also, consider passing this email along to a smart lady friend who needs more Spread in her life…
The Woman Who Birthed a Buzzword
Show us an article digging into a psych term that’s recently found mainstream ubiquity, and we’ll show it our eyeballs. Dysregulation? Delicious. Boundaries? Our appetite is boundless. The origins of toxic? Inject it into our veins. Codependency? Hitch our wagon to it and allow it to control our emotional weather. In reckoning with the latter term, the Cut takes the buzzword and mixes it with a posthumous profile of Melody Beattie, the woman who popularized the concept in her blockbuster 1980s book Codependent No More. The story is satisfying in many ways—a Joy-esque rags-to-riches story of a single mother who’s compelled to write a book that has sold 7 million copies and counting makes way for a profile of a woman with a big life who can’t take her own advice (same woman) and ends in an up-close snapshot of her admiring daughter, Nichole. We’re always curious about how the children of advice gurus turn out—in Nichole’s case, it seems, well!
Read “The Mother of Codependency” here.
We consider the Spread a form of “recreational wellness”—it’s not clinically proven, we just know it feels good.
Amy Larocca’s long-awaited tome skewering the wellness industrial complex, How to Be Well, is finally here, and you can just hear the publishing team at Penguin Random House kicking themselves that a little something called MAHA sprung up right after the manuscript skipped off to the printer. OG Spreaders will remember Larocca as the onetime fashion voice of New York mag, and she’s brought her understanding of consumerism and luxury marketing—because, lacking almost any scientific proof, it’s all marketing—to bear. Here is last weekend’s New York Times Q&A with Marie Solis, and here is the paper’s review by Elisabeth Egan, who writes that Larocca “debunks the cockamamie but persistent notion that ‘feeling old is not an inevitable byproduct of aging but something easily avoided by paying attention.’” Not hard to imagine what she’d make of the latest and greatest, a “bicep curl for your lungs”... but then, why burst Paris’s bubble?
Won’t You Be My Neighbor…and take these kids to the dentist for me?
In the Atlantic, friendship advocate Rhaina Cohen, author of The Other Significant Others—we pointed you toward her bonding sesh with an unexpectedly emo Ezra Klein last year—investigates a parenting solution that many of you out there have daydreamed about: What if you just moved in (or next to) your favorite people and did this together? Cohen speaks with 15 people who’ve moved in together, or next to each other, to coparent and co-live, including a trio of couples who, between them, had seven children under five when they bought three houses next door to one another. The good news is you can grab the baby monitor, jump the balcony (if you have balconies), and enjoy movie night anytime you want. The bad news is a) you have to live in close proximity to seven children under five, a factor that we think Cohen under-examines. And b) you have to cede a measure of control—something neither of your Spreaditors is naturally built for—when it comes to your kids. If you’re tempted, and are having trouble locating a Big Love-style compound, there’s a website for that!
Read “A Grand Experiment in Friendship and Parenthood” here.
As we speak, the Weinstein retrial is taking place right across the street from the Diddy trial. Huh.
Free Press culture writer Kat Rosenfield loves to stir a pot. This time she delivers the nauseating news that Harvey Weinstein, of all people, has been taken up as cause célèbre of the extremely online MAGA right—in particular, of “womanosphere” commandant Candace Owens, who conducted a series of jailhouse interviews called Harvey Speaks that’s got Joe Rogan and Co. wondering if Weinstein was just another innocent victim of the #MeToo “witch hunt.” Look, we read this stuff so that if you don’t want to, you don’t have to—it’s a public service—and Rosenfield is not as far away from Owens on this one as we’d like: “Considered in its totality,” she writes, “#MeToo looks mostly like a Salem-style moral panic whose casualties included dozens of innocent—or at least noncriminal—people and, generously, maybe five actual witches.” But when she posits that the result of this Wild est approach (in which, say, prosecutors were so hellbent on nailing Weinstein that they made the kind of jurisprudential errors that got his case called back into court and, who knows, maybe even thrown out) is the sweeping backlash we all live in now, in which a convicted criminal lives in the White House and #MeToo opponents have anointed the men they see as the movement’s “victims” (the more repugnant, the better, it seems) as heroes—look, parts of her argument feel uncomfortably on point.
Read “Harvey Weinstein and the Death Rattle of #MeToo” here at your own risk.
The most Rachel Baker text to hit the Spread chain this week:
“Does Esquire not remember the ASME-winning New York magazine ‘For and Against the Foreskin’ circa 2009? Or, worse, do they remember—and they didn’t think any of us would notice??”
Read Esquire’s “The Case Against Circumcision” here, or go back to the iconic-to-some New York Mag package here, here, here, and here.
Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow (Sorry)
Straight women who marry their male hairstylists hold a special place of fascination in the hearts of your Spreaditors. (We’re looking at you, Christina Ricci.) Town & Country gave the people what we want this month with a true crime yarn about larger-than-life hair stylist Fabio Sementilli1(really) who marries a woman (actually, two women in quick succession but that’s beside the point) and moves from Canada to the fabled, noir-ish Los Angeles, where he is...murdered. There’s no way the editors of Town & Country didn’t have American Crime Story boss Ryan Murphy in mind when they published this tale. (Spread Pictures would option it but we have different priorities at this time.) Counting down to this story’s inevitable limited series premiere. Since we hear Bradley Cooper is otherwise indisposed with his own projects, we’ll root for the casting of a pumped-up Oscar Issac. Fabulous, right?
Read “Death Becomes Hair” here.
Mother (Essay) of the Year
Every year at precisely this time, we all have Mother’s Day essay fatigue, but we couldn’t ignore one that had Elizabeth Bruenig’s byline. And you know what? Her maternal musings—about understanding her mother’s love and sacrifice only after becoming a mother herself—hit the spot. That spot being a really tearful one that required a tissue and a mascara reapplication. Love you, Dea Dea and BonBon! Allow Elizabeth to tell you how we feel.
Read it here.
“My body is a party hall, a room to be decorated, a gift to adorn with bows and patterns and leather and lace—not to be draped in drab gray bunting in order to make me disappear.”—Carla Sosenko in “I Was Born With a Rare Deformity — And It Made Me Obsessed With Fashion,” an excerpt from her new memoir in Vogue.
Is turning back the ovarian clock the secret to women’s health?
In Vox’s Highlight, writer Anna North asks, “Will my generation be the last to go through menopause?” She digs into a handful of treatments currently being studied to delay menopause or even stave it off forever, by slowing down the process of ovarian aging. Though North—like us—is “unsettled by the prospect of treating women’s aging out of their childbearing years, in particular, as something that must be cured,” it’s hard not to celebrate the major health benefits that such a medical revolution might usher in: Significantly less cardiovascular disease and osteoporosis, for starters. The implications for quality of life are staggering. As one expert told North, “Women live longer than men, but they usually do so in a much more frail state.” Stalling menopause could change that.
Read “Is this the end of menopause?” via AppleNews here.
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rachel's Text! Hahahahaahah!
Great Spread, as usual, guys. But this: “Women live longer than men, but they usually do so in a much more frail state.” Frailer than dead? I'll take it! xo