Who's Got Shotgun?
Who's Got Shotgun?
The Nurse and Mercutio of newsletters is desperately seeking Phoebe, high-fiving Kerry, and paging Elise. (Who are we, Lou Bega?)
What would make the perfect women’s magazine? Juicy yarns, 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.
Pulchritudinous Pussywillows,
This week the Spread Thread was aflame with chatter about something we don’t get around to all that often: Manners! At the Royal Television Society conference in Britain last week—be there or be square—Emma Thompson declared that referring to creative work as “content” is just plain rude.
“To hear people talk about ‘content’ makes me feel like the stuffing inside a sofa cushion…It’s just a rude word for creative people. I know there are students in the audience: You don’t want to hear your stories described as ‘content’ or your acting or your producing described as ‘content.’ That’s just like coffee grounds in the sink or something.”
Dame Emma, where were you in our hour of need at the Hearst Tower circa 2014? The “content”-ification of magazine journalism is old news1. But with even Spread deity Lauren Groff’s “content” being loaded into an AI machine—is it telling that we picture this as an endless scroll of pages being fed into a dot matrix printer from 1992?—we got to thinking about how easy it might be to load all 70 issues of the Spread into that gadget…and what that might mean for our gleaming media empire. ¡Dios Mio! Dua Lipa! So we’re writing to you today from the tilt-a-whirl position [see diagram 1.a. above] because, sure, an AI bot could crank out the words in this week’s issue. But could it do so while griddling a week’s supply of quesadillas and spinning counterclockwise with its bestie’s hooha front and center? Didn’t think so.
Only problem is, we can’t agree on who’s got shotgun!
[Off-mic mutterings: “Rachel, it’s my turn!” “Maggie, I just got up here, keep twirlin’!!”]
Come correct or don’t come at all,
Rachel & Maggie
P.S. When your book becomes a Prime Deal that basically makes you a Prime Minister, right? Or, like, Prime Rib, at least? Now through 10/11, you can buy Maggie’s J.Crew book, The Kingdom of Prep, for the bargain price of $14.93. What’s with the 93¢, you ask? Look, we’re just proud we figured out how to type the ¢ sign.
Organization porn.
The name of the post was “The Promise of an Organized Life.” The words that caught my eye were visual pollution. Spread friend, Substacker extraordinaire, bestselling author supreme
, who normally traffics in much headier stuff, got down into the Cheerio crumbs of life in her Pulling the Thread newsletter this week, interviewing organizational expert —the kind of woman who poses in her self-help tomes wearing white pants, reaching up to deposit a perfect white bowl into open shelving that holds…air. Argh, this is such a push-pull for me. On the one hand, yes, I need to know: How! How! How do I minimize the visual pollution in this house so that I can be, as Gill promises here, more productive, more creative, more in control of my life and less mad at everybody? On the other hand, how much more life and bandwidth can I spend fighting stuff and its inevitable build-up? Clutter is yet another thing that we ascribe moral value to in our culture, “goodness” and “badness,” just as Loehnen talks about in her excellent book, On Our Best Behavior: Failure to manage your clutter is a sign to you and the rest of the world that it’s not just your house that’s a mess—it’s you. But, oh, the things I could have accomplished in my one wild and precious life if I hadn’t spent it hoeing out the goddamn tupperware drawer, starting with: maybe being a nicer mom? You know what’s a lot more toxic than clutter? Constantly being irritated with your kids for causing that clutter.—MaggieMaggie, When I consider wasted brainspace and falsely ascribed moral value, I think about all of the hours—days! months! years?!—of my life I’ve thrown away fixating on my weight…with house tidiness (or untidiness) clocking in a close second. According to Elise’s thesis (say that five times fast), these two faux-vices would fall into the patriarchy-bred categories of gluttony and sloth, respectively, invented to keep women like me down! So should I resist my yen to sort every toy in my kids’ nursery by non-toxic material and tasteful color—or lean into it?! And how should I feel about my craving for that blonde lady’s chunky white pottery and airy shelves… Are you there, Elise? It’s me, Rachel.—Rachel
Hold the phone. Stop the dot matrix printer: has entered the chat! Helloooo, Elise!!!!!!!!!!!
Rachel and Maggie,
You two are literally pulling my shadow out of the laundry basket: Despite writing a whole book about escaping the tyranny of goodness and collapsing onto the couch for Netflix and Ben & Jerry’s, I can’t escape my belief that I can curb my existential anxiety by making my life less cluttered. My heart thrills at the promise of buying less stuff, and the (false?) promise that if I owned fewer things, I wouldn’t need to organize at all. But I recognize how spare(r) shelves and drawers—you know, passports and tax returns in an appropriate place, eight plastic kids’ cups, and not 18—spills over onto idealized surfaces as well. It becomes less about junk drawers and more about living rooms that look like Jenni Kayne catalogs, which we’re then projecting all over each other as an impossible fantasy. (I have kids AND cats, and a preference for color.) For the record, 80 percent of the crap in our house belongs to the kids, and last I checked, they’re not interested in parting with any of it, even old shoes.—Elise
Read the Pulling the Thread post that started all this here.
For never was a story of more woe...
Post-#MeToo reporter-queen Lila Shapiro has done it again. Following her Spreadie award-winning tour de force about Buffy producer Joss Whedon (cover line: “Interview with the Alleged Vampire”) and her 360-degree examination of the Shitty Media Men list, the New York writer has delivered the definitive feature on the turmoil surrounding 1968’s Franco Zeffirelli-directed Romeo and Juliet. In short, then-teen actors Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting allege they were abused on set, that their entire careers and lives suffered due to Zeffirelli’s actions, and that, more than 50 years later, Paramount is responsible for what went down. Under a temporary expansion of the statute of limitations over claims of child sex abuses—and with an assist from an enterprising manager from a town called Mentor, Ohio—the actors, now in their 70s, were able to sue Paramount last year. But the case was dismissed, leaving Hussey and Whiting with Paramount’s legal bills and those of us following along with even more unanswered questions. Zeffirelli died in 2019, but Shapiro sits down for interviews with every other major party in this firestorm, and speaks to a slew of legal sources for context. But not only is she an ace reporter, Shapiro is a writer able to operate in the uncomfortable gray of it all: We’re so conditioned to fight the good fight for justice, but in this case, the alleged victims have emerged from their quest with less than they had going in. Where are we supposed to shove that in our mental filing cabinets?—Rachel
Read “Romeo and Juliet Was a Tragedy” here.
A Fashion Quadruple-Header: Sarah and Gabriella and Phoebe and Iman
True fashion fans and even some fashion-aware individuals with stretchy pants surgically attached to our hindquarters (ahem) are mourning the departure of Sarah Burton from the house of McQueen. Burton stepped in after Alexander McQueen’s industry-rocking suicide 13 years ago and managed something that seemed impossible at the time: She kept the house nearly as lyrical and inventive as it had been under its founder, but never as dark—and also, being a woman herself, made clothes that were far more woman-friendly than McQueen ever had. Both Vanessa Friedman at the New York Times and Cathy Horyn at the Cut give Burton her due; Friedman almost made me tear up!
With Gabriella Hearst also exiting the helm of Chloe2 and a sudden dip in powerful women leading major fashion houses—Burton’s replacement, this dude, was announced today—last week at Puck, Lauren Sherman voiced an increasingly Burning Question: Where you at, Phoebes? We all remember that day in June 2021 when we found out Phoebe Philo was launching her own LVMH-backed collection. Two-plus years later, we’ve got an IG handle (Followers: 276K. Posts: 0) and a blank webpage. According to Sherman, Philo has made and scrapped three iterations of her line, cycling through three different design teams. And very real issues surround the Burning Question, too: The designer, never one to address much of anything with, ya know, words, has never responded to accusations of racism first lobbed as far back as 2013, which resurfaced last year in a podcast interview with the Iman, who noted Philo’s alleged resistance to using models of color. The supermodel says at one point she discussed this with Philo, who asked if she was going to be “forced to use Black models.” Yikes. “That’s why I have never bought a Celine bag,” Iman said. “She has a right to her runway, and I have a right to my pocketbook.” It seems we might not have to wait much longer to see what happens next; perhaps spurred by Sherman’s newsletter, which arrived on Thursday, Philo announced over the weekend her brand will open for business October 30.—Maggie
Read Vanessa Friedman’s tribute, “Farewell to a Woman in Full,” here.
Read Cathy Horyn’s rave, “Sarah Burton’s Stunning Final Bow” here.
Read “Remain Calm. Phoebe Philo is Finally, Actually Launching Her Own Brand” here.
Listen to Iman on Sway’s Universe here.
Tea time with Kerry.
My relationship with Kerry Washington has historically3 gone like this: Kerry as Chenille in Save the Last Dance? I’m having fun! Kerry as Kay Amin in the Last King of Scotland? I’m rapt! Kerry as Anita Hill in that HBO movie? I’m wowed! Kerry as Mia Warren in Little Fires Everywhere? I’m riveted! Kerry Washington as Kerry Washington? I’m asleep. This was of course by design; Washington is a very private person, as evidenced by every single interview she’s ever participated in. But with the release of her memoir, Thicker Than Water, she is finally letting us in on some bold moves: As excerpted in Time, she writes movingly and specifically about having an abortion in her twenties (read to the end—there’s a little twist); she also reveals in her memoir—and talks further about it to the New York Times—that a mere five years ago (for those playing at home: after Scandal, before American Son) she found out her dad is not in fact her biological father: Her parents used a sperm donor back in 1976. Kerry as memoirist? I’m all in.—Rachel
Read “I’m Ready to Talk About My Abortion” here.
Read “Kerry Washington Goes Deep on a Family Secret” here.
Buy Thicker Than Water here.
Magazine-making as revolution!
Your Spreaditors just finished recording an upcoming top-secret podcast episode for Print Is Dead. (Long Live Print!), which we’ll release later this season. (If you have suggestions for whom we should interview the next time we host, reply to this email or let us know in the comments!) In the meantime, slake your thirst with the program’s latest ep, featuring an obscure journo upstart named…. Gloria Freakin’ Steinem! Steinem talks about getting in on the ground floor of New York magazine and the nitty gritty of Ms.
Listen here.
Manspreading…with Allison Russell.
We’ve talked about doing this since the gates to Spreadlandia first swung open. Then this week Maggie’s husband, Nick, got very emphatic about an NPR interview he loved so much, he listened to it “not once, not twice, but three times.” Fine, we said, why didn’t he write about it? Without further ado, we give you…Nick!
Last week on Fresh Air, Terry Gross, the maestro, interviewed musician Allison Russell for the release of her new album, The Returner. Russell’s songwriting, amplified by her powerful voice, is by turns mournful, hopeful, soulful, and joyous—often all in the same song (I recommend the title track for starters). Here Russell discusses the harrowing physical and sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her adoptive father, a white supremacist who viewed her as property. (Russell’s mother is white; her biological father, who is Black, was told that she’d been adopted at birth, in a closed adoption.) Somehow Russell emerged from this childhood intact, open, and compassionate. She talks of reclaiming her body and decolonizing her mind. What I found most remarkable about Russell is the strength of spirit it would take to absorb all that hate, flip it, and beam it back into the world concentrated as art. That, and her banjo playing—learned not because of its significance in the Black music tradition, but because, in childhood, one bright spot for her was listening to Kermit the Frog play “The Rainbow Connection.”—Nick
Listen here.
Fox & friends.
During this morning’s Spreaditorial meeting, Maggie and I happened upon a brand new procrastination activity: Google Image-searching “Julia Fox Fashion Week Looks” and “Nadine Menendez Jeans Boobs” (highly recommended). Out loud, I declared “wow, Julia Fox and I are just really not much alike!” which seemed like the most obvious statement of my lifetime. And so I was gobsmacked, I tell you, to arrive at the opposite conclusion about an hour later. In a fresh-as-hell writer-subject pairing, Jia Tolentino interviewed Fox, who’s on the circuit promoting her memoir, for the New Yorker, and they spent a good fifty percent of their conversation talking about—drumroll, please!—parenting. Like me, Fox and Tolentino each have a toddler4, and Tolentino went long on this line of questioning: daycare logistics, ideas about postpartum depression, motherhood’s effect on thrill-seeking. The duo also covered drugs—which both Tolentino and Fox have written about extensively—death, money, and how the book-publishing sausage gets made, and there’s a fascinating and emotional section on Fox’s decision to look “grotesque” in order to disgust men (she’s currently in her “post-men era”). But I continue to be in it for the parasocial play date.—Rachel
Read “Julia Fox Didn’t Want to Be Famous, but She Knew She Would Be” here.
She Is… Jenna Fierce.
Writing about Queen Bey’s “Renaissance” tour for the Times Magazine,
performs on the page like only Knowles-Carter can on the stage, and with all the pyrotechnics. It’s spectacle on spectacle, each passage one-upping the last in poignancy and extravagance.—RachelRead it here.
A beautiful mind.
We fear we may have overplayed the supermodel card in recent issues, but we couldn’t ignore our idol (Spridal? Speadol? No?) Sophie Gilbert binding together countless cultural threads with a single line in her Atlantic essay on the Apple+ doc, The Super Models5.
“The rise and fall of the supermodel…ends up feeling like a microcosm of women’s progress in general: a triumphant, lucrative ascent for a select group, and then the inevitable backlash when that group is perceived to have gained too much power.” (Ed’s note: Ka-pow!)
Read “The Bittersweet Lessons of the Most Beautiful Women in the World” here.
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Speaking of the modernization attempts of legacy media, did anyone catch Washington Post tech columnist Taylor Lorenz, out pushing her new book, Extremely Online, and being, dare we say, kinda rude in conversation with Substack fashion chronicler
? On landing an internship in 2006 at Harper’s Bazaar: “I remember after college just thinking, OK, well, that's a dying industry. This is the most out of touch place I've ever been…No hate to Harper's Bazaar. I really love people that work there, but a lot of these companies haven't evolved very much, and I'm kind of shocked that they're still in business.” Geez, Lorenz, tell us what you really think!Gabriella Hearst leaves Chloe after a scant three years, which is pretty much par for the course over there: Truly, no fashion house churns through talent like Chloe. When are we getting the behind-the-scenes workplace drama on that place…hmm??
I should stipulate that I’m not a Scandal person, though I am very into Bellamy Young’s hysterical (in all the ways) performance in The Other Black Girl. If this half-hour workplace comedy/thriller wasn’t on your radar, well, now it is. Find it on Hulu here.
Though, to be fair, I am the mother of two toddlers—two under three to be precise. And no I am not keeping score or feeling at all beleaguered!! 😀 😁 😄 😊 😆
Huh! The director of the supermodels doc, Roger Ross Williams, is a very nice man who owns the Catskills property where Maggie and contributing writer Nick got hitched in 2010, at the height of the barn-wedding-chic era.
jesus i made one comment and it reproduced then deleted one and it deleted both anyways i wrote "thanks alot...erk... never got beyond the dua lipa stuff no doubt the rest was good too!"