Towanda!

The Idgie Threadgoode and Ruth Jamison of newsletters is frying up September issues, Zuckerberg drama, and celebrity therapists.

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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Swanlike Spreaderinas,

We’ve all seen it in the wild: The parent who didn’t set up the checkup because, seven years in, they still can’t figure out how the pediatrician’s online portal works. The partner who didn’t start dinner because zucchini, what? The Spreaditor who didn’t take out the trash because she refuses to commit the garbage-and-recycling schedule to memory. The concept of “weaponized incompetence” resurfaced this week and with back-to-school vibes in the air, we decided not to retread the old domestic labor arguments—because where does that ever get us, really—but rather to learn from these masters, and adopt it as a tactic. As in: Next time our kids ask us where their favorite Nike shorts are, we’ll tell them we forgot how to work the washing machine. Next time AmEx asks us to pay the bill, we’ll tell them we forgot how to make a living (or that we’re in therapy school? See below.). Join us, Spreaders, in embracing a newfound incompetence. Let’s see if together we can find a way to do less. Sure, we know that you can do it all, but who says you have to go around sharing that unfortunate fact?

Fake it till you make it,

Rachel & Maggie

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September Superlatives

It’s September issue season, the time of year when we all pretend it’s 2014 and studiously ignore the fact that some of these new issues are now labeled “fall” (as in…that’s it till January? Maybe.). Taking it from the top row: Elle UK shrunk Winona! WSJ’s favorite registered Republican, Sydney Sweeney. Mariah, untouched by time, in Harper’s Bazaar UK. Row 2: Alison Brie takes a roll in the hay in Marie Claire; Taylor’s arm candy in GQ; Rosalia graces Elle. Row 3: The otherworldly Michaela Coel in British Vogue; Emma discovers her toesies Vogue; Ms. Aniston commands Vanity Fair. Row 4: Dua Lipa does her thing in Harper’s Bazaar; Teyana Taylor covers InStyle; Margaret Qualley traipses NYC in a bedsheet in a very cheeky shoot for Cosmopolitan.

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This Sally Jessy Raphael Profile Is the Most Delightful Thing We’ve Read All Week (All Summer?!)

Speaking of superlatives, the Strategist has Trojan-horsed a full personality profile into its What This Celebrity Can’t Live Without column. Sally Jessy Raphael may be under five feet tall but she is *chock* full of practical magic, and apparently wears men’s underwear and cleans her own bathroom.

Read it here.

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Take these broken (right) wings.

How many more MAGA women will have to come forward about the reality of being barefoot and pregnant for the brainwashed masses to get the drift that “Less Prozac, more protein. Less burnout, more babies. Less feminism, more femininity," ain’t all it’s cracked up to be? In the Times, Michelle Goldberg zeroes in on Lauren Southern, a woman whose nativist and antifeminist vitriol made her a MAGA star during Trump’s first term, who now reveals the hidden truth: being subservient to her husband left her broke and broken. A bit of context:

Every few decades, it seems, America is fated to endure a new spasm of pseudotraditionalism, with women encouraged to seek shelter from a brutal world in homemaking. The lionization of the housewife in the 1950s came after women were pushed out of their World War II-era jobs. During the 1980s, as Susan Faludi wrote in her classic Backlash, women were bombarded with media messages telling them true freedom lay in marriage and motherhood. In 2003, The New York Times Magazine heralded “The Opt-Out Revolution,” part of a wave of media about elite women stepping back from hard-charging careers.

Elsewhere in the womanosphere, welcome Katie Miller, wife of Stephen, a not-so-stay-at-home vision of MAGA goodness who now serves up softball interviews with the vice president on her new pod. We love ya, Spreaders. But even for you, we will not be listening to this one, m’kay?

Read “A Right-Wing Influencer Tried to Be a Tradwife. It Almost Broke Her” here. Read “The ‘Womanosphere’ Is Booming. No Wonder Katie Miller Hopped Aboard.” here.

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Mark & Priscilla and Bill & Jordon

For elusive Zuckerspouse Priscilla Chan, mankeeping is small potatoes. Her mandate, according to Evgenia Peretz’s new Vanity Fair story about her and Mark Zuckerberg’s changing, uh, priorities, has long been to “try to guide him in a world of real-life humans.” Oof. So how’s that going? Not great! Ten years after Mark and Priscilla, who is a pediatrician and the daughter of Chinese immigrants, together launched the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative¹—armed with the kind of philanthropic resources and ambitions not seen since the founding of the Gates Foundation (which itself has started the clock to wind down)—the previously swashbuckling organization is flailing. Once at the forefront of education, justice, and immigration reform, the equality-focused org began dialing back that work right around the time Trump laid down the DEI hammer, Facebook got into moral and legal hot water, Mark started wearing that sweet gold chain, and the couple showed up on the front row of Trump’s second inauguration, to which he donated $1 million. The other arm of the initiative, the biomedical research-focused CZI Biohub Network, has a plan to develop something called the Human Cell Atlas that Peretz is told, if achieved, “would be a breakthrough along the lines of the human genome project”—is still chugging along. Y’know what doesn’t help a scientific undertaking like that? Trump’s $18 billion cut to the NIH budget. Take it from Inside Philanthropy’s David Callahan: “I can’t recall another mega-donor couple backtracking so completely from their early ambition.”

The other famous couple getting longform inches this week isn’t showing even a sliver of daylight: It’s UNC football’s $50 million baby, Bill Belichick, and his 49-years-junior baby, girlfriend Jordon Hudson aka “that Jordon person.” In the New Yorker, Paige Williams treats us to a meal of a write-around on Belichick that also sat-is-fies as a mini-profile of Hudson, whom every magazine is clearly trying to get access to at this moment. It’s delicious. Though at this point, may we submit that Vogue should do us a favor and move forward with a make-under à la Alex Cooper? The world needs to see the second-runner-up to Miss Massachusetts USA in understated Valentino and Chloé while posing beneath a tree. These days, after all, there’s no high-brow or low-brow—we’re all just…brow.

Read “A Chan of Heart” here. Read “Bill Belichick Goes Back to School” here.

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Psst, Spreaders… keep reading to stay out of debt, fire up your sex life, find a “tweakment” that’ll make you look like Natalie Portman, and roam the Greek Isles…