Under the Table and Through the Woods
The Green Baby Lima and Yellow Split Pea of newsletters is leaning in for lit-world goss, stripping down in your living room, and dialing 1-800-PEPTIDES.
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!
Spreados,
If you have trouble with blood, you might want to sit down for this one. Yesterday on the Cut, Brooke Nevils delivered a startling and powerful account of her #MeToo ordeal with Matt Lauer—the one that finally caused NBC to shit-can the highest paid man ever to work in morning TV in the fall of 2017. Nevils has processed what happened to her when she was a junior producer by writing Unspeakable Things1, a book about sexual harassment and assault from which this essay is excerpted (it’ll be published Tuesday; you can preorder it here). In it, she’s unflinchingly honest about what never came to light: She alleges Lauer anally raped her when they were working at the Winter Olympics in Sochi. In her account, what was widely referred to as Lauer’s workplace “affair” was not an affair at all, but something infinitely worse and far more brutal; Lauer comes across as no mere Mitch Kessler, abusing his power with underlings, but a cruel and careless predator. Now, Nevils details what was going through her head at the time, and the context she’s brought to it over the past eight years—a rare combination that moves forward the #MeToo narrative as a genre. “I was supposed to use a hashtag and call myself a survivor,” she writes. “I didn’t feel at all like a survivor. I felt like an idiot, set up to fail from the beginning.” The most gutting scene of the piece isn’t the bloody one—though that’s a doozy—but a phone call during which she comes clean to her mother.
With the men of #MeToo gradually coming back out into the light—not so cancelled after all, it turns out, in the era of the manosphere—this is a reminder that some deserved far worse than they got. And should never return to our good graces.
Curious to see what Meredith Viera will have to say: Nevils cites her as a mentor and says Viera was at the bar with her that night in Sochi, before things with Lauer went south. No doubt this book’s ripple effect will be wide.
Rachel & Maggie
P.S. We’re lifting the paywall in a week that feels like everybody could use a little extra love. (We know we sure could.) Free subscribers: See how good it feels to get the fulllll Spread?
P.P.S. ❤️s are for [Spread] lovers.
The Dystopian Nightmare Next Door
There are of course endless important and worthy articles one could read right now about the travesty that’s happening in Minneapolis. For our money, Minneapolis native Charles Homans offers the most comprehensive view in the New York Times Magazine. With both ICE officers and the protestors who are keeping watch for them prowling the city, fueling fear and paranoia; immigrants holed up in their apartments for months on end, afraid to so much as look out the window; and police defending their own positions—it’s a thoughtful and many-angled portrait of a powder keg ready to blow. Read “Watching America Unravel in Minneapolis” here.
A strange swipe of the claw
Airmail sicced Jessa Crispin on the literary trio of memoirist Emily Gould; her author husband, Keith Gessen; and Keith’s sibling, New Yorker writer turned New York Times columnist M. Gessen. These are the kind of industry dots we love to see connected, but the story’s raison d’etre is fuzzy at best, and its tone mean-spirited from the get-go. All in a day’s work for Crispin, the irritable Bookslut founder whom Alexandra Jacobs has characterized as “the Patti Lupone of literary critics.” With Gould currently enjoying her most likable era yet as the writer of the New York’s Dinner Party newsletter, and M. Gessen cranking out important work at Opinion—and a lot of real shit to worry about these days—it would seem the lit world’s appetite for snark on these three is pretty low. Judging by the “meh” comments on Airmail’s IG post about the story: a swing and a miss? Read “Keeping Up with the Gould-Gessens” here.
“Middle-age divorce is an act of optimism.”
Recommended by Spreader Lindsay M., Gabfest Reads’ recent episode, an interview of author Curtis Sittenfeld by journalist Emily Bazelon, is indeed a 10 out of 10 on the Spready Scale™. Halfway through the brisk half-hour conversation about marriage, the passage of time, and how perspective changes events—as pegged to Sittenfeld’s recent short story collection, Show Don’t Tell (buy it here)—Sittenfeld reveals (blurts out?) that her own marriage has ended, and the divorce is a week out from being finalized. It’s the first time in all the press she’s done about the marriage-centric book that Sittenfeld has acknowledged that her own union went bust, informing the work’s themes, and it tone-shifts the conversation in surprising and rewarding ways.
Listen to “Troubled Marriages and the Clarity of Middle Age” here.
Stacked!
A couple weeks ago, Spread-beloved beauty queen Linda Wells filed a little explainer on the sudden ubiquity of peptides for Harper’s Bazaar. We raced to read it, but the subtext—that buying rando shots off the internet is commonplace, everybody’s doing it, ain’t no thang!—left us itching for a deeper dive. Enter Ezra Marcus’s New York feature, which jacknifes into the dark-gray underbelly of the unregulated and booming peptides market, powered by US compounding pharmacies and Chinese factories. Retatrutide, the Ozempic one-upper we wrote about a couple weeks ago, is just one of the “not for human use” injectable proteins flying off conveyer belts, alongside peps for sexual performance, weight loss, stamina, clarity, energy, muscle mass, pain relief, etc. These shots are so rampant and so powerful, “wild west” doesn’t even come close. As one superuser put it to Marcus: “If people got super-sick this next year, I wouldn’t be surprised.” And well, yeah, if we feel this dizzy from just reading about them…
Read “Life on Peptides Feels Amazing” here.
Hollywood’s High Priestess
We had recategorized Chloe Zhao as an icon of sheer joy after that clip of the Hamnet cast busting a move to Rihanna went viral (even tried to recreate the moment in our own homes, with a significantly smaller cast.)2 Last weekend’s “The Interview” brought us back down to earth—or rather to the profound and mystical headspace that Zhao occupies. The still-somehow-only-43-year-old director tells David Marchese she’s studying to be a death doula, because she’s paralyzingly afraid of her own death. Her thoughts on loss and mourning are a rejoinder of sorts to the “grief porn debate” (yes, it’s become a debate!) around Hamnet.
Funny enough, she collaborated with Jessie Buckley the exact same way we make you a new Spread every week:
“In the morning, she would do fever writing about her dreams and then would pick some music, and as soon as I got to set, I would put the music on repeat so the whole set was harmonized to the vibration she wanted. Other than a conversation about which setup we want to do, we just go in there and do it. When she let out that very guttural scream of grief [in the scene of Hamnet’s death], that was not planned. But I believe it didn’t just come from her; it came from the collective. When that happens, it’s the most exciting thing for me as a director, because there is no way any of us could have thought of that. That is truth happening in the moment.”
Read “Chloe Zhao is Yearning to Know How to Love” here.
More “heavy lifting” propaganda, and other stories.
We know, we know. But for those who have read Lisa Miller for years, her story about learning to love weight lifting at 62 was an eye-opener (and not necessarily because of its fitness revelations). Who knew that Miller—who on the page has always seemed ultra refined and buttoned up—was so…rugged!? “Long afternoons of hill sprints”? Backcountry skiing with igloo-building and sleeping”? Lisa, we’re intimidated in a whole new way. Read it here.
Speaking of writers we love pulling back the curtain: In a moving post, Tina Brown celebrates her son George’s “fucking 40th.” It’s fairly common these days to read the narratives of mothers of young children with special needs. Brown is writing—with characteristic brio but also such rich tenderness—about providing for those needs into adulthood. It made us love “Georgie” and his highly specific party cheese plate demands (you’ll see what we mean), but also added new depth to our longterm crush on Tina. Read it here.
Maybe Claude can sort it out?
The “latest episode in the perpetual soap opera that is the artificial intelligence industry, where young billionaires clash over professional and personal relationships as they vie for money, power and supremacy in the field”? Mira and Barret and Luke and Sam (Altman), aka the ballad of Thinking Machines Lab, has all the components of a cinematic tech-world implosion, including a smoking-hot female lead (tacky of us to point out? Maybe, but no less accurate for it), bonking colleagues, billions at stake, and of course, as a backdrop, the rise of evil machine overloads threatening to take over humanity. This tale was reported in the Times and the Journal this week, but is still awaiting its juicy and highly option-able Vanity Fair unspooling.
Poison Penned
Were you able to muster the fortitude to get through Texas Monthly’s haunting “The Baby Whisperer”—a feature about an at-home daycare director who was arrested for the death of one of her charges that we wrote about this fall? Regardless, we recommend Ben Taub’s sophisticated new New Yorker story, which hinges on a different tragedy: an infant deemed to have ingested fatal levels of codeine via breast milk. This one is no tawdry yarn but a crime thriller set in the world of toxicology and centering on its most prestigious research stars.
Read it here.
You know we’ve reached peak fibermaxxing…
When the Rancho Gordo Bean Club ($200 a year) has 30,000 members—and 29,000 people on the waitlist. Reader, we’re talking about beans. Workhorse beans. Eye of the Goat beans. Beans with the spots of a cow. Beans striped like zebras. And something called Good Mother Stallards that “look like some kind of mishmash of pintos, cranberry beans and the Milky Way at dusk.” Read it here.
We’d pay good money for a newsletter about movie and TV interiors.
Does this already exist? If it does, dear readers, please point us in the right direction. In the last few months alone, we have googled the exact shade of peacock blue in Shiv Roy’s house on All Her Fault and the lighting scheme in Cate Blanchett’s dreamy London home in Disclaimer—and both times, come up basically empty. We already know that we’re gonna have questions about that pink couch in Margot’s Got Money Troubles. Curbed gives us sweet satisfaction with “Sentimental Value Is an Excellent Lamp Movie” here.
Elsewhere in interiors, Jolie Kerr coins a term that we’ll be mulling for a while, “aspirational clutter.” The kind you can’t let go of because it represents the person you wish you were; the items that “quietly create guilt and overwhelm and stall progress when they pile up.” Think: That Peloton you’re hanging damp laundry on, the Artist’s Way workbook on your bedside table that never got around to changing your life. Read it here.
You’re telling us this table is not a cry for help?
Pity the good folks over at Architectural Digest, whose good manners (and, we’re just spitballing here—high dose of beta blockers?) led them to describe, with a straight face, a certain furniture designer as “a former architectural designer at Yeezy and now a designer in her own right” when really that person is Bianca Censori, as in “Bianca-blink-twice-if-you’re-not-O.K.“ (Naomi Fry) and one half of “the most attention-thirsty couple in Hollywood” (Vulture.) To date, Bianca’s biggest credits include exhibiting the least supportive sports bra in history and maybe leading the “redesign” project/destruction of Ye’s $57.3 million Tadeo Ando beach house. But sure, AD, let’s treat her work with the seriousness it so richly deserves. Read “Bianca Censori’s Bio Pop Furniture Debuts a New Kind of Feminist Critique” here.
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Publishing honchos: Our brains are bent by the fact that Unspeakable Things is also the title of our beloved Leanne Morgan’s latest standup special and has thus been entered the Spread lexicon in a very different way. Surely this could have been avoided?
From the caption to Zhao’s “dance-take” post: “We believe emotion is energy in motion. So to discharge, we move, we breathe, we make sound and we dance, so we are never too scared to feel our rawest emotions and we don’t store them in our bodies.”
Ok, you got us, we are in the RG Bean Club (after a long soak on the wait-list)