The Hunt for Pink September
The Malin Akerman and Brittany Snow—we can’t believe it either—of newsletters is starting a light cult (again), channeling Sleeping Beauty, and fueling up on Jen-N-Out.
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Spreadtopians,
Hot on the heels of our own Maggie Bullock’s nation-sweeping article on dance-party conveners the Earlybirds Club, the Times’s Lisa Miller has zeroed in on another feminist avifauna: the residents of the Bird’s Nest, an East Texas community consisting of eleven women aged 60 to 80, their dogs, and no men. You won’t be surprised to hear that the Bird Nesters, all of whom live in tiny houses, are real characters, endowing Miller with colorful asides such as “gardening here is a war, not a hobby.” The piece, in its way, is also good, old-fashioned service journalism; as useful as any Well tutorial about, say, strengthening your bones or soothing poison ivy. Like Miller, we’ve long had the retirement fantasy of living with friends Rhaina Cohen–style—a brick-and-mortar Spreadlandia, if you will. (How about subscriptions to every magazine still in print? Book clubs on Mondays and Thursdays! TV clubs on Tuesdays and Fridays! Movie club on Sundays! Whew, we are busy.) But cohousing expert Kathryn McCamant, whom Miller consults on her vision, did slightly puncture our bubble. The fantasy of retiring with current friends, she says, should stay a fantasy: “Over a lifetime, these friendships grow out of sync. Friends get tied down to partners, children, parents, jobs, neighborhoods. They have different levels of financial ability and need. Far better…for one or two strong-willed people to articulate a vision, then recruit other like-minded people to join them. That’s a win-win.” Hmmm. We’re looking for some strong-willed, “too much,” overthinky, media-hound women… know anyone?
Last one to the commune kitchen is a rotten egg!
Rachel & Maggie
P.S. Thank you to the New Yorker and Emma Roberts for teaching us this week what “ripping cards” means. Sounds pretty fun, TBH. Maybe one day on the ole Spread Ranch (Spranch? Too soon?)...
Vogue-alopolis
Palace intrigue around the totally nondemocratic coronation of a new Vogue editor continues apace, and will apparently continue to do so until the winner of fashion’s ultimate reality show challenge is announced at New York Fashion Week in September. Will it be Eva? Will it be Sara? Will it be Chloe? As a couple of people who always think magazines still matter, we find it amusing that suddenly everyone’s acting like they still matter. Speaking of Vogue, this week they really took the Call Her Daddy out of Alex Cooper, toning down her contouring and blingy blonde to the blandest, most indistinct definition of the search words tasteful, Gen Z, and fashion. Your Spreaditors are divided on the result. Is this an improvement? Or an erasure?
Read “How Alex Cooper Built a Media Empire” here.
Maybe efficiency shouldn’t be our love language.
The latest cover story of the Walrus (koo koo kachoo) takes on “the HR-ification of domestic life”: the apps and spreadsheets and organizational tools that are leaping from the boardroom to the bedroom to, theoretically at least, make our families functional. If you’re in the market for “an app for that,” this story keeps a running tally of them, too many to mention here. But writer Courtney Shea also pushes back on the idea that “further integration of tech into our lives is the way out of this moment.” As one of her sources puts it, “tech is how we got here,” making our time ever more scarce and our attention more fractured. One therapist she interviewed gave us a good LOL: As coping mechanisms go, organizing your marriage via something called Trello is “obviously preferable to wandering through your life in a haze of booze” (ok!) “but it’s still just a Band-Aid” for working your shit out in therapy.
Read “Marriage Is Broken. A Colour-Coded Calendar Might Help” here.
The Moms Are All Right
Therapist and soon-to-be-mother Maytal Eyal is rejecting out of the gate the whole “mother, heal thyself” ethos of modern parenting, which tells us that in order to raise emotionally resilient kids, we have to first “do the work” to fix ourselves. Eyal goes up against the current deities of child-rearing here, including her holiness Dr. Becky Kennedy, and the wider online “therapy culture,” whose “message for moms can be incredibly seductive: Do enough ‘work’ on yourself—regulate your nervous system, master emotional attunement, follow the rules of attachment parenting—and you can safeguard your child’s psychological future.” In truth, the data suggests that your kids’ peers, their siblings, and their DNA have as much or more effect on their ultimate mental health than having a “perfect” mother who’s been through all seven rings of psychotherapy. As moms who have, at times, fallen hook, line, and sinker for this unattainable ideal—and felt like we were never quite “Good Enough” because of it—we appreciate the counter-programming.
Read “Enough with the Mom Guilt Already.” here.
“In the darkness of Space Mountain, we felt as close as we’d felt since the womb. Or at least, I did.”
For VQR, empathetic examiner Leslie Jamison picks up where the Atlantic’s Eyal leaves off and runs with it… all the way to Anaheim, where she stays for several days. This is Jamison—whose work can occasionally cause chronic eye-rolling—at her best. In another writer’s hands, a novella-length epic about taking one’s six-year-old daughter to Disneyland would be a familiar slog. But Jamison manages to turn out a mouse-eared, princess-sparkled odyssey that’s one part personal roller coaster and one part treatise on parenthood. It’s so long, she’s able to really go, and the result has a light touch overall. As an example, here’s a passage on the burning need she feels to maximize Disney’s Lightning Lane™: “It’s a distilled, steroidal, high-gloss version of the anxiety at the core of parenting itself: If I can just make all the right choices, then my daughter will find and realize the best version of herself. This delusion is at once self-aggrandizing, self-punishing, and utterly false. I don’t control her, she is subject to many influences beyond my own, and some part of her is beyond any influence, anyway. It is her own.”
Read “Dark Ride to the Source” here.
Cruella Who?
Slate editor-in-chief Hillary Frey treats us to a spunky little current events-pegged beauty essay. (Paging Ms. Rachel, more more.) Frey has long had a funky, skunky gray streak in the front of her hair—evocative of game-changing women like Gloria Steinem, Susan Sontag, and Tulsi Gabbard. Wait a minute…
Read “You Have to Admit, Her Hair Looks Good” here.
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