You're Never Too Old To Get Even
The salted cantaloupe and seedless watermelon of newsletters is bowing down to the GOAT and packing our therapist in our carry-on.
Welcome to Spreadlandia, where two veteran editors read it ALL to winnow out 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!
Welcome in, Spreadistas!
Three cheers for Auntie Eeeee! In New York, Jessica Bennett—a frequent chronicler of the E. Jean Carroll trials who has been embedded in our protagonist’s camp for years—delivers some of her best writing to date in a profile of the Spread’s fairy godmother, timed to the till-now top-secret1 release of E’s new book about the trials, Not My Type: One Woman vs. a President.2 Bennett describes the book as a “minute-by-minute, motion-by-motion retelling of the two court cases, written in the choppy, gonzo style Carroll became known for in the 1980s.” In yesterday’s New York Times rave, Alexandra Jacobs calls it, “a trial scrapbook that is also a memoir of love and friendship, a photo party, a movie set and—though sprinkled with social media posts—a mash note to Ye Olde New Journalism.” Horrific as the book’s raison d’être may be, Jacobs says, Not My Type “tops off Carroll’s whipped-cream oeuvre like a slightly bruised but still buoyant maraschino cherry.”
That fantastical buoyancy (unfathomable even to us, a pair of acolytes who have seen it up close and personal) swerved into extra-sharp relief this week for us, thanks to a story about its polar opposite: Alexis Okeowo’s stomach-churning reporting on other women of #MeToo—those who risked life and limb, mental health, personal relationships, jobs, homes, and sanity to come forward in what was supposed to be a new era of possibility for survivors of sexual violence. And who now find themselves living in the backlash we call… 2025.
For the New Yorker3, Okeowo returns to her own home state of Alabama to track down women who accused Roy Moore of sexual misconduct, derailing his campaign for an open seat in the US Senate. You remember Moore, don’t you—the one who propositioned, dated, and grabbed so many underage girls that he was at one point banned from the local mall, yet still went on to have a thriving political career? One of the women Okeowo interviews is Leigh Corfman, who said Moore initiated a sexual encounter with her when she was fourteen and he was thirty-two. In 2017, Corfman was mentioned in Time’s “Person of the Year” issue. Today she’s a self-described “hermit” living on food stamps. “It’s like, once the men started complaining and MAGA got involved, we can’t talk about this anymore,” she said. “This has to be swept under the rug.”
Given everything these women continue to deal with, it’s no wonder that, in an interview last year, Christine Blasey Ford said, “If I had known, I don’t think I would have jumped off the diving board.” All of which only underscores the extent of E. Jean’s heroism—and, truly, her one-of-a-kind sticktoitiveness. And reminds us why, in Bennett’s story, we find her living in her beloved Frog Cabin in the woods, surrounded by floodlights and armed with a shotgun nicknamed Aphrodite, always with “one in the chamber.”
Spreaders, E’s book came out Tuesday! We got our copies in the mail today! Do yourself a solid and order yours here at the Spread’s Bookshop.
Forever and always, you’re exactly our type,
Rachel & Maggie
P.S. Show us a little love and hit that ❤️ button, would ya?
Let them eat cake.
Spreaders, we were all set to make our go-to joke about Huma Abedin and Alex Soros’s Hamptons nuptials. You know, the one where we har-har-har it up about how sore our feet are from shmancing the night away with the beautiful people? Well, not this time. We don’t know how these images of the same old, same old Hollywood/DC Democratic power grid—Hillary and Kamala; Adrien Brody and Harvey’s ex—hit you, but for us, watching them all party down together, not a hair out of place in their shared snow globe of wealth and power, had us reaching for the extra strength Alka Seltzer. Yes, with human beings being disappeared by the US government, lawmakers being gunned down, and women dying for want of what should be routine health care, Camp Dem staged its ultimate power wedding with maximum elite-media visibility (Vogue) on what just happened to be Trump’s big beautiful birthday weekend, as Democratic foot soldiers took to the streets en masse in the No Kings protests. Because, you know, America doesn’t have royals. Except, looking at these pics, maybe we do? Yick.
The Enigma That Is ACB
As much as #MeToo is supposedly over, done, dead, buried, there are ways in which all roads—especially here in Spreadlandia—still seem to lead back to it. Read Jessica Bennett’s E. Jean profile, and you will be reminded that it was Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s explosive reporting on Harvey Weinstein that inspired E to expose her long-buried secret about Trump. And now Kantor—back on the Supreme Court beat—is reconsidering the woman Trump rushed onto the Supreme Court, who has made some surprising decisions. “When Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan agreed on nonunanimous decisions this term, Justice Barrett joined them 82 percent of the time,” Kantor writes—and that’s giving Dear Leader a serious case of buyer's remorse. Look, it’s a dark day when Amy Coney Barrett is our last, best hope. But in a world short on good news, we’ll take it.
Read “How Amy Coney Barrett is Confounding the Right and the Left” here.
Titty Committee 2.0
You heard it here first: Catherine Lacey can write. OK, fine, we’re hardly the first to tout the talents of the Biography of X author, whose next sure-to-be-big release, The Möbius Book, hit shelves yesterday and who, like Parker Posey, is a fellow alum of Rachel’s childhood sleepaway camp. But in an essay about the unexpected glories of a 250-member breast-forward group chat—a text chain mostly featuring unconventional images of tits of all persuasions—she really goes for it, her delight so palpable, you can almost hear Lacey smiling through her teeth as she describes the various boobs
on her phone screen as “oblong,” “spilling,” “busy,” “lucious,” and “audacious.” But there’s more to the experience than the visual thrills of male gaze-defying tit photography: “Prior to this, I had never heard of a whisper network of women whispering about their lives and their bodies on their own terms instead of having to use such channels as a mode of protection,” she writes. “I have never so regularly seen the beautifully wide variety of tits we never see in film, on television, or even in those supposedly body-positive ad campaigns that still feature only conventionally attractive women who are merely a bit curvier than their runway counterparts.” OK, we’re sold—who’s ready to get something going with us on Signal?
Read it here.
The Devil Wears Greasy Gray Bangs
Patricia Highsmith fans will be on the edge of their seats throughout Elena Gosalvez Blanco’s retelling of her time working as the college-age live-in assistant for the iconic, curmudgeonly thriller writer. At the end of Highsmith’s life, Gosalvez Blanco moves into her remote Switzerland home—a badass-sounding triangle-shaped Brutalist house—where she does a lot of faxing of pages when they’re not eating soup together. As she tears through the queer novelist’s catalog, she begins to wonder, Is she actually the victim in a Highsmithian plot to murder her? It’s fun.
Read “The Talented Ms. Highsmith” in the Yale Review here.
Hey June
We will never miss an opportunity for a squibb about 95-year-old June Squibb, an American treasure we thought we could not love more—that is, until she did that Oscars bit with ScarJo, who directed her in the upcoming Eleanor the Great, and our heart grew another size. (Don’t sleep on last year’s Thelma which is a near-perfect comedic caper, ideal for family viewing if your kids are 10 and up). Here she is in Vulture, talking at Cannes about why she chose to do a dramedy about Holocaust survivors in New York City, and much more: “I felt very strongly about the Holocaust. Because I was alive! I was a child, and I was in Illinois, and I remember looking at Life magazine when they found all of the camps.” JUNE!
The Method and the Madness
Xochitl Gonzalez is so damn good at writing about class issues with a breezy, pop-culture-infused touch—a real Mary Poppins, you might say. In the new issue of the Atlantic, she uses that considerable gift to conquer a rare-for-her form, the celebrity profile, proving that she could, if she wanted to, give Taffy Brodesser-Akner a run for her money as the reigning priestess of the crumbling genre. (We understand that Gonzalez might prefer to maintain her position as an essayist who has the attention of the Pulitzer committee! Just spitballing over here!) The subject is Tracy Anderson, the Gwyneth-backed “dancer’s body” queen, whose net worth is estimated at $110 million and who we never thought we needed to read another profile about (we were so wrong), and the absolutely winning angle is that Gonzalez herself is a longtime fan of The Tracy Anderson Method, encountering her guru at an inflection point: when, thanks to social media, IP in the form of choreography and exercise moves are being hotly contested. Also, a moment when Anderson—thanks to a cash infusion from her third husband (her first two exes died)—is ramping up the business anew.
Read “Inside the Exclusive, Obsessive, Surprisingly Litigious World of Luxury Fitness” here.
Honestly, Airbnb Is Too Much Damn Work
Over the weekend, after lugging two beach chairs, two kids, and nine or so tote bags of various size and function, plus the dregs of one warm and soupy Spindrift, up the hill from the pool and to the parking lot in the blazing heat, we found ourselves googling “all-inclusive hotel kids club nice take care of me where go.” Writer Andrew Lipstein apparently got the same itch and, with the support of GQ, did the whole nine, packing up his family and jetting to a Club Med in the Dominican Republic, all while musing about why our milieu is forgoing adventure-laced travel for amenity-packed escapes. In a shocking twist, he and his wife had a great time. Meanwhile there’s also a travel trend story in WSJ this week, on a rich-folk phenomenon we didn’t have the wherewithal even to fathom: Fancy families are opting for luxury vacations equipped with butlers, chefs…and therapists. One happy 37-year-old dad-customer of Bluestone Families, which for an $80,000 price tag (that excludes airfare) provides an estate outfitted with tennis courts, an infinity pool, a wine cellar, and onsite counseling, raved thusly: “Because we go away so much and we go to so many amazing places, I was really worried about my kids becoming bratty, becoming overly privileged….We got more in a week there than I have in three weeks in France.” Mmmhmm.
Read “Why Millennials Are All-In on All-Inclusive Resorts” here, and “The Next Big Thing in Luxury Travel: A Family Therapist” here.
Beeeeeep!
According to Town & Country, glucose monitors are the hottest summer accessory. They would know, we guess. Read “Sweet, Sweet Status” here.
For $125 Mil, You Can Call Us Whatever You Want
Five years ago—a year and a half before the Spread was born—Call Her Daddy’s Alex Cooper was struggling to pay the rent on a shared NYC walk-up. This year she signed a deal with Sirius XM for $125 million. We’ll be working through our feelings about that on vacation with our therapist. But the real star of Hulu’s Call Me Alex two-part doc is Cooper’s mom, Laurie, who has great taste in knits and eyewear, an unreformed Jersey accent, and who—as a school psychologist—took notes during her phone calls with her college-age daughter. That meant that when the family confronted the Boston University athletics department about sexual harassment by Cooper’s coach, guess who had THE RECEIPTS. Call her mama.
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Bennett writes: “The book had been sold in March 2024, but after the election, conversations between Carroll and her editor moved to Signal, page proofs were delivered by hand, and booksellers were required to sign NDAs. There was a nebulous fear of what the president might do: ‘This is Trump,’ Carroll’s publicist told me. ‘Your guess is as good as mine.’”
One rarified group did receive a preview of sorts: Spreaders who listened to the wide-ranging podcast interview we did with E. Jean last year!
The New Yorker is having a very Spready summer so far. Here are some stories we would have loved to cover if Condé Nast had just put us on the payroll like we asked! (There’s always next week, Nasties.)
“The History of Advice Columns Is a History of Eavesdropping and Judging,” by Merve Emre. A missed opportunity for another E. Jean ode, if you ask us! Read it here.
“How I Learned to Become an Intimacy Coordinator,” by Jennifer Wilson, who we really trust with a story that involves attending a sex-choreography workshop after her excellent investigation of tech’s breakup boom. Read it here.
“The Portland Bar That Screens Only Women’s Sports,” in which Hannah Goldfield embeds at the Sports Bra. Read it here.
“Why Did New Zealand Turn on Jacinda Ardern?” by Rachel Morris, a name we haven’t heard in a while…because—lucky for the New Yorker—she moved to New Zealand! Read it here.
Molly Fischer riffs on Mark Singer’s 1996 (Tina Brown-era) story “Mom Overboard!” about what happens when three women give up their high-flying careers to become SAHMs. Read it here.
Though the two of you have gone through your illustrious lives casting sunshine where ever you go......You never cast it like you did today, Rachel and Maggie!!!!
Love this Substack! Thx for keeping us informed and abreast. xoc