Shakespeare in the Dark
The Knox and Shiloh of newsletters is getting a little judgy.
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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Spread-a-lama-ding-dongs,
We’re keeping things a little light this week—more of a nosh than the usual smorgasbord—while Rachel yucks it up with the American Society of Magazine Editors, who are meeting in New York to vote on 2024’s best magazine journalism. RB would like to thank all the editors and writers out there for the Edible Arrangements, singing telegrams, and envelopes of cash that have mysteriously arrived at her hotel room. So sweet of you to make her stay more comfortable! But while, yes, our girl is a little high on power this week, Spreaditors cannot be bought! Blah blah journalistic ethics…ah, forget it, who’s ready to read?
Rachel & Maggie
P.S. Over this crazy week, there have been many newsletters informing us how to help victims of the California wildfires.
’s, released today, is comprehensive, practical, and easy to action. Spreaders in California, our hearts are with you!P.P.S. Per tradition we are spending most of January plotting how to not spend time with our kids in July, otherwise known as The Amazing Summer Camp Sign-up Race. Anybody else?
The Unsinkable Caroline Calloway
Caroline Calloway is up to her old shiz again, this time with a book of advice she wrote with… the ghost of Elizabeth Wurtzel. Yeah. In an interview in Dazed, accompanied by this on-the-money photo, she speaks about her level of fear of getting sued by the Wurtzel estate (that would be zero percent) and also makes wise points about Wurtzel's unjustly modest legacy. After a week of text-chain debate about another author-slash-performance artist’s response to the wildfires in California, though, our top question is this: Do Caroline Calloway and Miranda July text?? We’d tune in for a call-in advice show from those two (though let’s be honest, only once). Read the Dazed chat here.
Human-to-human connection: It’s a growth market!
We couldn’t wait to get our mitts on the Atlantic’s cover story, “The Anti-Social Century,” which really hits our dead-of-winter anxiety sweet spot. The story is nutritionally dense, stitching together the decline of in-person hangouts, the takeover of TV and then the smartphone, “socially underdeveloped” kids, and the birth of the “secular monk” (dudes more focused on solo self-optimization than, say, girlfriends).1 But as a read it is, dare we say, lacking flavor? Allison P. Davis to the rescue! In New York, she covers the inevitable loneliness business boom (see also: perimenopause, breakups) as idealistic app-building types apply their big brains to solving this problem—one such founder says loneliness is neck and neck with climate change as the crisis of our time (um, sure, but only one of these seems to be a straight line to our collective fiery demise?). Davis captures moneyed do-gooders—delightfully reminiscent of Anne Hathaway’s cuckoo Rebekah Neumann in WeCrashed—doing their darndest to reduce human isolation with dance parties and group trips to the Arctic. We’re into it! And yet the most compelling, easily adoptable solution of the month comes via Ellen Cushing, also in the Atlantic, who argues that all we really need to do to reconnect is throw more parties. Her Rx:
“This year, pay your taxes: Resolve to throw two parties—two because two feels manageable, and chain-letter math dictates that if every party has at least 10 guests (anything less is not a party!) and everyone observes host-guest reciprocity (anything else is sociopathic!), then everyone gets 20 party invitations a year—possibly many more.”
P.S. Thank you, Ms. Cushing, for working the recent demise of Party City, our one-time happy place, into the loneliness convo. Anyone with Party City memories to share should reach out to NPR—seriously, do it—here.
Read “The Anti-Social Century” here.
Read “How Far Would You Go to Make a Friend?” here.
Read “Americans Need to Party More” here.
How would we survive this American life without SNL?
The sole highlight of the national nightmare set to begin next week is taking bets on which Trump hench-person Lorne Michaels and Co. will skewer first, and who will play those poor bastards. (We’re already salivating for SNL’s Pete Hegseth, trying to name his 47 children.) We’re not going to give you the full book report on Susan Morrison’s decade-in-the-making bio of Michaels2—the excerpt of which coincides with SNL’s 50th year on the air, and also with the New Yorker’s 100th anniversary (darling)—but we will cheat and skip to the story’s kicker, in which Lorne compares himself to… Shakespeare. Which seemed insane and hyperbolic for a second, but then we thought, “huh…. Fair.”3
Read “Lorne Michaels Is the Real Star of ‘Saturday Night Live’” here.
Roses blooming on the moon.
A few weeks back, Substacker extraordinaire
—whose frankness about the profitability of her Feed Me ’stack has been known to take our breath away—prognosticated that 2025 would be the year of the beauty newsletter, and declared herself “ready to invest” in new contenders. Unclear if by invest she was talking, like, $7/month or series C funding—like we said, lotsa big talk over on FM!—but grab your checkbook: has entered the chat! The longtime beauty director of Town & Country, April is a much-decorated beauty writer (yes, there are awards for fragrance writing), and an expert on all things floral (lady’s got a serious green thumb, too). Now she brings the full bouquet of her skill set—see what we did there?—to , a Substack on all things frah-grahnce: “Expect to find perfume history and recommendations, notes (and noses) to know, behind-the-scenes ingredient stories, fun flower lore, guides to the most fragrant gardens of the world, and unmissable places to seek out new scents, from museums to souks to off-the-beaten-path boutiques.” Sign up here.Do we still use the term “bodice ripper,” or…?
Hot on the heels of Katy Waldman’s exploration of the “romantasy” industrial complex (feel free to text us at 2 a.m.; we’ll be lying awake at night thinking about that one for the foreseeable future) comes an Elle profile of one of the genre’s two leading authors, Rebecca Yarros, courtesy of friend-of-Spread Véronique Hyland. Yarros is a millennial mom and military wife who shot off the midlist with her Empyrean series in 2023. Less than two years later she has millions of volumes sold and production deals in the works with Netflix and Amazon MGM. The cost? Being stalked on TikTok and at airports, and getting doxxed to the point she had to move to a new house.
Read “Rebecca Yarros’s Fantasy Life” here.
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