We Came, We Saw, We Drank White-Wine Spritzers

The Diane Warren and Susan Lucci of newsletters is turning its frown upside down with a Spread-style recasting of the 2026 ASME Awards.

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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The award we didn’t win. In fact, this photo belongs to Bitter Southerner editor and ASME slayer Kyle Tibbs Jones (congrats, Kyle!). If we had won one of these we would have had no speech prepared. But if we had won and had prepared a speech, it would have gone something like: “We love magazines so much. Every week, we get together and write a valentine to all of you—to the incredible, world-changing, hilarious, weird, inspiring work of the magazine-makers in this room and all the people out there who get what’s so special about it. That, in a nutshell, is the Spread. Thank you to the judges, our fellow nominees, and all of you.” Pretty good, right?

Cherished Citizens of Spreadlandia,

We bring you good tidings from the magazine multiverse, whose best and brightest gathered last night (at a mall, natch) in Manhattan for the National Magazine Awards, aka the ASMEs.¹ The good news is we did not have to negotiate a shared custody agreement or hire a welder to solve the problem of which Spreaditor would get dibs on our Alexander Calder-designed Ellie statuette, because we do not have an Ellie statuette. No need to storm the palace gates on our behalf. The newsletter award went to Bloomberg News’s FOIA Files, by senior investigative reporter Jason Leopold—mazel, Jason!—the kind of guy who relishes filing a Freedom of Information Act request (or, as the news junkies say it, a “foyah,” like the entry to your office building, only with a New Yawk accent) so much that he hosts a podcast and writes a newsletter about them. The only thing we like that much are Levain Caramel Coconut Chocolate Chip Cookies, which FWIW also make an excellent consolation prize for friends and spouses who do not win awards.

How do you compare a Spread to a FOIA Files, or, for that matter, a Secret Strategist full of insider shopping tips to a Today in Tabs full of piss and vinegar and internet jargon? That, friends, is the very apples-vs-oranges essence of the ASMEs, a forum in which the New Yorker’s Goliath can be defeated by the tiny New York Review of Architecture, and where the Spread, a baby birthed at our respective kitchen tables that has no infrastructure, no full-time employees (not even us), no HR department—departments, ha—competes against newsletters powered by the Atlantic, Harper’s Bazaar, and New York Magazine. When we say it was an honor just to be nominated, we’re for real.

We walked in on a high. Immediately upon arrival in New York, we experienced a one-two punch of Spreadlebrity sightings: Ezra Klein on the A train (taller than expected!) and, moments later, designer Rachel Comey on Bleecker (shorter than expected!). Our Venn diagram was 🔥🔥🔥.

As for the event itself, ASME night always leaves us feeling jacked up on Journalism.² Where else are a couple of Spreaditors going to find a room full of people who, like us, get fired up about stories that take two long years to percolate (like Olivia Carville’s reporting for Can’t Look Away, a documentary for Bloomberg News about the legal battle to prove social media is addictive) or that take big swings on subjects that are almost impossible to wrap your arms around (like Rafia Zakaria’s “Water Pressure,” about the burgeoning water crisis in Karachi, Pakistan—which illustrates how the people most devastated by climate change are ones the least responsible for it)? Where else do we get to cheer on little engines that could like The Bitter Southerner, the scrappy indie out of Athens, Georgia, that defeated Mother Jones and the Yale Review for General Excellence in Literature, Science, and Politics? To partake in loose talk about recent blephs, old-school diva writers (in new-school establishments), and the newsletter superstars that no one actually likes (it’s not us, we’re pretty sure)? To speculate about the James Murdoch acquisition of New York Mag (confirmed this morning, after a moving speech last night from EIC David Haskell, who spoke about working for a company that revolved around journalism as he accepted the evening’s biggest prize: General Excellence, News, Sports, and Entertainment) and take bets on who’ll land the plum slots open at GQ and T: The New York Times magazine? And to commune with folks from places like Poetry and Racquet, and feel a little guilty about the fact that as hard as we try to read everything for you, there’s still so much great work we never get around to.

Far be it from us to look a gift horse in the mouth but… it did not escape our notice that not one single solitary “Spready” (i.e., explicitly woman-leaning) story, package, series, pod, newsletter, or magazine went home with an Ellie. Hopefully you know by now that we don’t believe women only read stuff made for or about women. But since these stories are our bread and butter—and since, in this day and age, almost all publications make something in this vein—it does seem striking that the powers that be still don’t tend to view that kind of content as “the best.”

Well, we know different. So in this issue, we’re sharing the 10 Spreadiest finalists from the 2026 ASME Awards. Plus the six best new things we learned this week because, onwards and upwards!

Thanks, as ever, for being the only award we need: loyal people who click open these emails and actually read them.

Hope you’re hungry!

Rachel & Maggie

P.S. Going into last night, we wondered how many Devil Wears Prada 2 jokes we’d have to endure. Turns out, only the ones that were made by… us, several of which were about this irony of ironies: Last week, we won a Deadline Award for Bustle’s “The Vanity Project,” a package coedited by our very own Rachel Baker and featuring two stories by one Maggie Bullock.³ Eagle-eyed industry types know that, in the movie, the Deadline Awards—a roundtabled affair at New York’s Harvard Club—is the unnamed awards ceremony during which Andy Sachs and her Vanguard colleagues get shitcanned at the tip-off to the Devil Wears Prada 2. Rich, right? Still, we’d like to thank Nigel and our nondescript and utterly unnecessary Aussie boyfriend who people seem to love from Colin from Accounts for this honor. (“The Vanity Project” was also up for an ASME, for personal service, but was ultimately relegated to bridesmaid for the most servicey-service-serving outfit in all the land: Wirecutter, for a hardcore guide to data security partially written by friend-of-Spread Jon Chase—congrats, buddy!)

P.P.S. Gee, wouldn’t Shein buying Everlane make a great backdrop for The Devil Wears Prada 3? Here for it! (We can’t stop.)

What’s after the paywall? So glad you asked! First: We rejudged the year’s ASME finalists with one criteria: Spreadiness. Second: Six fresh-n-fruity reads of the week. (An explosion of clowns! A millionaire feline! And one makeup-lovin’ priest)