Welcome Back, SPY (Magazine) We Need You
courtesy of Esquire Magazine:
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a49305/kurt-andersen-spy-esquire/
Back in the late '80s and early '90s, SPY magazine pretty much had the American satirical-journalism field all to itself. Then came the full-blown Internet, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, mainstream journalists getting snarky, and everybody cracking wise on social media 24/7—some of which SPY prefigured and spawned and influenced. Over the years, people again and again have said to me, "Oh, you guys should bring back SPY." But I couldn't quite see a place for it in such a cluttered media landscape already so thick with so much satirical intent.
Then came the last year: the withdrawal of Stewart and Colbert from Comedy Central, the death of Gawker, the return of Hillary, and especially the rise of Donald Trump. SPY pioneered the exposure and ridicule of Trump back in its day, of course, always referring to him as "short-fingered vulgarian Donald Trump"— and in this campaign, astonishingly, that epithet (and the general tiny-hand critique) resurfaced in a big way. As Trump became the Republicans' presumptive nominee, lots more people, pretty much every day, said to me, "SPY really needs to be rebooted, if only just for the election."
I guess maybe they're right, so I'm very pleased that Esquire has decided to produce an online pop-up SPY during the last thirty days of the presidential campaign. It has my whole-hearted best wishes. And it's also a nice serendipity that this October will mark the magazine's thirtieth anniversary. It's as if SPY, a retired superhero, is making a brief but necessary comeback.
- Kurt Andersen (co-founder of SPY, with Graydon Carter)
And here is the full link to Esquire/SPY:
http://www.esquire.com/spy/
HAVE FUN!! I know I am.
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