We’ll Have Our Cake (Please?)
The Starlet O’Hara and Mrs. Wiggins of newsletters is toasting a big one while contemplating prison vacations, banana hammocks, Malala as “sex bomb,” and Ezra’s transgression.
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Sumptuous Spreadikins,
Can you believe it? It’s been four years, 182 posts, a book, and two whole Spread-babies since we decided to plant our flag in this brave new world, Substack. At the time, we were finding the “women’s media” landscape, where we’d spent most of our careers, paradoxically both overwhelming and undernourishing. There was nothing to buy on the newsstand, yet infinite content to scroll, and finding the real gems in that deluge felt maddeningly difficult.
We got to Substack early, before the big-brand invasion, before “inbox Armageddon.” Also: before the AI revolution, before we had a name for the “manosphere” or the “womanosphere,” before we knew to fear the “Gen X Career Meltdown.” What we found was an online home that allowed us to do what we’d always loved as magazine editors: curate and share the journalism and storytelling we care about; celebrate writers, editors, and podcasters we admire; hold forth on “the conversation” around women’s health, ambition, creativity, inner life, conflict, and controversy…all while hanging out with each other. And with you.
Now, with working mothers under attack, our bodily autonomy in peril at best, and everything from vaccine access to our fourth amendment rights dangling from a precipice (what is the plural of precipice, and how many can one dangle from at a time?), we find that our original mission has never felt more pressing.
So we’ve got lots to look forward to this fall: Original author interviews! Podcast eps with our friends at Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!)! And, as always, the reading lists that, depending on what you have the time or the appetite for, will either give you hours of delicious reading to look forward to every week or, let’s be honest, do the work for you.
Loyal Spreaders, thank you so much for coming along with us on this expedition, putting up with our nonsensical jokes and arcane references, and giving us the fuel (and the funds) to keep doing this thing we love. You complete us.
According to the Knot, the fourth anniversary is the time to gift fruit and flowers, appliances, or blue topaz, and while Maggie would really love a new counter depth fridge, we think you know what we really want:
If you haven’t already supported our work, we’d be so grateful if you did that now. Click here to get a 25 percent discount (that’s one FOURTH off) on a paid subscription.
Also nice? Pass this email along to the smartest, Spreadiest women you know. And click that ❤️ button to say: Keep on keepin’ on.
Happy anniversary to us all,
Rachel & Maggie
P.S. Are you a woman? Do you have a face, a body, and/or thoughts? The editors over at Bustle would be very grateful if you’d take their Vanity Survey! Jump in here.
The Whole Kat and Caboodle
It speaks to the complete bifurcation of American media that until last weekend we’d never even heard of Kat Timpf, the very visible sidekick on a (semi) late-night show that regularly commands a bigger audience than Kimmel, Fallon, or Colbert. Our beloved Amanda Hess does a bang-up job of introducing us to the costar of Fox’s 10 p.m. nightly show, Gutfeld!, a Misfits-loving brunette in nonprescription glasses who describes herself as an independent, and who recently had the nightmarish experience of discovering she had breast cancer while nine months pregnant. In rapid succession, she’s gone through childbirth, new motherhood, a double mastectomy, and reconstructive surgery—and talked about all this yucky lady stuff on Fox, of all places, while taking abuse from viewers for daring to work while mothering. Turns out Fox folk will happily eat their own, if that person happens to be a—gasp—working mother.
Read “A Baby. A Double Mastectomy. Many Opinions From Fox News Viewers.” here.
Et tu, Ezra?
When even the left’s most crushable public intellectual makes reproductive rights sound like a bargaining chip—repeatedly—what are progressive women to do? Several Substackers are railing against Ezra Klein’s recent comments on abortion, including Vajenda superstar Dr. Jen Gunter, Men Yell at Me yeller-in-chief Lyz Lenz, and Abortion, Every Day heroine Jessica Valenti, and he best listen up. In other words: Ezra! Don’t make Maggie write a follow-up to her year-old valentine to your mic-side manner. You do not want that.
What It’s Like to Be Bruce’s Wife, When He Can’t Be Your Husband
Anna Peele, writer of Vanity Fair’s iconic (we don’t use that word lightly) and savage-with-a-smile cover story on the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, shows her softer side in the new issue with a profile of Emma Heming Willis, Bruce’s wife, who became his caregiver once he got early onset dementia (specifically frontotemporal dementia or FTD). It’s a heartbreaking love story—one that, due to our culture’s discomfort with talking about both the realities of this kind of disease and the necessities of caretaking, feels a little radical in its intimacy and tenderness. Heming, who has two grade-school-age children with Bruce and seems close to Demi Moore and the Demi-Bruce offspring, “has become his caretaker, and in doing so, become a voice for the impact of something that will eventually affect us all: the inevitable time when we can no longer care for ourselves.”
Read it here.
Queen of Comedy
If we couldn’t quite understand how the (talented and, at the time, up-and-coming) millennial mag writer Rachel Syme got her name called out alongside those of Joan Didion and Nora Ephron on The Bold Type back in 2018—we get it now. At the New Yorker, Syme just keeps nailing plum assignments any writer would kill for, including a long, luxurious, and deeelightful profile of the Carol Burnett that she apparently spent two years gathering string for—including going behind the scenes of a sweet cameo in Hacks that we’d been wanting to know more about!—to compose the magazine world equivalent of a lifetime achievement award. Syme speaks to the full sorority of our parasocial friends (Amy, Kristen, Jean, Tina) and traces the steps of Burnett’s life and career in enough detail that we have to ask: Is this the seed of a future Burnett biography?
Read “Carol Burnett Plays On” here.
What’s ahead for paid subscribers? ”The highest male standards,” which in our experience are pretty low. Malalalalalove. “Magazines,” but not really. Lilith guilt. The “clean eating” cult that could eventually kill ya. You don’t want to miss out on all that, do you?
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