Will Welch Spills the Whiskey
It’s a boy! The Bobbsey Twins of newsletters meets GQ’s #winning EIC. Plus: Sally Rooney week, Nuzzigate, Miranda x Esther…
We’re here to reclaim the “women’s magazine.” Every week, two veteran editors read it ALL to bring you everything we believe women’s media should be: juicy yarns, big ideas, deeply personal essays, hot goss, and the odd shopping tip—aka, the full Spread. Plus: original interviews, podcasts, and more. Come hungry!
Spreadsqueezes,
Pat yourself on the back if you got anything at all done this week. Between nonstop Nuzzigate, the deluge of Sally Rooney1, the fact that we had to drop EV-ER-Y-THING once we saw that Miranda July was doing sex therapy with Esther Perel (keep reading, we have thoughts!), and what with Rachel’s toddler’s preschool apple-picking outing (star-studded!), we are feeling quite smug that, this fine bright and shiny fall morning, we are delivering unto you our first podcast interview with an editor-in-chief who happens to be...male!
The latest installment of our podnership with Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!)—yes we hear your eyes rolling, Ms. Sherman—is here! We sat down with GQ EIC Will Welch, a veteran of the magazine who took over the top job in 2019, amid a #MeToo moment in which, as he has candidly said, no one especially wanted to hear what men had to say. To his credit, he did not shy away from or gloss over this challenge—with his very first issue, GQ attempted to define the “new masculinity” for a not-so-binary era. Kudos to Will for being an exceedingly game interviewee. We spoke on the day his mag dropped its October Beyoncé cover featuring some eye-popping product placement, and quizzed him on that and more: choosing to endorse Brad Pitt circa late 2024; that whole Pitchfork brouhaha; and what it’s like to have one’s name bandied about as Anna Wintour’s successor. Plus, we may have asked one too many questions about whether GQ is in fact a women’s magazine at this point. Did we take that line of questioning too far? Things did get a little loosey-goosey towards the end—you tell us!
Listen to the episode here! Or here! Or wherever.
And now on to your reads…
Rachel & Maggie
P.S. Spreading on a Friday?! It’s radical, we know. But we’re really rock’n’roll and like to shake things up! Also, we’ll be out next week on our Spread Corporate Retreat in Boston—at press time, both members of the Spreaditorial staff had RSVP’d—and want to help you pace yourself at the Spread buffet. Bon appétit!
P.P.S. Let’s clink refillable coffee mugs to the Spreader who grabbed this for all of us at 6:51 a.m. 🐊👰🏻
How are you celebrating Sally Rooney Week? Allow us to present a mix-and-match menu…
By allowing your weapon-sharp clavicles to protrude through oversize While You Were Sleeping-sleeved sweaters.
By listening to Rooney on Rooney: Thanks to the New York Times’s the Interview pod/column, we get to hear directly from the First Great Millennial Novelist. Our biggest takeaway? Though she doesn’t care about her career—or so she says—the 33-year-old Irish superstar is surprisingly upbeat in her chatter about Marxism and writing sex scenes.
By full-on fangirling alongside three brilliant New Yorker-ers. Y’all, Alexandra Schwartz, Naomi Fry, Vinson Cunningham of the Critics at Large pod are fully in the tank for Rooney.
By inhaling Andrea Long Chu’s Rooney treatment. The New York mag critic goes deep on the contradictions inherent in the aforementioned Marxism and being a romance novelist. Long Chu is uncharacteristically gentle in this review, which we recommend you read all the way through to its satisfying last line.
By living vicariously through the Times’s write-up of ole Sal’s book party—which she, in a very Sal move, did not show up to!
By nodding along to Vogue writer Emma Specter’s incisive critique of Rooney’s choice to make her characters super-duper, concave-stomach skinny. (We’ve said it before, but Vogue should give Specter a raise—no writer on their lineup makes the mag feel as of-the-moment as Spector does.)
By wrapping oneself in a chunky scarf of a review by Amy Weiss-Meyer—“The Rooneyverse Comes of Age”—which calls Intermezzo Rooney’s most grownup yet (which, logically, it should be?) in the Atlantic.
By hopping in your hot-tub time machine to enjoy Becca Rothfeld’s now-legendary takedown of Rooney’s work in the Point, which will turn five in January.
By, you know, just reading the book2? Revolutionary! Buy it from our Bookshop here.
Stop spreadin’ the Nuzzi.
It would be weird for us to ignore the issue of Olivia Nuzzi, a journalist whose work we regularly celebrate here, so let us say this about that: As underqualified conspiracy theorist “journalists” attempt to pick her bones and New York mag lawyers decide her professional fate, we’re as curious as anyone else about the next chapters in this story. But having spun through all eight stages of grief on this one over the past week, we have landed (for now) in deep sorrow for the lone woman in this story—who we hope has an Olympic-level therapist and an intact support system.
Call it homework or call it marketing…we’ll take it!
High Priestess Miranda July wasn’t just invited on Queen Mother Esther Perel’s podcast—Esther made Miranda take her online course on sexuality and desire before they spoke. This is the first interview July has done in a post-All Fours world; all the other interviews took place pre-release, before it became a phenomenon. Perhaps for this reason we found Miranda’s insights even more captivating than Esther’s. Like when Esther suggests the protagonist’s husband lacks complexity—why is it the woman doing all the soul-searching and overthinking and domestic-sphere-imploding in this book? And Miranda’s like, respectfully…duh. “That’s often the women’s role in this culture. Like, ‘I will contain all the emotional turmoil and complexity and badness sometimes, and you can remain an upstanding citizen of a world that frankly was made for you.’”
Listen here.
Read a transcript here.
But We’re Her Cheerleader
We want to feel the way Natasha Lyonne looks in this photo. If you haven’t already, please do find time this weekend to watch His Three Daughters3, a beautiful meditation on the anticipation of loss, and what that head trip brings out in each of us. There’s deserved awards-season buzz for Lyonne, and in an already crowded field, we’re rooting for her, if for no other reason than we need to revel in the acceptance speeches of the comeback queen with the Joe Pesci voice box. Read this profile in the New York Times to see what we mean.
Yes, Pregnancy Broke Your Brain (but we can call it “fine tuning our neural processing” if you want)
Thanks in part to Ms. July, it feels we cannot get through a week without being reminded of all the ways that uterus-owners must go through not one adolescence, but a seemingly infinite number of rescramblings, in which hormonal changes throw everything—mood, brainpower, weight, plumbing, identity—out of whack. Last week, this reminder came via a study that showed how having babies changes the brain: Scans showed gray matter decreases steadily throughout pregnancy, persisting years after birth, and not just in one area—80 percent of brain regions shrunk. This might help explain the rate of depression before and after pregnancy…and why you still can’t find your keys.
Read it in National Geographic here.
We’ll take that C-section “gentle,” please.
Why oh why did it take so long to figure this one out? Doctors in the UK are finding ways to make a C-section more like a vaginal birth. That means no more opaque blue drape that cuts mothers off, so to speak, from the action—now it’s clear, so you can see your baby emerge. And no more whisking the baby off for immediate cleaning—now it’s skin-to-skin, right in the OR. American medical establishment, if you’re looking for more totally-fucking-obvious suggestions that would vastly improve this experience, Maggie has notes!
Read more in Women’s Health here.
In Brief….
We are loath to turn this into even more of an Ezra Klein fanzine but screw it, our crush’s conversation with Zadie Smith restores our faith in higher intelligence. Smith speaks forcefully, in that Smithy way, about aging and freedom, and she cuts right through the divorce fantasy we’ve been struggling to process this year of All Fours: For Zadie, true freedom exists within intimacy, which she finds only with her husband. Radical indeed.
Well played, New York Times, for getting Liev Schreiber—revivified in the female gaze as a DILF thanks to The Perfect Couple4—to record the audio for “The Deserter,” an epic five-part love story that captures the scope of the war in Ukraine. Not gonna lie, Liev makes us more willing to commit.
Congratulations to Substacker extraordinaire and relentless boots-on-the-ground abortion-rights chronicler Jessica Valenti on the release of a new book, Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win. Order it from the Spread’s lil Bookshop here.
We devoured Amazon’s A Very Royal Scandal the day it was released last week, and now we’re stuck in an endless loop of compare-and-contrast with Netflix’s Scoop. Both tell the story of BBC journalist Emily Maitlis’s “takedown” interview with Prince Andrew. But Scoop has Maitlis as an overbronzed, brittle-y posh, borderline elderly woman with no evidence of having children. In AVRS, she’s a hip mum in blue fingernail polish with a bizarrely deep voice. The only thing the two agree on is that she jogs a lot and likes whippets (the dog, not the drug). It’s calling into question everything we assume to be true about the world, not least our faith in the veracity of the docudrama. Can anyone out there help us process?
Gives great pap smear.
In this spring’s generally unsatisfying Interview interview, Rihanna offhandedly mentioned that her favorite thing about Los Angeles was her gynecologist. In due course, the Cut went out and found that doc and spent a few days shadowing her for a profile that’s about as close to catnip as we’ve encountered this year. Turns out, the Beverly Hills OB/GYN is Dr. Thaïs Aliabadi, and that she’s also beloved by the full Kardashian crew, Hailey Bieber, someone called Olivia Culpo, and Olivia Munn (Aliabadi is the hero who discovered her early breast cancer). As described by writer Bindu Bansinath, the level of attention that Aliabadi affords her patients is the stuff our scarred-by-the-medical-establishment dreams are made of. If only she took insurance…
Read “She Delivered the Kardashian and Bieber Babies” here.
Kamala and her…and her.
The New York Times this week delivered a twofer about Kamala Harris’s relationship with high-powered women, one about Harris’s decades-long power friendship with the famously press-careful Laurene Powell Jobs, who just happens to be the wealthiest woman in Silicon Valley (a casual $11 billion, y’all) and who could down the road be considered for Secretary of Education.5 The second is about decades of bad blood from the direction of Kimberly Guilfoyle, with whom Harris worked in the San Francisco D.A.’s office before Guilfoyle became a TV star and a de facto Trump family member. (Vanity Fair followed with a piece about Guilfoyle as “Trump’s Trojan Horse for His Sexist Attacks on Kamala Harris.”) Though the first is a far more substantial read, we couldn’t help but take in the Harris-Guilfoyle saga through David E. Kelley goggles: Guilfoyle became an assistant district attorney in 2000, right around the time that Robert Downey Jr. joined the cast of Ally McBeal as Ally’s love interest, Larry—the fanfic potential is boundless!
Read the Laurene piece here and the Kimberly here.
We’re moving?
We are way behind on our actual work this week, and for that we blame Jonathan Safran Foer. (And not just because we’ve made a hobby of blaming him for random bummers since the whole Nicole Krauss breakup in 2014—a habit which we doubled down on after the whole Natalie Portman thing in 2016.) JSF has put his Ditmas Park house up for rent for a cool $35,000 per month. We challenge you to feast your eyes on the 8-bedroom, 6-full-bath, 3-half-bath house and not start doing math about how many of your friends you’d need to recruit to pull off a very modern share-house arrangement in which you get the big bedroom. See the listing here.
This week on the Spread Culture Calendar™
Kate Winslet’s tough-stuff biopic; the TV finale of the fall (Will Harper get what’s comin’? Will or won’t Yasmin and Rob? Will Eric’s Egyptians save the day?); the buddy road trip whose trailer brought tears to our eyes, and So. Much. More!
Subscribe here.
May the Road Rise Up to Meet Hodes
As you’ve likely heard by now—hug news that it is—our (and everyone’s) beloved Hoda Kotb is stepping down as co-anchor of the Today Show. Though her last morning at 30 Rock isn’t until early next year, your Spreaditors of course had to dig down to the depths of YouTube looking for clues about what her sign-off might be like. Well, we got our answer: Moving and tearful! Check out this video of young Hodes bidding farewell to her post as an anchor at WWL-TV in New Orleans in order to follow her dreams and join NBC’s Dateline. You will laugh and cry—as is life Hodes’s orbit. Watch it here.
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Between the Nuzzi drama and Rooney’s new Intermezzo, our pronunciation of the Italian double-Z has really gotten a workout this week. For lunch today we’ll be having mozzarella in the terrazzo-floored piazza.
Sigh. Even with all this Rooney hoopla (Roopla?), have you heard about Amazon’s best-selling book of the week? It’s the 58-page self-published “memoir” purportedly written by Kim Porter—one-time wife of now-imprisoned Sean Combs—before her death in 2019. It’s apparently riddled with typos; Porter’s kids say she had nothing to do with it. Today it was ranked number 4 on the “Literature and Fiction” list.
Why is no one talking about the brilliant use of pig Latin—pause to Google whether “pig Latin” is now offensive…nope, all good!—in His Three Daughters? Also: In the closing credits, there’s a clear view straight into Maggie’s old Grand Street apartment on the Lower East Side! We famous!
In further news about this just-ok yet addictive series (The Perfect Couple) we can all rest easier at night knowing that, yes, Nicole Kidman did check in with her longtime friend Naomi Watts before agreeing to have window-sex with Naomi’s ex-husband Liev onscreen. Phew.
The Times tosses out a breadcrumb about how Laurene and Kamala—and thankfully not Kimberly and Kamala—go to the same celebrity dermatologist. Our eyes are peeled almost as much as our faces! Who is this expert, Spreadlandia? One of you out there must know…
Val we basically wrote that note to you.
As for that celebrity dermatologist...I think I might know. ("Think" and "might" being the operative words here.)