Spy magazine has made a glorious but limited return to cover the election. Spy co-founder Kurt Andersen announced today that the magazine has returned as an online pop-up publication, which will run from today until Election Day and cover the presidential race over at Esquire. Here’s what Andersen said about the decision to bring back Spy:
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.
Check out the Spy pop-up for yourself here, and read more about the magazine with our deep dive into its archives here.
