Something to Talk About
The Wham! of newsletters is conjuring our inner “big, ugly Irish girl,” trading Burning Man for the Kennedy School, and yes, fine, bloggin' our buns off.
What would make the perfect women’s magazine? Juicy yarns, big ideas, deeply personal examinations of women’s lives—and none of the advertiser obligations. Welcome to the Spread, where every week two editors read, listen, and watch it all, and deliver only the best to your inbox.
Roman Empresses,
Our raison d’être is keeping you up to date on our little corner of “the conversation.” But sometimes we, too, feel like teacups at the county fair—reminder: We’re shoulder-padded Big City Women currently living undercover as small-town baby-food entrepreneurs—spun this way and that by the great ideas machine in the sky. A brief highlight reel of the motherhood-related cultural commentary that has whizzed past, just in the few weeks since school buses got back on the road. It started with a burst of thinking about the #Tradwife: See Anne Helen Petersen, Kathryn Jezer-Morton. Then there was that lengthy exchange between childless ideators—Anne Helen Petersen (girl gets around), Jill Filipovich—on the crisis of abandonment when your friends have kids and you don’t, spurred by Allison P. Davis’s lightning rod New York cover story “Adorable Little Detonators” (if you haven’t read it, may we recommend the audio version?). Last week, we gave you two sides of the Mom Rage debate. And over the past week, we’ll be honest, we’ve gotten a little touched out on Amanda Montei’s seemingly everywhere new book on pretty much all of the above, Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent, and Control. We feel compelled to think hard about her thesis but, um, can we be honest with you? We may have pulled a muscle in all this navel-gazing. Please send reads about big-haired Texas real estate agents, bananas pyramid schemes, and anything—literally, anything—the kids are doing these days. By kids, we mean the Brock Colyar demo. Not, like, our kids.
Holler!
Rachel & Maggie
P.S. Turns out, when we ask for love, we get more love. (Wait, did Glennon say that, or did we just coin something epic?) So: Please take the hottest second to heart this post.
Marriage stories.
My actual last Google search: “Is there a term for the gesture when you lick your finger and then touch your hip with that finger and make a sizzling sound?” The answer, apparently, is no, there’s not, but I hope you can now picture me manically gesticulating when I encountered Rebecca Traister’s new piece, “The Return of the Marriage Plot.” It’s a comprehensive takedown of the suddenly pervasive-again conservative idea that two-parent households are the key to keeping kids out of poverty. I’m sizzling with outrage against these dum-dums and in righteous agreement with Traister…and also because a week ago I sent a text to Maggie, something along the lines of, “WHAT IS WITH ALL THESE GARBAGE OP-EDS ABOUT MARRIAGE AS A CURE-ALL FOR POVERTY?” (Yep, I’m a hot-fire trendspotter.) “It’s not marriage—it’s money, and the racist and economically unjust policies that leave some Americans with less of it to begin with, regardless of their marital status,” Traister argues. “For those who have money, marriage is likely to help them to have even more of it; for those who find a good match, there are many emotional and societal rewards of partnership. But you need stability first; you need the money, jobs, housing, and health care first. And these are the things that the American government, particularly the American right, does not want to offer its people.” On cue, the Atlantic’s Annie Lowrey chimes in with, “Is Single Parenthood the Problem?” Lowrey essentially agrees with Traister, stressing that “the real elephant in the room…is that the United States doesn’t want to contemplate, let alone create, a policy infrastructure that supports single parenthood,” and law professor Kimberly Wehle offers an explainer about one of the right’s favorite boogeymen in their quest to force the nuclear family on every American: No-fault divorce.
The seminal article on this topic, though, is a full 20 years old and as relevant as ever: Katherine Boo’s 2003 New Yorker masterpiece, “The Marriage Cure,” examining the Bush administration’s $300 million push for marriage through a portrait of two Oklahoma City women, Kim and Corean, as they embark on a government-sponsored class on how to get and stay married. It’s a masterclass in magazine journalism (I first read it—nerd alert—in The Best American Magazine Writing 20041) that lends a much-needed layer of real humanity to a whole lot of thinky punditry both then and now.—Rachel
Read “The Return of the Marriage Plot” here.
Read “Is Single Parenthood the Problem?” here.
Read “The Marriage Cure” here.
When Tressie Met Pooja.
When Tressie McMillan Cottom sits in for our favorite women’s media pod-host, Ezra Klein, you know it’s gonna be good. When she lets loose on one of her pet bugaboos, the Self-Care Industrial Complex, with the help of perinatal psychiatrist and author Pooja Lakshmin, the Spread item pretty much writes itself. Still, Rachel, I was caught off guard when you told me you cried listening to the two women discuss the difference between commodified self-care (scented candles, downward dog) and the kind that really makes a difference in women’s lives (in Lakshmin’s view: setting boundaries, practicing self-compassion, aligning your values, and exercising power). Huh! I loved this meeting of the minds because it felt less emotional, more actionable: I’ve spent all week parroting Lakshmin’s observation that the people whose feelings get hurt when you enforce your boundaries are not the ones who can also absolve you of your guilt over causing that hurt. Translation: If your aunt is wounded that you’re not coming to her house for Thanksgiving, that aunt is not going to be the one to make you feel better about it. That discomfort, you must learn to live with. Like, woah.—Maggie
Maggie, I’m gonna get a reputation as the village weeper around here! But I did get emotional when Lakshmin spoke so beautifully about community as self-care. And I too found it to be really special—dare I say, moving?—that Lakshmin, the interviewee, was totally fluent in Cottom’s work and her personal brand, her likes and dislikes, and not just vice versa. Tressie is not just a master interviewer but a master connector. When is the New York Times going to wise up and give this woman her own show?—Rachel
Listen to “Boundaries, Burnout, and the ‘Goopification’ of Self-Care” here.
“Half adult, half child.”
Probably because I live with a real, live 13-year-old girl, I dillydallied for a week before actually facing reporter Jessica Bennett’s interactive New York Times project: A year-in-the-making group portrait of three freshly teenage girls as they navigate “the age-old pressure to be good enough, pretty enough, kind enough, popular enough, but now on multiple platforms, too.” The package is tricked out with actual photos, playlists, and DMs from Bennett’s subjects’ actual phones, which makes for a dizzying experience (the point!) and an exercise in empathy for a generation scrutinized at a new level, from every angle. On the same day Bennett’s piece came out, the Cut published its own survey of 65 teens about their online lives, from writer Anya Kamenetz, which has its own share of highs, lows, and gut punches. Do as I say, not as I do: Read these two important stories, but take a break—ideally one that doesn’t involve being on a screen, or down the hall from a teen—in between. Whew.—Rachel
Read “Being 13” here.
Read “I Asked 65 Teens How They Feel About Being Online” here.
It’s feeling very 2007 around here.
“So, how’s your blog going, honey?” As a couple of print-o-sauruses who were (cluelessly) ensconced inside the glassy tower of establishment media during the rise of the blog, Rachel and I still reflexively shiver when, say, our dads ask how we like being “bloggers” now. But if the job title fits—fine, dads, you’re not wrong. In the two years we’ve been on Substack, it seems that most of the people we do think of as bloggers, the surviving OGs of the form, have migrated over here, too—seeking, most say, a break from the pressures of clickbait production, a way to reclaim the original writer/reader intimacy blogging once held, and easier tech (hey, if we can figure it out…). This week, that movement reaches its apotheosis, maybe, as queen of genteel Brooklyn charm Joanna Goddard (Cup of Joe) launches her Substack, Big Salad, joining brethren like Victoria Smith of SFGirlByBay (who’s in Laguna these days) and Holly Becker of decor8 (who’s in Germany these days!). With a decade and a half of experience under their belts; big fat built-in readerships (Deb Perelman’s the smitten kitchen digest has 200,000+); and in some cases full staffs (the current iteration of politics rag Wonkette boasts four full-timers “with excellent health care”—must be nice!—and a retinue of freelancers) the one-time “disruptors” now are the establishment, moving in on a platform allegedly built to nurture scrappy indie operations2 like, say, this one. We’re not threatened, you’re threatened. Welcome, Jo!—Maggie
Julia & Julia
The editors of the New York Times Style section have truly outdone themselves. Last Wednesday, they served us an ooey-gooey chocolate chip cookie in the form of the absolutely absurd love story of proto-influencer Julia Allison and legal hot shot Noah Feldman. This one has it all, folks: “Opposites” attracting, cross-country romance, Burning Man, Harvard, and the renovation of a 5,000-square-foot home involving hot-pink-primate-dappled wallpaper. Also, did we mention that the heroine is…Julia Allison? Speaking of Styles being extra Styles-y, they’ve also got a new profile of Styles pet Julia Fox, pegged to her memoir, Down the Drain, out next month, which Fox would like you to know she produced without a ghostwriter. Other things she’d like you to know: There isn’t sex with Kanye in the book because “there, like, wasn’t any” sex with Kanye, and she’ll show up to your brand event for $20,000—minimum. Almost makes Linda not getting out of bed for less than $10,000 seem quaint!—Rachel
Read “She Pioneered Internet Fame, He Helped Draft a Constitution. Now They’re in Love.” here
Read “Julia Fox Gets Dirty to Come Clean” here.
Virginia Woolf, she’s just like us.
Stealing this item wholesale from dedicated Spreader Esme (with her blessing!), who photo’d a page from her print edition of the New Yorker, yellow-highlighting this segment of Rebecca Mead’s story on the boho Brits known as the Bloomsbury Set: “Her journals are filled with comments on the inadequacy of her wardrobe…in 1915, Woolf considers attending a party, reminding herself that she will ‘see beautiful people, & get a sensation of cresting on the biggest wave,’ then decides against it. ‘There is vanity,’ she writes. ‘I have no clothes to go in.’” It me.—Maggie
Read “The Bloomsbury Group Is Back in Vogue,” here.
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The magic of Rachel Baker, folks!—Maggie
shocked that already this week both Julia stories in Times had absorbed me and cannot possibly imagine getting head around all the other fascinating topics here how on earth can women's brains be so much more capable aieeeeeeeeeeee