We Found Kate Middleton
We Found Kate Middleton
This week, the Wisteria Sisters of newsletters sashay and shante through the fertility clinic, across the Hudson Valley Target, and all over the City of Light.
What would make the perfect women’s magazine? Juicy yarns, hot goss, big ideas, deeply personal examinations of women’s lives—and none of the advertiser obligations. Welcome to the Spread, where every week two editors read, listen, and watch it all, and deliver only the best to your inbox.
Royal Marquesses of Spread-dom,
We know the question keeping you up at night. Heck, we’ve heard that even Powerful Persons in the highest reaches of American government have their boxer briefs in a twist over this one. (No, really. This is a thing we heard.) So considering we are providing a public service here, no, we did not appreciate the bucket of non-Icelandic, non-glacial, not-even-carbonated plain old ice water that Charlie Warzel over at the Atlantic threw on our unhinged dogged pursuit of the truth about a very dear friend. Imagine, comparing the search for Kate Middleton to Infowars’ conspiracy-peddling and QAnon “truthers”! We are frankly a little injured. Our only hope of healing: Your battiest, most outrageous hypotheses on the whereabouts of Big Willy’s bride. Send one, send all! You know where to find us.
Your fave “paranoid online vigilante researchers,”
Rachel & Maggie
Sooner or later, everyone in L.A. will age into the same 40-something blond.
Are there actually more than one of them, or is it just one smooth-faced rich lady with symmetrically full lips and a flattering haircut racing from one “top women in technology, media, and finance” photo shoot to the next? I know Sophia Amoruso’s face and whatever she has or has not done to it should not be my primary takeaway from Jessica Bennett’s Elle profile of the one-time Nasty Gal founder and CEO, but I’m obsessed. The same magazine dispatched me to L.A. to interview Amoruso back in 2012, when she was an edgy, blunt (though, as today, also strangely flat in affect), very individual-looking brunette with neither degrees nor business background whose mushrooming company was expanding its office space acreage by the month—“hustle culture, personified,” Bennett writes. That was before1 she wrote #Girlboss (“the scrappy misfit younger sister” to the now-much-maligned Lean In) and became the kind of woman that other women want to throw their bras at. Bennett does a good job of using the profile to trace the rise and fall of the #girlboss, speaking with Amoruso contemporaries who also got caught in the “bloodbath” of the backlash, and dissecting their era’s overall impact. Yet somehow the sandblasting of Amoruso’s exterior façade does feel relevant. Nasty Gal is history. Now she’s running a VC firm called Trust Fund (she’s still got that branding knack), rolling her eyes at both cheesy “female empowerment” mantras and, curiously, at the suggestion that she would specifically fund female founders… while in the same breathe lamenting the fact that, thanks in part to her own era, women founders are now deterred from taking “big swings.”2—Maggie
Read it here.
“Strictly speaking, my only real job was to walk into the office on the day the eggs were retrieved and jerk off into a cup.”
For GQ, Zach Baron reports for duty with an essay about going through IVF as an aspiring father. The whole thing feels dutiful because it is: Baron—who’s made hay of the lighter side of his personal life over the years—is, in the face of the cataclysmic Alabama State Supreme Court, digging deep on his and his wife’s IVF “journey” (quotes mine—this is actually the first IVF story I’ve ever read that doesn’t use that word, and for that I am grateful!). It’s also extremely careful, self-aware, and respectful,3 given that he played the supporting role here. And at times, it really manages to achieve liftoff4, a feat for which I would like to present Baron with… the second Golden Syringe Award of 2024! (Following Julianne McCobin’s essay for the Point, of course.) Elsewhere on the “embryonic children” (I can’t) beat, Jill Filipovic’s newsletter this morning revised the prevailing idea—not only on the right—that abortion and IVF exist in opposition. It’s a great overview to the increasingly tangled rat’s nest of “beliefs” and factions, as well as a corrective.—Rachel
Read “My IVF Years” here.
Read “The IVF Backlash Shows Almost No One Believes an Embryo Is a Person” here.
The quote we’ve been thinking about all week.
If you thought it was radical for Kim Gordon5 to greet her eighth decade with a rap-influenced “blistering and gloriously strange” first-ever solo album, please allow her fellow rock goddess Kathleen Hanna6 to set you straight.
“What Kim’s doing is totally, absolutely normal. What’s not normal is when women or people who are marginalized in other ways have stopped making art…. We’re not witnessing a miracle, we’re witnessing what happens when the thing that’s supposed to happen is just allowed to happen.”
Read “Kim Gordon’s Coolest Act Yet” by Lindsay Zoladz in the New York Times here.
Jack Sprat’s Wife.
Over the past five years or so, my husband’s flesh has become progressively sleeker and more aerodynamic, even as mine has taken on a veal-like consistency. In Slate, essayist Kristin Kovacic puts it brilliantly: “He’s Jack Sprat. I’m Jack Sprat’s Wife.” This lovely bit of writing by the 40-years-married Kovacic is less about body issues and more about a marital woe we don’t hear as much about. Comparison, if we’re being nice. Envy, if we’re not. How do you cope when one partner is naturally more disciplined, more successful, more serendipitous, more metabolically gifted—or, to continue the children’s literature theme, when one is an endearingly slow-moving tortoise, and the other’s a marathon-training hare?—Maggie
Read it here.
Jenna Lyons is Finally an EIC as God and Nature Intended.
It’s so funny that media is officially dying, or so we’re told, yet rich and powerful people who presumably have other things to do with their time keep wanting that throne. See: Karlie Kloss saving i-D, and now Jenna Lyons, taking on the role of “Editor-in-Chief (at Large)” of the Coveteur, with chic pal Sarah Clary holding down the title of “Fashion Editor (at Large).” So much Large-ness! What does it all mean? No idea. But feel free to catch up on Jenna’s scintillating backstory here.
“Everybody’s playing a role.”
For my husband’s birthday last weekend, our teenage kids and I took him to see Kinky Boots at our community theater. The part of Lauren, the shoe-factory worker with a crush on her boss, was played by an especially exuberant performer who really went there, to borrow a term from the boomers, in her big, horny solo, “The History of Wrong Guys.” The song calls for lusty choreography (see Annaleigh Ashford’s original Broadway turn) but our Lauren….well, lady really knew how to, uh, work a shoe. At intermission, the other shoe dropped, as it were: The actor who played Lauren is our 13-year-old’s eighth-grade theater teacher. Educational is one way of looking at it. A lot of windup to say that the fact that drag is now as mainstream as a family-oriented Saturday in Charlottesville, Virginia, is owed in large part to RuPaul, the 6-foot-4 pioneer with 14 Emmys, 16 seasons of Drag Race (not including international spin-offs), and now a memoir under his gold-plated belt. In the New Yorker, Ronan Farrow, whose fandom for Ru creeps in now and then, profiles him upon the release of The House of Hidden Meanings—out today, with a writing assist from Sam Lansky, whom you might remember as Britney Spears’s ultimate The Woman in Me ghostwriter. (Assigning-editor friends: Where is the delicious piece on Lansky that we crave?) The best parts get at the tensions within drag’s biggest celebrity and most effective cheerleader/mainstreamer—who is himself not so touchy-feely and who, at 64, has weathered criticism from both outside and within queer culture. Ru to Ronan: “So much of our culture today, with young people, is centered around their feelings. Feelings are indicators, they’re not facts…Parents teaching their kids about safe spaces, and ‘I feel uncomfortable’…It’s like, You know what? The world is not a safe space. You have to find the comfort. It’s mostly uncomfortable.”—Rachel
Read “RuPaul Doesn’t See How That’s Any of Your Business” here.
Research on Aisle 5.
I confess, my first reaction to the news that Adelle Waldman had spent six months toiling at a Hudson Valley Target was, “sheesh, they talk about writerly income going to hell, but how bad is it, really, to be a celebrated novelist?” Turns out the author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. took on the job—unloading trucks on a 4 a.m. shift—for the sake of research. Michelle Goldberg calls the resulting novel, Help Wanted, “poignant, funny, stealthily ambitious…[it] follows a group of low-wage part-time employees… as they scheme to rid themselves of their toxic manager and secure a promotion for one of their own.” A conceit that, a few years ago, would have gotten the upper-middle-class white Waldman in trouble. Goldman puts her finger on it: Post-American Dirt, is it verboten for the Adelle Waldmans of the world to “dabble” in the working class in order to write fancy novels about them? Or are they permitted, once again, to venture outside of their own heads and fictionalize lives less privileged than their own?—Maggie
Read “Adelle Waldman’s Journey from Brooklyn Literati to Big Box Store” here.
Bedtime stories.
Last week, this Cut headline showed up on my screen: “The Parents Who Dread Their Kids’ Bedtime.” At first glance, I thought the Cut was taking a stab at Reductress-style deadpan humor (you know, like, “REPORT: It’s Always Fucking Something”). From where I sit as the parent of the world’s most brilliant, generous, comedically gifted, perceptive, beautiful, and loving three-year-old wild woman, Yeah, duh, bedtime suuuuuucks. Upon further inspection, however, this story’s take is apparently controversial—and tons of nymag.com and Instagram commenters have chimed in to emphasize: We’re supposed to relish bedtime and feel ashamed if such relish is not naturally occurring! Whoops and mission accomplished, I guess? The story attempts to soothe the bedtime-curmudgeons among us with an expert who insists that people’s nerves are shot by the end of the day, but precious moments can be found at other times. I feel the need to add that 6:30 to 8:30 a.m. is not one of those times.—Rachel
Read it here.
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Let’s play footnote Scrabble, connecting this week’s stories: Sophia Amoruso “lived briefly in Olympia, a dreary town south of Seattle where Kathleen Hanna cofounded Bikini Kill and famously scrawled the words ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ on Kurt Cobain’s bedroom wall.”
Amoruso asks, “If the precedent is that if you go for it, and maybe you’re a new leader, or you’re moving too fast, or you’re in over your head, or just like every other founder are unaware of what’s happening in every last rung of your company, and, God forbid, you screw up, then you’re going to end up literally wiped out and your company obliterated—like, why even try?” But as a VC theoretically pouring zillions of dollars into the next big thing, uh, wouldn’t she have the resources and hard-earned wisdom to put the right guardrails in place to help the next gen take those big swings without falling into the same pitfalls? In other words, what is Sophia Amoruso’s personal obligation to continue the work she once said she stood for?
“I want to be respectful of my wife’s privacy and of her story, which she would never choose to share in a magazine. (In fact, here is the only time I will quote her: ‘I never want to talk about it again. If you could put that in the piece, I’d appreciate it.’)”
Reading this description in the lead, I literally cried, “YES” aloud: “For those undergoing IVF, the process is universal; if and where you snag, and on what—that part is deeply individual.”
That time Kim Gordon duped me into moving to Western Mass: The fact that Gordon lived in Northampton, MA (the town next to mine), was no small factor in my belief that this place had to be secretly “cool” and therefore worth living in. Soon after we moved, I learned Gordon had decamped for NY/LA. Not cool, Kim.—Maggie
My opinion about Kate's health is "whatever they said was purposely vague, leading me to believe it's either not a big deal and they didn't think anyone would care that she wouldn't be 'working' until Easter OR it IS a big deal and she's not well enough to be posing for pics" (Except Charles is up and about with cancer, posing for pics, so...)
What I find more interesting is the whole media aspect: it's clear the British Press was told to keep quiet, and they did. No paps hanging around (until now, conveniently), no stories about how George is stepping up and Charlotte is learning to bake, etc. So the Royal Family CAN ask for privacy for Kate but when Harry and Meghan asked for help, no. Add on the whole William missing his Godfather's funeral service with an hour's notice, Camilla now flying off for vacation and the visual of putting the elderly Duke of Kent into service, it's a train wreck bad PR Optics.
As a retail salesperson, I do feel icky about a reporter embedding with 'real workers', hopefully the story will have some nuance, the reviews seem good. But I was immediately reminded of Barbara Eihrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, does Waldman credit her at all, I wonder?