Yentl But Make It Brat
Wait, is Brat still a thing? Do we care? The Ella and Cole Emhoff of newsletters weighs in on the science of childcare, must-read trash and treasure, and the smartest chick in entertainment.
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!
Friends! Romans! Spreadisans!
We’re still riding high on Michelle Obama’s DNC blockbuster, just like you. And people, we’ll take the high where we can get it: School has been officially out for one or more of your Spreaditors’ children for 78 days and counting. As Jerusalem Demsas reported this week in the watershed (to us) Atlantic article “Of Course Schools Are Day Care,” studies back up what you know and live but aren’t supposed to talk about out loud: Summer and other school-free chunks of the year drive parents to drink. The stats are startling: When kiddos are on the loose, we buy more alcohol and pop more pills. Well, some of us do. “The new paper indicates that women with elementary-age children suffered the most, consistent with expectations that young children require the most time and attention,” Demsas writes. But here was the clencher for us: “Further, the researchers found no effect for fathers, which is consistent with research about who was likely to be most burdened with child care.” To the tune of Barbra Steisand’s number in the Academy Award-winning 1983 film Yentl: Kamala, Can You Hear Us?
The good news is, half of Rachel’s many, many children are back in school in Virginia. And Maggie is currently parked outside her kids’ Massachusetts elementary school with a pee bottle and a bag of Trader Joe’s Trek Mix, waiting for it to get back in session at 8:10 Monday morning. We’re beginning to see the light. But for a moment there, all this nonstop summer funny-fun-fun made us want to test our luck and start noshing on random people’s doorstep flora like Cher Horowitz. (Her kid is middle-school age—we checked, we empathize.)
Salud,
Rachel & Maggie
P.S. Earlier in the summer, we floated a trial balloon in this newsletter, asking you: Is Ezra Klein hot? The next thing we knew our own
had penned the definitive article on the question, for Bustle: “Is Everybody Horny for Ezra Klein?” In the past few days, the piece has been mentioned in Semafor, CJR, and most thrillingly, After School. Now we know: People interpret the word “horny” quite literally! It’s true, Kathryn C., one of the high-end horndogs quoted in the article has an Ezra fantasy that’s pretty hot: “I want to know what he’s saying on the phone. I want to watch his thought process happen in more detail… OK, and maybe get into bed next to him at night wearing our Bert and Ernie PJs. We can both have a cup of tea and just lie there and talk. And I will say, ‘Okay, don’t laugh but I’m thinking Kamala might be underrated?’ And he would be like, ‘OMG ME TOO!’”P.P.S. Do you listen to Ezra Klein, too? Or any podcasts at all? Ding ding ding—go ahead, hit the heart button on this newsletter.
P.P.P.S. We’re lifting the paywall for today’s issue! What’s not to like about that? (Just be sure to subscribe in time for next week.)
It Girls on It Girls (on It Girls? OK, fine, we’re not It.)
Look, don’t judge us, but we just did not know that Hari Nef is maybe the smartest actress in Hollywood. In the summer issue of Apartamento magazine, Nef opens her West Village-meets-Chelsea loft to writer Michael Bullock (Maggie’s lost cousin? TBD) for what at first glance is just a hipsterized version of your standard Elle Decor story—and Secret Strategist jumped right on those Yves Delorme sheets—yet grows into the full, shall we say, Spread, of how true New York It Girls get minted, and how Nef’s internet-y celebrity coasted the wave of the wider trans movement. Nef will play Warhol muse Candy Darling in a yet-to-be-shot biopic. Not only is the casting kismet, the insight on fame, objectification, and the performance of womanhood that Nef brings to it is pretty thrilling. Nef on Candy: “She wanted to be a star, almost as the medium for being a woman. She was also so alienated by the dehumanisation that comes with putting yourself on a pedestal.... Glamour and pathos can create a context that sells people on your right to exist but also divorces people from your humanity.” You go, Barbie.
Read it here.
Ex-Wife of the Year
The award goes not to the ever-growing myriad of divorce memoirists of 2024 but to Kerstin Emhoff, for producing the DNC video—narrated by her son, Cole—that you just know made Usha Vance wonder what she’s doing with ole blue eyes, when there are gems like soon-to-be First Gentleman Doug out there. Maybe you’ve heard: When someone tweeted that Emhoff (who attended the first two nights of the DNC) was more present to support her ex than Melania has been to support her actual spouse, Kerstin retweeted it. Her response? “Damn right.”
Well this is clearly a future Ryan Murphy production.
“The artifice was the passion,” writes Vanity Fair’s Alice Hines in her bonkers tragicomedy about a bonkers TikTok couple: 95-year-old “diamond heiress” Lady Betty Grafstein and 61-year-old genderfluid “Kardashian-level star in Portugal” José Castelo Branco. The story is twisty, wild, sad, and trashy as hell—a formula that, if we’re being honest, we’d like to see more of from Vanity Fair these days. Also, snaps to Hines especially for this lead: “José Castelo Branco had been wearing the same Balmain leggings for two weeks. Anyone who knows knows this to be a scandal.”
Read it here.
Their Comrade, My Mother
For the Atlantic’s latest issue, culture writer Xochitl Gonzalez delivers an essay so personal, crushing, fine-tuned, and wise that it makes us want to reread all of her previous work with it in mind. The vantage-shifting context? In a storyline that will be familiar to readers of Gonzalez’s wedding-planner novel, Olga Dies Dreaming, the writer’s mother was a socialist organizer so committed to (blinded by?) the cause that she left three-year-old Gonzalez to be raised by her grandparents in Brooklyn indefinitely while she traveled the world, agitating for revolution. The most heartbreaking moments come when her mother squeezes in the occasional cameo between campaigns and gigs. Move over, Lost Daughter: This is the entry into the cauldron of Maternal Ambivalence we didn’t know we needed.
Read “To Save the World, My Mother Abandoned Me” here.
Bigger, better.
You know those times when you’re reading a first-person essay and it strikes you that you and this writer have very, very little, like maybe nothing, in common? Here is Molly Rosen, on wearing postpartum underpants while recovering from an unmedicated childbirth that required 17 stitches: “Yet I’d never been more horny in my life. The underwear made me feel hot. The body I’d spent 35 years starving and drugging and trying to make beautiful had suddenly revealed itself to be a wild and magical beast. I was drunk on its power, its capacity to mold and make, to supply and deliver. I strutted around my maternity leave wearing only the mesh granny panties, bouncing my newborn, leaking blood and breast milk, blasting Beyoncé, pouncing on my husband every time he walked through the door.” In the Cut’s “Gone Commando,” Rosen threads the needle from rock star hookups of her youth to a trip to, we shit you not, Auschwitz—and all the reasons that, by the time menopause hit, she was desperate to get rid of…underpants. One Spreaditor’s counterargument: “My Decision To Commit to Extremely Large Underpants.” Yeah, we’re talkin’ Bridget Jones-large here. Never happier.
Read it here.
“You got cancer only so you could write about it.” Ooof.
Annie Ernaux—everyone’s favorite 83-year-old literary It Girl—manages to hold forth on the thrill of meeting a new penis in an essay about going through chemotherapy for breast cancer in this week’s New Yorker. The larger point: That the combination of a cancer battle and a new romance had the effect of unlocking a new frontier of creativity. One of the many reasons she has a Nobel and we do not.
Read “Landscapes of Cancer and Desire” here.
Slather that stuff a lil further north?
We’re good little Spreaditors, and terribly vain, too, so when Linda Wells tells us to put menopausal vaginal estrogen cream on our faces, we say yes’m. Rarely have we read such a full-throated endorsement for an ingredient that feels kinda radical, but Wells says smart women have been dabbing the stuff that keeps their vajays functioning on their crows feet for years. In fairness, her E of choice comes in the M4 cream by Alloy (a meno-brand cofounded by another ex-EIC, Anne Fulenwider—hey, Anne!) which was created for your…face.
Read it here.
Is the friend split the new divorce?
A week ago, we mentioned two pieces—one from Elle, one from Bustle—about friendship breakups. The double dose felt like a lot of sugar for a dime. Since then, the dam has broken and we are now doggy paddling through fructose. (Are we poets or what?) On Saturday, the New Yorker published “The Trouble with Friends” by Weike Wang. On Monday, the Cut launched a weeklong series called Friends for Never, consisting of an article on the psychology of friendships ending, pop-culture rankings, playlists, and of course many a first-person essay. On today, well, we’re still friends with our friends and we intend to keep it that way!
Should we demote the Big O? To like…the Medium O?
Many a Spread reader passed around the recent New York Times story about the heterosexual “orgasm gap”—apparently, despite all this supposed progress we’re making, women still get off less than men. (Pick your jaw up off the floor, reader.) In her Substack, sexpert
, PhD, who was quoted in the original story, reframes the conversation. In part because, she says, “gap”-type thinking “uses orgasm as a proxy for sexual… Justice? Equality? Fairness?” when “orgasm isn’t any of those things; it’s just the spontaneous, involuntary release of physical tension generated in response to sex-related stimulation.” Thinking of the “gap” as a Very Bad Thing that needs to be fixed just puts more focus on orgasm as end-all, be all,1 and thus more pressure on women to perform. (For the record, what does raise the frequency? More non-penetrative sex and vibrators, duh!)Read Nagoski’s “The ‘Orgasm Gap’” here.
Read “The ‘Orgasm Gap’ Isn’t Going Away for Straight Women” here.
This just in from Katie Holmes’s official royal biographer
Stop us if we’ve already shared this one: In 2012, Maggie wrote an Elle cover story on Katie Holmes, in which she bought the Holmes narrative hook, line, and sinker, declaring not only that the actress was a legit fashion designer (!!) but that her marriage to Tom Cruise was not a sham at all—their love, your future Spreaditor wrote, was true, and going strong. The story dropped literal hours after Holmes staged an epic four-car escape from her marriage worthy of a heist movie. It remains the only truly dramatic movie star-ish thing the woman has ever done. Writing in Town & Country, Eric Wilson tries to pin down why we’re all still rabidly looking at this perfectly nice woman—a quiet, demure (as they say) likable human who says little; acts rarely; and mostly wears wide-leg jeans and mom sweaters, yet whose every move is documented more rabidly than most pop stars.
Read it here.
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“Whenever I’m asked how women’s sexuality has changed over time, I turn to the Hite Report. It was first published in 1976, yet it very often says the same thing I find myself saying to journalists,” writes Nagoski. In it, Hite documented the “social pressure that says a woman who has an orgasm is more of a woman, a ‘real’ woman.” Cue your quarterly reminder to catch The Disappearance of Shere Hite, now on Prime Video, which we first raved about back in January.
Hari Nef was the best part of the first season of And Just Like That, and I would have watched a spinoff of her Rabbi in a second (I never went back and am thankful for it).
As far as Katie Holmes goes, she got publicity for wearing a sweater bra and a cardigan, and someone anointed her a fashion icon. And how many years ago was that? I did lol at her nose ring on the cover, on Town and Country, no less (wonder if they got any complaints?)