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!
Sweet Spreadikins,
Christmas came early for the headline writers of the world, who—in a season of uncontainable excitement about the-weirder-the-better movies—are having the time of their lives rising to the challenge (if you will) of a cinematic love machine that brings new meaning to the term “rough sex.” “Sex scenes with a ‘Wicker’ man? ‘Less embarrassing’ than usual, says Olivia Colman,” proclaims the LA Times. “What Does Wicker Husband Have That I Don’t?” asks The Ringer (if you have to ask...). “Size Really Does Matter,” says the Hollywood Reporter. (“Hell yeah! 50 shades of Pinocchio!”)
Top marks go to the wizards at New York, for Cat Zhang’s “Anything But a Human Man” as well as our spit take of the week, “What Would Happen if You Had Sex With a Wicker Dick?”—a real Rachel Handler special. (Handler, btw, was already having a banner fortnight squeezing every ounce of sweetness out of figuring out why the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups you’re about to pilfer from your kids’ trick-or-treat stash will straight-up taste like brown wax.) Wicker has been “a source of horny internet fascination for months, due largely to the fact that it stars Alexander Skarsgård as a man made entirely of wicker, complete with a rock-hard wicker dick that catapults Olivia Colman into paroxysms of bed-breaking ecstasy,” Handler explains, taking the fascination ultra-literally by interviewing a professor of obstetrics and gynecology about the sexual-health wisdom of the act itself. What about the splinters? Wouldn’t, um, fluids be bad for wood? For what it’s worth, the studio behind that film has thoughtfully addressed a few practical concerns by releasing a branded splinter-removal kit, though the Spread’s preferred merch is the 100 percent perfect cap.
Zhang, for her part, makes an earnest attempt to get to the bottom of why women are reacting to the prospect of non-human lovers—and not just baskets, either: “a Noah’s ark of strange literary fiction involving trees, planes, blobs, pangolins, and soon towers… with a resounding and unexpected moan.” Fans have “pronounced themselves proud harlots of HomeGoods, sisters in splinters. As one Instagram commenter poetically put it, ‘Mr. Wicker can snap, crackle, and pop this back to oblivion.’”
For our part, we’re in it for the election escapism. How about you?
Off to our weaving lessons,
Rachel & Maggie
Say “Fromage”
Frequenters of the Spreadiverse will note that we’ve been bullish on Hungarian photog Szilveszter Makó for many moons, championing his wacky-chic Cate Blanchett shoot for Vogue China in 2024, fawning over his whimsical Elle Fanning fantasia for Who What Wear this past January, high-fiving one another over his far-from-tradish first-lady portraits of Rama Duwaji for the Cut in February, and admitting that his Daisy Edgar-Jones cover images for Vogue UK were chef’s-kiss incarnate. But sometime around when we saw famously non-directional actress Sandra Bullock wearing a strange collection of furry things on one of Makó’s sets in September for Interview, your Spreaditors began to feel a little, uh, fatigued. This month alone, we got: Emma Corrin for Harper’s Bazaar UK, Gigi Hadid for WSJ, Hunter Schafer for Elle, and last week, in what had to be the grand finale, Jenna Ortega for Vogue. Nope! Then Alicia Keys for Vogue Italia landed, and we had to take to the bed Leanne Morgan-style (and we’re not talking one of Makó’s whimsical, American Girl doll-size nests). This afternoon, both the New York Times and Diet Prada weighed in on the phenomenon, interviewing Makó himself. In an era when no magazine has the clout or the budget to lock up a photographer with a contract that gives them exclusive access to his work, a hot fashion-world debate is upon us: Is the consistency of Makó’s work a laudable “signature,” or is it a one-trick-pony sameness that leaves egg on the face of a whole bunch of magazines this month? After all, nobody (besides us) likes showing up to the party in the same dress as everybody else.
Dial T for Trauma
While the whole country waits to find out whether Lindsay Clancy will have to stand trial again, Anja Aronowsky Cronberg has written a boldly empathetic story about the filicide case of Nakira Griner, who was convicted of murdering her toddler son but maintains that he died after falling down the stairs. (We don’t have the stomach to retread the rest of the horrific details here, and honestly, any reader should have to actively opt in to learning them anyway.) When Cronberg begins looking into the case, she is herself grappling with ambivalence around having a second child after getting pregnant unexpectedly—which feels like a radical framework through which to explore such appalling and taboo subject matter. But what begins as an essay morphs into a devastating profile of Griner, who will spend life in prison. The piece also manages to weave in the trauma suffered not only by Griner’s surviving son and her husband, but also the police involved in the investigation, who can’t unsee what they found that day, which may be the perspective that stuck with us most.
Read “A Mother on Trial” here.
