So...What Have You Learned? PART DEUX
The bathrobe and the scented candle of newsletters offers you a break from printing return labels with our (last) end-of-year wrap up. No really, this is it.
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!
Spreadbabes,
We know you’ve thought of nothing else since you last heard from us, and here it is at last—all the other things we obsessed about, feared, craved, poked at, armchair-analyzed, imbibed, and shared with you in 2025. New Years, here we come!
Love you, mean it.
Rachel & Maggie
Worry not: Those of you who missed Part One of our Year in Review can dig in riiiiiiight here. (We’ve got blephs and facelifts a plenty—Meghan and Harry galore. You want magazine goss? We’ve got twenty…)
Also in 2025…
8.) We crowned Victoria Ratliff our Honorary Spreaditor of the Year.
The caftan-clad, generously medicated matriarch of White Lotus, Season 3, sparked a new love of flouncy nightdresses, a welcome return of better-than-ever Parker Posey, and a certain fellowship among your Spreaditors. Like (some of) us, Victoria has a drawl like a mint-julep-drunk Persian cat and a knack for staying vigilant at all times, no matter what comes her way. The cherry on top: y’all, she’s real!
9.) Gen X got taken for a wild ride.
You’d think that all the HRT and Lexipro that Gen X women are on would keep things even-keeled, but sheesh, the highs and the lows! First Mirielle Silcoff lifted our spirits and our libidos with a fist-pump-inducing reframe of the “misery perspective” on aging. The former latchkey kids and riot grrrls of Gen X, forged in the fire of the ’90s, were emerging into a kinder, gentler, more open-minded sexual era to find “a womblike bouncy castle where women are invited not just to have orgasms but also to have important conversations about their orgasms.” Gen Xers are having the most and the best sex of any demographic, she argues. “Whoop-tee-do!,” we say. But then Steven Kurutz had to come along and kill our buzz with “The Gen X Career Meltdown,” now maybe the most-invoked title in Spread history. It’s too painful for us to put into words, so we’ll just re-quote fellow Substacker Doree Shafrir’s take: “The long careers we all thought we would have in magazines, advertising, graphic design, et cetera, have been cut short and no one knows what the f*ck to do anymore, and most of us are just out here flailing and feeling washed up and old and useless.” Now all those unemployed Nirvana fans are becoming therapists—even Eliza Dushku. Which might help us process the late-breaking news that, wait, no, actually Generation X is the greatest—the coolest, the most creative, the one everybody else wishes they could be!! See what we mean by highs and lows?
10.) The West Village was ruined, young conservatives had a blast—and Brock Colyar got invited to both.
The two magazine stories that truly permeated the zeitgeist this year were both written by New York’s reporter-about-town Brock Colyar. First, the instantly iconic “It Must Be Nice to Be a West Village Girl” zeroed in on the army of strangely identical, gorgeous, skinny, moneyed, Aritzia Super Puff-clad girlies running rampant on Bleecker Street, treating New York’s most young-woman-idolized neighborhood like they’re on a perpetual semester abroad. Then with “The Cruel Kids Table”, Brock embedded with the rich, hardpartying twentysomething Trump fans who just want to have fun and believe real fun includes the ability to make off-color (at best) jokes. Taking on this assignment was a bold move for Colyar, who has written beautifully about their gender identity in the past, and who is referred to by their subjects while reporting this story as “a queer. But a friendly one” and “not ‘normal gay.’” Still, Colyar approaches these Trump lovers with the same open-hearted fearlessness as the denizens of any other scene they’ve covered.
11.) Republicans decided that what American women really need is more babies!
Remember Simone Collins, the “Techno-Puritanist” who started her own religion to hold people “responsible for every life they chose not to bring into the world”? If only she was a lone she-wolf! Alas, she was just one of the “zany” characters in the Times story that brought us deep into the beating heart (blergh) of the pronatalist movement by hanging out at a convention for their kind in Texas. The story, which would have been great theater had it not been absolutely chilling, came hot on the heels of a report that the Trump administration was considering pitches for how to make women have more babies—with no mention of, say, early childhood education or any other resources we might need to care for more babies AMONG OTHER PROBLEMS. While we tear our hair out, please allow us to refer dear Simone, the Project 2025 architects, and honestly, everyone, to this stirring New York Times Magazine profile of MaryBeth Lewis. Lewis birthed a batch of five in quick succession, then another eight, the last of whom she delivered at 62. At 65, she wanted even more, but no one thought that could be a good idea for infinite reasons, so she hired a surrogate and got two more—it was only then that the legal drama began. Fifteen, wow! That’s even more than Elon.
12.) That whole Amy Griffin thing? Saw it coming from a mile away.
Before Griffin’s bestselling memoir, The Tell, even hit bookstores, The Spread sniffed something rotten in Denmark. Why did the book excerpt published in Vogue by a woman we’d never heard of, writing about her perfectionist tendencies—which: fine—neglect to identify her by any of the markers that would actually mean something to readers, i.e.: the fact that she’s buds with Reese and Gwyneth and runs a baller VC firm that cut deals for Spanx, Goop, and Bumble? We now know that it’s because… her book doesn’t either! All summer, book-world friends were confounded by the omissions in The Tell and its unvetted claims about Griffin’s alleged attacker. In September, the New York Times rolled out a banger of an investigation that was everything our nosy little buttons could have asked for. A month later, Spreaditor Maggie dropped into the chat a piece published in Bustle about the effect of MDMA (Griffin’s hallucinogen of choice—she’s an investor!) on buried memories. Did it stop Griffin in her tracks? Not so much. She was too busy partying with her latest purchase, the New York Liberty.
13.) Boobs made a comeback
If you were an alien who’d just landed on earth, you’d think breasts were a brand new phenomenon, lighting up every corner of the internet via the otherwise blank actress Sydney Sweeney. Well aware of this sensation, Sweeney has in turn fed the frenzy by “wearing” her ample orbs in myriad arrangements on the red carpet (turns out she can tie ’em in a knot, tie ’em in a bow, and throw’ em over her shoulder like a continental soldier). While the solid-as-moonrock mammaries of space babe Lauren Sanchez may be a little one-note compared to Sweeney’s capricious bombs, Mrs Bezos’ chesticles also demonstrated a knack for starting conversation this year. Your Spreaditors saw art in them there hills at the inauguration in January, while the New Yorker’s Naomi Fry interpreted that unflinching rack as another unapologetic reminder that in Vladimir Trump’s America, “women will be women and men will be men.” Finally, we can shake off all that neutered, no-fun corporate culture (sensitivity training, what a buzzkill!) that pervaded the Biden era.
14.) We discovered some hard truths about our bodies, ourselves.
It’s not news that The Cut produces some excellent content about women’s cultural, sexual, and intellectual lives. But in 2025, they officially became our editorial destination for stories about the corporeal, too, delivering one super-relevant, well-reported women’s health story after another and seriously outscoring most of their competition in that genre. The supernova, of course, was our friend Laurie Abraham’s rigorous, moving, and (seriously) laugh-out-loud funny first-person report on her colon cancer “journey” (read our Behind the Music interview with LA here), but we were also served with news we could use on topics like breast reconstruction, the suddenly widespread affliction of brain fog (hi), and 2025’s favorite health boogeyman, inflammation. Now if someone over there could just take a look at this mole…
15. ) We learned some other things, too…
A. That god is a woman. #Facts. When a bunch of religious leaders took ‘shrooms in a university study, “men and women alike experienced the divine as a feminine presence. Participants characterized God as “soothing,” “maternal,” or “womb-like.” A Baptist Biblical scholar said, “God struck me as a Jewish mother at one point, which is funny, since I’m a Jesus follower.” (Michael Pollan, sticking to his beat in the New Yorker here. )
B. ….And her name is E. Jean Carroll. In a profile timed to the release of Not My Type: One Woman vs. a President (we particularly love the audio book) Jessica Bennet captures an icon of resilience and originality: our shotgun-toting, flight-suited fairy godmother in her mystical cabin in the woods. But it was E’s appearance on the Modern Love podcast that really moved us. Host Anna Martin caught a rare peek behind E’s armor of unflagging optimism. Thirty years after her assault, she admits, it’s still excruciating to open up to the possibility of romance and eroticism. Nevertheless, she still longs for it.
C. That Taylor Jenkins Reid banks $8 million per book. In other brain-bending publishing news: “Romantasy” is so dominant these days that two of its two biggest authors, Sarah J. Maas (A Court of Thorns and Roses) and Rebecca Yarros (The Fourth Wing), between them, wrote five of the ten top-selling books of 2024. Friend-of-Spread Véronique Hyland profiled Yarros for Elle: Two years after her Empyrean series took off, the military wife has sold millions of volumes and has production deals in the works with Netflix and Amazon. What have you accomplished since 2023?
D. That testosterone is the hormone of the year! It improves sexual health in about 50 percent of women who try it, but for most the results are subtle. “It’s not like ‘whammo-bammo,’” one expert told health reporter extraordinaire Danielle Friedman back in February, presaging the official Big T report from Susan Dominus (who found a woman who said the opposite: She wants sex so much now that even when she’s in the midst of shtupping her husband, she’s thinking about the next time.) Too bad those side effects—facial hair, deep voice, enlarged clitoris—might be… permanent? See also: Macronutrient of the year (protein), powdered blergh of the year (creatine), and parenting philosophy of the year (FAFO).
E. That the aughts was maybe the worst time to be a girl? Spread Icon Sophie Gilbert’s book, Girl on Girl, summed up all the ways that the supposedly sex-positive porn culture and “recreational misogyny” that peaked right when she was coming of age (Gilbert was 16 in 1999) crawled into our subconscious, deeply resetting ideas about how women should be treated, talked about, and viewed, and simply what we’re capable of—ideas imbibed not just by men, but by women—and, as we’ve seen in the last couple of years1, it stuck.
F. That sometimes the nanny never leaves. For sheer entertainment factor, we’ll take Bindu Bansinath’s story about a wealthy 30-something New York couple who moved with their baby to upstate New York and won the nanny lottery in the form of an experienced, high-end, German-speaking, 50-something former model—who moved into their guest house, wrecked it, and refused to move out. Almost makes us glad we can’t afford live in help!
OK, Spreadfriends! We’ve left it all on the mat in 2025. SEE YOU NEXT YEAR!
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A late-breaking viewing partner for Girl on Girl: Netflix’s new Diddy documentary, Sean Combs: The Reckoning, produced by 50 Cent, has incredible access to his inner circle and offers shocking insight on how 90s/aughts culture contributed to the making of a monster. If he wasn’t truly cancelled before, he’s donezo now.