You Belong Among the Wildflowers
The Velveteen Rabbit and Little Bunny Foo Foo of newsletters considers calling it quits and reconsiders the early 2000s. Plus: Our nightstands get ready for some action!
Two veteran editors read it ALL and deliver to you only the best: juicy yarns, big ideas, deeply personal essays, and hot goss—aka, the full Spread. Plus: original interviews, podcasts, and more. Come hungry!
Spread Nation,
At a moment that finds many of us wondering if we’ll ever get to retire, Cate Blanchett shocked us by doing what might be considered the opposite of “quiet quitting.” “I’m giving up,” she declared recently on a British radio program. “My family roll their eyes every time I say it, but I mean it. I am serious about giving up acting … [There are] a lot of things I want to do with my life.”
Could she be serious? Blanchett has the kind of BDE and intellectual Aussie accent that makes you believe everything she says but since we are esteemed investigative journalists, we hit up a top-secret website called IMDB. This source reveals that Ms. Blanchett, a Taurus who’ll turn 56 next month, is, in fact, down to just two announced projects: a Jim Jarmusch movie about estranged siblings costarring Adam Driver (we’ll see it) and a sci-fi comedy, Alpha Gang, in which Blanchett will play an “alien gang leader” opposite Channing Tatum. Pause for a quick Google: How much did Sandra Bullock make on Lost City? $20 mill. That’s exit-strategy money. Case dismissed! Fact-check complete! Blanchett out.
Meanwhile, one Tina Fey—almost 55, also a Taurus—told the Hollywood Reporter1 that in her grande dame era, she chooses projects based on which friends she can make them with, and which shooting locations would be a nice place to spend time. (Which is exactly how we chose this project, the Spread: It would allow us to work together from the cushy tropical environs of our homes in Virginia and Massachusetts. Same, same, Tina!) In this case, the project is The Four Seasons, a Netflix limited comedy series out May 1 about three couples who go on an annual vacation together; Fey stars alongside Colman Domingo and Steve Carell and, as every true Spreader already knows, she talked about it here with our other best friend/life partner Amy Poehler.
So, how do you dream of going out, Spreaders? Do you aspire to one day drop the mic on your careers and get funky on that pottery wheel? Or keep working as long as you can, but on your own terms? Isn’t it fun pretending we have control over our professional fates, as if any of this is actually up to us?
Bahahahahaha,
Rachel & Maggie
P.S. If you like what you see here, please o please smash that ❤️ button up top, won’t you?
Christmas Is Coming in May
In fewer than three weeks, the Spreadiest Tuesday of the year will be upon us. Yes, we’re talking about May 6, the day after the Met Gala. Will our feet still be throbbing thanks to the [REDACTED] heels that Anna chose for us to wear with our painstakingly fitted [REDACTED] gowns for her big event (theme: “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style”)? Of course. But will we get to nurse our morning-after party-girl drips over fare that is far more nourishing than the dime-a-dozen best-dressed slide shows? Hell yeah. Because that very day, four of our most eagerly awaited books will hit shelves all over as well as our mailbox. We’re alerting you now so you too can preorder these titles from the little Spread Bookshop.
The Family Dynamic by Susan Dominus: Inspired by the Brontë sisters, the Spread fantasy mentor and New York Times Magazine staff writer digs into the phenomenon of super-successful siblings, profiling six contemporary families whose kids became ultra-achievers, including the Wojcickis (Ann founded 23andMe; the late Susan was YouTube’s CEO). Preorder it here.
I Regret Almost Everything by Keith McNally: This dishy (sorry) tell-all from the legendary Balthazar/Odeon/Pastis restaurateur covers everything from being a child actor in London to causing drama on Instagram in his seventies. Also: family life and the stroke that left him semi-paralyzed in 2016. Read an excerpt in Grub Street here and preorder it here.
Second Life by Amanda Hess: If we were betting women (or if we could find a venue for pop-culture bets—know a place??), we’d put money on this reported memoir becoming a blockbuster. The razor-sharp New York Times critic, who’s been covering the collision of culture and tech for decades, movingly takes on fertility, pregnancy, and early motherhood in the digital age. As a preview, we highly recommend this Q&A Hess did with Brooding ace Kathryn Jezer-Morton. Preorder the book here.
Girl on Girl by Sophie Gilbert: If we could have a dollar for every time we’ve praised Sophie Gilbert in the Spread, we’d definitely have enough money to preorder her book for $28. In it, the Atlantic’s Pulitzer Prize-winning culture critic tackles the pop culture of the early 2000s and its corrosive effect on young women (hi). Preorder it here. (For more instant gratification, read about our thoughts on this week’s excerpt in the Atlantic below…)
If you dig a heads- up on pop-culture happenings like these, and haven’t yet subscribed to the Spread Culture Calendar™, fix that now by clicking right here.
The Incredible Shrinking Influencer
Because we at the Spread are interested in how we (royal) talk about female bodies in 2025, and because we are old and, despite recent rumblings. hadn’t the foggiest who Remi Bader was, we are spectacularly grateful to the delightful duo behind Slate’s ICYMI podcast, Candice Lim and Kate Lindsay, for breaking it all down for us on this week’s show. The haiku version is that Bader was a body-positive shopping influencer, famous for curating “realistic” hauls during which she’d show what the clothes actually looked like on her plus-size figure. Then in late 2023—boom—she started losing weight and her followers took notice; feeling deceived, they began lashing out in the comments and on Reddit. Then, a couple of weeks ago, Bader revealed to Khloé Kardashian on a podcast that she’d undergone a hardcore weight-loss surgery that combines gastric sleeve and gastric bypass, a revelation that was quickly followed by a big Self profile, which made many of her former fans absolutely ripshit. The ordeal raises questions about health, bodily autonomy, privacy, and human beings as brands. If only the Oprah show were still around to (imperfectly) help us process such matters on the daily.
Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts.
🎵 One Pair of Matching Bookends / Different as Night and Day 🎵
In a column about the merger of Prada and Versace, Washington Post fashion critic Rachel Tashjian once again earns the recent cymbal-crashing profile of her in SSense (we wrote about it a couple of weeks ago). The column is a compare-contrast profile of Miuccia and Donatella as two sides of the Italian fashion matriarch coin, full of insight and poetry. Don’t take our word for it: “[The] news is the stuff of an Edith Wharton novel: Miuccia Prada, the intellectual matriarch of an old-money fashion behemoth from the chilly, stylish north comes together with Donatella Versace, the up-from-her-bootstraps, pop-culture-obsessed babe of the country’s rough, parochial south. The two women, and the lives that led them to this moment, could not be less alike,” Tashjian writes. “Two very different women — one a champion of an intellectual but never stodgy breed of minimalism, and the other a champion of vulgarity and excess as a gateway to spiritual liberation — are philosophically coming together in a moment defined by potent nationalism, the potential doom of tariffs and a widespread skepticism of luxury.” We’re not weeping over the perfection of a fashion column, you’re weeping over the perfection of a fashion column.
Read it in the Washington Post here.
Your Purchase History
The best #tariffcontent we’ve read this week comes from Bloomberg Businessweek’s Amanda Mull (no surprise). Mull takes on Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who recently piped up to say that cheap goods do not the American dream make. In the succinctly titled “Cheap Goods Are the American Dream, Actually,” Mull says pishposh, going on to trace our consumerist lot back to the Marshall Plan, which in 1950 pushed “citizen enfranchisement through rising purchasing power.” Now 70 percent of the United States GDP comes from household consumer spending. In short: This is gonna hurt.
Read it here.
Female Chauvinist Pigs: An Explanation
In “What Porn Taught a Generation of Women,” Spreadqueen Sophie Gilbert makes the case that when pornography (as an industry, an aesthetic, arguably a worldview) infiltrated culture and redefined sex itself in the ’90s and early 2000s, it set in motion the big, bad anti-women backslide we’re now living through in Trump 2.0. Gilbert charts a course from Britney to Larry Flynt to Terry Richardson’s proto #dickpics; from Gennifer Flowers to Snoop showing up at the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards with two women wearing …
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