The Babe(s) and the Bathwater

The Miss Yvonne and Chairry of newsletters is contemplating life’s biggest questions and making a splash.

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!

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Spreadsperts,

Hailey Bieber’s squeaky $1B deal? Old news. Sydney Sweeney has “made waves” this week by launching a soap with Dr. Squatch. Here’s the “point of difference” (and yes, we are available for copywriting gigs that require bizspeak!): Along with pine, moss, and Douglas fir, the turquoise-color bars’ ingredient list includes a splash of the breast-forward actress’s own honest-to-god used bathwater.¹ Sydney’s Bathwater Bliss, which will be available for purchase on Saturday, is apparently a response to fans (Sweenhounds?) salivating over the idea of her, well, bathwater. Which—deep breath; we were saving this big news for our Fourth of July edition but here goes—is just so funny given that the Spread will soon be launching our own “personal wash.” Whether spritzed or slathered, SpreadSuds™, which includes the dregs of our last soak, is guaranteed to waft notes of glossy pages burning over an open fire, AI coming for our jobs, and industry-wide despair. Ever since Saltburn your Spreaditors have been fielding requests for a vial of our tub remnants—flattered, we’re sure—and now, thanks to an extremely lucrative licensing deal with Coty (the terms: we gave them our life savings), this dream will soon become a reality. After last week’s issue, in which we tipped you off to some of the most promising pop culture coming this month, we got lots of notes from Spreadstans thanking us for our service. We realized that there was but one way to top ourselves: an ablution potion made with our own Spreadtastic essence.

Pruned4U,

Rachel & Maggie

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Spread-beloved photographer Elinor Carucci, 53, posted this self portrait on Instagram this week—perhaps after a bath?—with a moving caption: “What happens to us mothers at some point in our middle age? After years of rushed mornings, packed lunches, grocery lists, and dinners on the table night after night? After the parent-teacher conferences, finding the right after-school programs, the endless school applications, middle school, then high school, then college, tours and applying, the years of 529 college savings plans? After the annual doctor visits, the specialist appointments, the winter clothes and summer clothes shopping, the camp packing lists, and vacation checklists? What happens when much of it is over? When the noise fades and the house stills, and we find ourselves alone with ourselves, with the woman we've become after all those years, but also with the woman we used to be before the kids, making an appearance? Who is she now? Who am I now?”

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Beyond the Playhouse

Sunday night, we decided to flip on Matt Wolf’s well-reviewed documentary Pee-wee as Himself (HBO Max). It would be the perfect laundry-folding and calendar-reviewing companion, and given its almost-four-hour runtime, we figured it could last us through whatever busywork and household admin bubbled up over the course of the week. Friends: We gulped down the Paul Reubens story in two sittings, with not a single towel folded! Our personal calendar remains in shambles! (Your Spread Culture Calendar™, on the other hand, is pristine through June.) This documentary, which includes reams of archival footage and a transfixing interview with Mr. Herman/Ruebens himself, is a perspective-changing portrait of the man in the gray suit but also the 1980s comedy scene in L.A. Perhaps our favorite supporting figure in the doc: Debi Mazar, who dated Pee-wee/Paul for three years, in spite of/despite him being gay. On that note: From her friendship with Madonna since the Danceteria days to her role in the watershed publishing sitcom Younger, this woman has lived! Where is Debi’s celeb memoir? Also, does she need a ghostwriter? Asking for a friend.

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Nose for News

We have read our fill (pun intended) of stories about “liquid rhinoplasty,” a nose job-y effect achieved with injections instead of going under the knife. Still, this month’s Vogue was able to grab us by the byline: Alice Gregory, an exquisite writer and also a known beauty, whose allure is due in part to her striking, atypical proboscis. Thank goodness the writing is nice because in classic “tasteful” Vogue style, there are no before and afters for us to sniff. Read “On the Nose” here or via AppleNews here.

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Circumnavigate this 🙄.

Given “recent events” (from deadly crashes to the lumberjack from The Real World: Boston being appointed Transportation Secretary of the US of A), we’ve never been less inclined to brush up on our aviation history. (Hot take on The Rehearsal’s second season: The emperor has no clothes!) However, for the New Yorker, writer Laurie Gwen Shapiro recast the story of Amelia Earhart’s ill-fated final flight as a marriage story, which is always our jam. Turns out Amelia’s husband, George Palmer Putnam, was a fame whore who operated as her manager, agent, and publicist, orchestrating her every high-profile flight (and appearance) for maximum exposure and setting off the sequence of events that ended in the round-the-world trip that killed her. Speaking of common- and proper-noun marriage stories, ScarJo and Adam Driver would be pretty great in the feature-film version of this one. Read it here.

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When Heaven Can’t Wait

Katie Engelhart, who literally wrote the book on medically assisted death—and also the masterpiece story “Letting Naomi Die”—is back on the beat for the New York Times Magazine with another soul-shaker, this time about a woman who qualifies for Canada’s newly expanded right-to-die parameters. Read “Do Patients Without a Terminal Illness Have the Right to Die?” here.

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The Philosopher Queen

Last week, Ezra Klein—who these days we kind of think of as an ex-boyfriend we’re still friends with?—shifted gears for, if memory serves, his first non-Trump episode since the election last November. The guest is GODDESS (and New Yorker writer) Kathryn Schulz; the topic, being a human being in 2025. Their conversation, hooked to Schulz’s memoir about the death of her father, Lost & Found, casually covers concepts like duty, happiness, and grief and contends with what it’s like to have access to a constant drip of horrific news while trying to get through the day as a parent/partner/friend/daughter. It’s an ep we’ll be referencing early and often, and one that we should probably listen to every year or so. Take us to church, EKS! Listen here or here.

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“I want to suggest that there’s another reason my generation dreads parenthood: We’ve held our own parents to unreachable standards, standards that deep down, maybe, we know we ourselves would struggle to meet.” —30-ish-year-old Michal Leibowitz suggests maybe we need to own our own shit and stop blaming our parents for everything, if we want to actually become parents ourselves (OK, fine, that’s a wildly oversimplified summary) in “There’s a Link Between Therapy Culture and Childlessness” here.

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“Know thyself”? Good luck with that.

Self-knowledge: It’s the basis of every self-help-y “how to be happier” quizlet and charticle, right? But, as the Atlantic’s Julie Beck writes, it’s an impossible goal—we can’t really know ourselves, at least not perfectly. We’re both too biased and too riddled with “unconscious patterns” that often work against how we think the real us would feel or act. Plus, slaving away in the excavation of that “one true self” can cut us off from the possibility of finding greater happiness… by evolving who that person is. Read it here.