So…What Have You Learned? PART I
The James Caan and Bob Newhart of newsletters is playing it back and taking names.
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!
Joyful Spreaders, Grinchy Spreaders, Hungry Spreaders:
Looking back through this year’s issues, some of the things we obsessed over feel like ancient history (Lively v. Baldoni, the hot cocktail party goss last winter), others feel like they happened just yesterday (the debut of Jordon Hudson, self-declared “golddigger”), and others feel so dystopian and absurd—Katy Perry making space “chic”; actual humans falling in love with the robot voices that live in their phones—that we’re not sure whether they actually happened, or if the anesthesia from our joint facelift still hasn’t worn off. Did Martha Stewart really cop to biting her new pets on the face, or was that just a Spread fever dream? (Also: Whyyyy? To establish dominance? Catch a snack?) This week we are kicking off the first half of a 17-point blockbuster list of The Year in Spreadlandia: a synthesis of the stories, ideas, and characters that imprinted on us these past twelve months.
As Paris says, this is Sliving!**
Merry, merry,
Rachel & Maggie
PS: If you find yourself wanting for programming this “break”, may we suggest you return to the Spread 100, our superior-to-the-New York Times ranking of our favorite films of this century: Get crackin’ here!
PPS: We are lifting the paywall this week so that everyone can experience this bounty. Please consider giving us the enormous gift of passing this email along to a few of the smartest woman you know. (No really, we love fresh eyeballs!) Also nice? Consider wrapping up the gift of a paid Spread subscription!
** “iconic term for ‘slaying and living,’ meaning to live glamorously, empowered, and authentically.
In 2025…
1.) Magazines gave ’em something to talk about
Last year, we would have told you that we were the co-presidents of a pretty exclusive fan club: People Who Still Care About Magazines (PWSCAM, pronounced pwuh-scam). But today, our feeds are as clogged as J.D.Vance’s arteries with talk of Vanity Fair’s “diabolical,” “intentional,” “evil genius” photo shoot of Trump’s basket of deplorables. The magic of magazines, bay-bee!
Not since the very same publication egged on Nuzzigate (three whole weeks ago) have we seen this kind of all-in chatter, commentary, and sheer glee—proof that Anna Wintour (who 100% had to sign off on the feature) has official reached her gives-no-fucks era. This is the perfect nightcap on a year that also saw a Condé tell-all (Michael M. Grynbaum’s Empire of the Elite), a Condé memoir (Graydon Carter’s When the Growing Was Good), a fictionalized Condé insider account (Caroline Palmer’s Workhorse: catch our Exclusive Interview™ with the author here), a handy-dandy Condé quiz that we aced (“Could You Have Landed a Job at Vogue in the ’90s?”) and the promised sequel to everyone’s favorite Condé spoof. (To answer your next question: May 1, 2026.) After a couple of intense conclaves, we even chose a new Pope and, uh, cardinal—Vogue “editorial director” Chloe Malle and Vanity Fair “global editorial director” Mark Guiducci. The latter, as established, is turning out to be a born headline-grabber, with the hire of VF’s shortest-lived West Coast editor in history and now the absolute PR bonanza of this Trumpworld shoot. Will that pay off in actual ad dollars come 2026?
2.) Everybody got a “bleph”
In early July, our group chats emitted something between a gasp and a squeal when “Annie” Hathaway showed up in Vogue looking, uh, exceedingly well rested. Later that month, the Hollywood Reporter declared plastic surgery to be “finally out of the closet” and our For You pages began exclusively featuring celebrity before-and-afters. In September, the Cut published “The Forever 35 Face,” detailing the rise of the deep-plane facelift and the procedure’s prevalence among women we previously believed were nowhere near the facelift demo. And in November, our own Maggie Bullock wrote an up close and personal profile of the Upper East Side’s star tweak doctor, Lara Devgan, as part of a 17-feature Bustle interrogation of the culture’s suddenly all-consuming preoccupation with cosmetic surgery. Over six months of inundation, we’ve cycled through all the emotions—shock, curiosity, envy, denial, empowerment, resignation, and annoyance (not necessarily in that order). Though our For You page is still a lost cause, the backlash has begun and, we must admit, we are tired of the Emma Stone discourse, tired of Mandy Moore looking nothing like Mandy Moore, tired of Kate Winslet feeling like she needs to weigh in. So tired we probably need a ble…
3.) Meghan and Harry’s stock plummeted.
One year ago, people were still giving that girl from Suits and her affable, redheaded spouse the benefit of the doubt. Sure, her podcast had been a nothingburger and neither of the Sussexes exactly radiated self-awareness, but the royal family and British tabs had been deeply terrible to them a while back—and who doesn’t love a love story? But in January, with Rahdika Jones still in the EIC chair, Vanity Fair slapped a stock photo of the Duke and Duchess on the cover and commissioned writer Anna Peele to let ’er rip, producing the most scathing write-around we’ve read in years. The piece literally likens Meghan to a “Mean Girls teenager.” In one of its wildest anecdotes, she floats a divorce memoir to a major publisher, gauging interest in case she and Harry were to get divorced anytime soon. (For these and more sick burns, read the Spread’s full take here.) Wilder still: All of the above occurred before Meghan hit Netflix like a ton of vanilla bricks in May, prompting Vulture critic Kathryn VanArandonk to string together this sentence: “With Love, Meghan is an utterly deranged bizarro world voyage into the center of nothing, a fantastical monument to the captivating power of watching one woman decorate a cake with her makeup artist while communicating solely through throw-pillow adages about joy and hospitality.”
4.) Ezra Klein hurt our feelings.
This year, our old crush repeatedly made reproductive rights sound like a bargaining chip. (At the risk of sounding crass, say it with us: boner killer!) He also rolled out a handful of interviews that reminded us why we’ve been known to call The Ezra Klein Show the best ladymag in the land: Wide-ranging chats with superfeeling writer Kathryn Schulz, trans Congresswoman Sarah McBride, and shamanic rockstar Patti Smith. We’ve been told that a person can hold two truths at once, but Ezra: Why you gotta make it so hard?
5.) Our evil twin jumped out from behind the bushes.
Ack! While we were over here poking fun of Republican henchwomen in Kabuki makeup and bad filler, a thriving female counterpart to the manosphere—one that’s cannier and more nakedly ambitious than the #tradwives, and bears a strong resemblance to “our” people—was gaining steam. We were still licking our inauguration wounds in February when we first caught a glimpse of this “womanosphere” (the polar opposite of the Spreadosphere) an “ecosystem of young conservative female voices that fills space for a generation of women who are at least curious about some traditionally conservative views—but aren’t always interested in entering the digital man cave that is the overwhelmingly male right-wing podcast space,” wrote Max Tani in Semafor. Now we know that it has its own “conservative Cosmo,” Evie magazine, which reads like the Onion but actually means headlines like, “I Don’t Want to Be Independent Anymore”; benign-looking avatars like Katie Miller (wife of Goebbels-lookalike Stephen); and the lock on a vision of womanhood summed up by womanosphere influencer Alex Clark: “Less Prozac, more protein… Less burnout, more babies, less feminism, more femininity.” (The womanosphere has perfected many dark arts, but merchandising does not appear to be among them: When we Googled this choice phrase plus “merch” we found nary a tote bag, bumper sticker, or insulated pink travel wine glass. Shocking!)
6.) Elizabeth Gilbert fell off her pedestal.
When the previously untouchable goddess of self discovery released her tenth book this fall—All the Way to the River, a memoir about her sex-and-love addiction and the prolonged demise of her partner, Raya, from cancer—a literary it girl of another generation, Jia Tolentino, stepped up to the plate. In a searing (and impressively self-aware) star-on-star “book review” that’s in fact more of a full-fledged analysis of Gilbert’s interlocking oeuvre and celebrity, Tolentino puts into words what we’ve all been observing and wondering about for a while: Liz’s insistence that, as a famous, 56-year-old kajillionaire, she is still an everywoman is at once delusional and unnecessary, and her imprint on our culture runs deeper than linen pants, long baths, and travel as self-care. “So many women—and I would never exclude myself,” Tolentino writes, “have come to believe, at some level, that they, too, are Elizabeth Gilberts, people who search hard and love harder, whose personal journeys can and should captivate millions, whose flaws and failings only make them better heroines in the end.”
7.) Dying for Sex shook us to our core.
Can we recommend an 8-episode limited series about a woman whose terminal cancer diagnosis inspires her to leave her husband, bring her best friend closer, and set out on a quest to feel alive—if only for a moment? That feels like too much responsibility. But we can say that Hulu’s Dying for Sex, which stars Michelle Williams with Jenny Slate as her friend, Sissy Spacek as her mother, and Rob Delaney as her love interest, is the Spreadiest piece of culture we consumed this year by a country mile. It’s also, somehow, some way, really funny, which, we suppose, is part of its power. In a profile of Williams, Rachel Handler wrote of the show: “It’s casually groundbreaking in its treatment of heterosexual sex; its protagonist has sex with multiple men largely without vaginal penetration, a choice that stands in direct opposition to most of the show’s thrust-loving American television forebears. It explores kink as an opportunity for liberation and catharsis, not as a punch line or dark Freudian detour on the way to conventional sex. It doesn’t shy from the visceral realities of what happens to a human being as she dies—the sounds, the way time slows and distorts. It’s proudly weird and theatrical, featuring a hallucinatory dream-ballet sequence complete with custom puppets, one of which is a hyperrealistic penis outfitted with fairy wings.” We rest our case.
8.) Leanne and Amy saved us.
We do a lot of work around here to KEEP IT UPBEAT. In this, the year of ICE, Hegseth, Noem, Epstein emails, mass shootings, measles outbreaks, epic humanitarian fails, and homicidal Hollywood sons, Amy Poehler gave us a go-to emotional hidey-hole, Good Hang1—a place to get away from it all, where the women are rad, the c-pap machine is crankin’, the veggies are fake, and everything is more or less ok. If saying welovethisshowsofuckingmuch makes us basic, then basic we must be. During her chat with Maya Rudolf2, we legit started to wonder, wait, is that us talking? (Which, now that we say it, is not just delusional but a little arrogant. Oh well!) Hard to play favorites here, but Amy’s interview with Leanne Morgan—another of our other most cherished 2025 discoveries—made us laugh so hard we hit our heads on the kitchen counter.
If there’s anything we could wish all of you for the new year, it’s that kind of concussion-level happiness. Which we will be delivering right here—same time, same place—next week!
TO BE CONTINUED ON DECEMBER 26!!!
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IYKYK: “Don’t cry, sexy.”