“You’re allowed to laugh.”

For those among us who have missed the eighties, from now until November 8th, Esquire magazine is hosting a special pop-up edition of SPY, that late-millennial stalwart of satirical journalism. Co-founder (and novelist) Kurt Andersen said he was moved to bring the magazine back because “lots more people, pretty much every day, said to me, ‘SPY really needs to be rebooted, if only just for the election.'”

If it’s election satire you want, we highly recommend our own Jacob Lambert‘s literary cagematch: Hemingway vs. Faulkner vs. Trump.

Citizen author Claudia Rankine spoke about racial tokenism in MFA workshops in her AWP keynote speech last week. As she puts it, “The white students aren’t being challenged to think harder about the assumptions they are making in workshop.”

Thanks to her new book, Lydia Davis is getting a lot of well-deserved attention, including an interview with Salon this week. In conversation with Brendan Matthews, she reflects on her “letters of complaint,” her habit of juggling multiple projects and the effects of translating Proust on writing emails.

Last week, I directed you to a piece in The Atlantic by John Yorke on the substance of stories. His argument: that all stories have one thing in common–their plot. Now, Lincoln Michel at Electric Literature suggests that rather it is all story structure models that have one thing in common–and that thing is bullshit.