Bosses across the country are complaining into their coffee that “nobody wants to work anymore.” Baloney.

The talent is absolutely out there. They just aren’t applying to your boring job postings.

Let’s be real about what happens when you try to hire right now. You post a role, go to lunch and come back to a pile of 43 useless applications. Three of them live out of state and want relocation cash you don’t have. Ten don’t even have the required state license. The rest clearly just mindlessly tapped “Quick Apply” on their phones while sitting on the train.

Small businesses don’t have the profit margins to sift through hundreds of garbage resumes just to find one decent human being to interview. If you actually want to hire quality talent, you need to understand one word: Friction.

A good job post shouldn’t sound like a desperate plea for a date. It should act like a giant bouncer at the door. You want to scare the wrong people away, so you only waste breath on the heavy hitters.

According to ZipRecruiter data on recently hired workers, 80% of employers land a quality candidate within the first day of posting a job. The other 20% probably wrote a bad job description. 

Additionally, 46.7% of job seekers would feel more seen by employers if job descriptions were more detailed, according to ZipRecruiter’s Q1 job seeker confidence survey.

The Title: Stop Writing for the Org Chart

The first mistake happens before they even read the ad.

Stop writing job titles to stroke your own ego or match your internal HR spreadsheets. “Associate, Client Success Operations”? Nobody is typing that into a search bar. They are searching for “Account Manager.”

Small businesses love to pull this stunt to sound edgier than they really are. They post a gig for a “Marketing Ninja” or a “Sales Rockstar.” Listen, nobody is searching for ninjas on a Tuesday morning. If you get cute with the title, search algorithms are going to ignore you. Use normal words.

The Pay: Transparency is Your Best Candidate Filter

Should you post the salary? Yes. End of story.

ZipRecruiter data shows job posts that actually include a salary range get 50% more quality applications. There is an ancient boomer-era corporate myth that hiding the pay gives the boss the upper hand in negotiations. Not anymore.

Today, candidates scroll right past secretive listings. If you don’t list the pay, they assume you are cheap. In places like California and New York, pay transparency is literally the law now anyway. So if you are still writing “compensation commensurate with experience,” you aren’t a brilliant negotiator. You are falling behind the times.

If your salary range scares people off? Good. That is a massive reality check that your pay doesn’t work compared to the market. Take a second look at your budget. Don’t bury the numbers.

Johnson – stock.adobe.com

The Requirements: Why Laundry Lists Scare Off Top Talent

Pull up any job site and chances are you will see the same thing: a wall of bullet points, a paragraph about “company culture” and a list of requirements that reads as a cold, sterile collection of tasks run through ChatGPT. It checks boxes. It covers the company legally. It tells candidates only as much as they need to know.

That is a recipe for an inbox full of candidates who were never going to be a good fit.

A study by the Behavioural Insights Team surveyed more than 10,000 active job seekers and found that both men and women take requirements lists literally. Most people won’t apply if they don’t think they clear the bar. That is not a confidence problem. That is a phrasing problem.

When Harvard Business Review surveyed professionals about why they skipped a job they were otherwise interested in, the top answer was the same: “I didn’t think they would hire me since I didn’t meet the qualifications and I didn’t want to waste my time.”

If your list has 14 requirements when you actually only need six, your limiting the pool before they even get to the end of the post. Write requirements in two clear buckets: what someone needs on day one and what they can learn on the job. Keep the first list short and honest.

The Copy: Use the “Bouncer Method” to Repel Bad Fits

Most job descriptions are written defensively. They list everything the company needs protection from rather than painting a picture of what success in the role actually looks like.

Flip it. Your company culture might be fantastic, but who is going to know if your job descriptions are putting applicants to sleep? Stop asking for a “passionate self-starter.” Every single applicant claims to be one.

Instead, tell them what is going to make them want to pull their hair out in the first 30 days.

 According to the ZipRecruiter New Hires Survey, the top reasons employees regret taking a new job are unexpected, excessive workloads and difficult managers. If you are hiring for a role that regularly requires 50-hour weeks or reports to a notoriously demanding boss, do not hide it. If the software you use is from 2008 and crashes constantly, say so. If the job requires dealing with angry clients, put it right there in the ad. The whiners will run for the hills, but the thick-skinned problem solvers will actually lean in.

Lastly, include a “Who We Don’t Want” section. Tell them explicitly: “If you hate picking up the phone, do not apply.” You would appreciate knowing ahead of time, right? So will your applicants. You just saved yourself three hours of useless Zoom interviews next week.

Mojahid Mottakin – stock.adobe.com

The Distribution: Smart Tools to Help Employers Publish Job Ads

Posting on random free job boards and praying someone good shows up is a loser’s game. You are going to get buried by massive corporations with bottomless ad budgets. You need a scalpel, not a sledgehammer.

This is where a tool like ZipRecruiter really pulls its weight. You don’t have to start from scratch. It has templates that actually sound like a human being wrote them. More importantly, it doesn’t just sit there waiting for people to apply. It uses AI to actively scan millions of profiles, finds the people who actually match your brutal honest criteria and taps them to apply.

It actually learns what you like. You rate the candidates thumbs up or thumbs down and the algorithm gets smarter for the next batch. It is a recruiter who doesn’t sleep and doesn’t demand a 20% commission fee.

The Final Polish: Cut These Phrases Before You Hit Publish

Run every job description through this filter before you hit post:

• “We are a fast-paced environment.” Every company says this. Are you an Amish butter churning company? No. Cut it.
• “Must be a team player.” If you need to list it, it sounds a lot like something went wrong before.
• “Other duties as assigned.” This one is fine legally but it is a flag to experienced candidates. Be specific about the role’s scope.
• Any requirement with “5+ years” attached to a skill that didn’t exist 5 years ago. No one was a ChatGPT expert before the pandemic. That math doesn’t math.
• A mission statement longer than two sentences. Candidates don’t apply to mission statements. They apply to jobs. The company wants to make money and so do they.

A bad hire can be a walking nightmare that you have to pay every two weeks. Write a better ad, use better tools and start getting the best people in the door.

Pormezz – stock.adobe.com

FAQ: The Brutal Truth About Hiring Right Now

Should I list the negatives of a job in the posting?

Yes. You will get fewer total applicants, but the ones who apply won’t quit after three weeks when they find out what the job actually entails. Including the hard parts of the job acts as a natural filter, prioritizing candidate quality over sheer quantity.

How can small businesses attract candidates without offering top-of-market salaries?

You have to compensate somewhere else. Be honest about the pay, but sell the flexibility, the lack of corporate red tape, or the fact that you let people work from home three days a week. You cannot offer low pay and a rigid, miserable environment. Pick a struggle.

Should I require a college degree in my job description?

No, unless the profession legally requires one. The market has shifted heavily toward skills-based hiring, and clinging to mandatory degree requirements just artificially shrinks your talent pool.

According to ZipRecruiter’s New Hires Survey, over 51% of recent hires said their employer prioritized practical skills and experience, while only a measly 6% felt formal education was the top consideration. Test for the skills they actually need on day one instead of paying a premium for a piece of paper.

Can employers post jobs for free online?

Yes, some platforms offer free job postings with limited visibility, but they are rarely effective. Most free listings get buried quickly by paying competitors. If the role is hard to fill, free posts rarely generate enough high-quality applicants to justify the time spent managing them.

Are paid job boards like ZipRecruiter worth the cost?

Yes, if you value your time. You can use free sites if you want to hire someone whose primary skill is browsing Craigslist at 2 a.m., but you get what you pay for. Platforms like ZipRecruiter are the best tools to help employers write and publish job ads because they use active AI matching to find candidates, rather than waiting for them to find you. (If you are terrified of the upfront cost, use their free trial to test the tech first).

The post How to write a job description to attract top talent appeared first on Our Story Insight.

May 20, 2025, 11:16am

Today, a Bluesky user shared a photograph of what appears to be a summer reading insert published in this Sunday’s edition of the Chicago Sun-Times. The feature looks normal enough, until you actually read it and discover that only five of the fifteen books recommended by this supposedly legitimate newspaper “to deliver the perfect summer escape” are actually, um, real.

Image via ‪@rachaelking70.bsky.social‬, original credit @tbretc.bsky.social

The first ten books on this list are imaginary. The authors might be real, but the titles and descriptions are not. Needless to say, these are not mistakes that a human would make. It’s obvious that this list is AI slop. The only real question is, how did it get published?

The Chicago Sun-Times responded with versions of the same statement on multiple platforms: “We are looking into how this made it into print as we speak. It is not editorial content and was not created by, or approved by, the Sun-Times newsroom. We value your trust in our reporting and take this very seriously. More info will be provided soon.”

This is pretty disheartening, especially for “the hardest-working paper in America.” There are a lot of hard-working writers out there who would be thrilled to recommend fifteen actual books for summer reading, and even more hard-working readers who don’t deserve to be cheated like this.

For the record, Literary Hub’s summer reading list will be 100% AI-free, now and forever. Keep an eye out for it next week.

Update: 404 Media’s Jason Koebler reports that the listicle was “written” by Marco Buscaglia, who admits he used AI to generate it. “I do use AI for background at times but always check out the material first,” he told 404. “This time, I did not and I can’t believe I missed it because it’s so obvious. No excuses… On me 100 percent and I’m completely embarrassed.”

404 also found other evidence of AI usage in the section, which was mostly written by Buscaglia, and which appears to have been syndicated in multiple markets.

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The post Looks like The Chicago Sun-Times used AI to write a reading list—and wound up with slop. ‹ appeared first on Our Story Insight.

Terry Brooks published the first book in the epic fantasy series Shannara in 1977. After writing dozens of bestselling titles and selling more than 25 million copies of his books, he announced at Emerald City Comic Con 2025 that he is retiring from writing.

At the Comic Con panel, Terry Brooks explained he spent a year “fiddling around with a manuscript that never went anywhere,” and that’s when he decided to hand the reins of his beloved fantasy series over to another writer. Delilah S. Dawson, who was in the audience of the panel, will take over writing the Shannara series. Dawson is the author of Kill the Farm Boy, The Violence, Bloom, and many others, including Star Wars novels. She was also born in 1977, the same year the Shannara series began.

After this announcement, Brooks said that while most handovers of series happen after an author’s death, he would like to see where it goes after he puts down the pen. He has worked well with Dawson in the past and added that she has the chutzpah to take on the challenge—to which Dawson replied, “Wait, you’re going to be troublesome with this?”

The post Terry Brooks is Retiring from Writing, Delilah S. Dawson Will Write Shannara appeared first on Our Story Insight.

Q: What surrounds the Earth?
A: The Atmosphere; composed of air, vapor, and other gases.
Q: How far from the Earth does the atmosphere extend?
A: About 45 miles.
Q: What can you say of the Air?
A: It is thinner or less dense the further it is from the Earth.
Q: When water dries up where does it go?
A: It rises into the air.
Q: How can water rise into the air?
A: It is turned to vapor, and then it is lighter than the air.
Q: When vapors rise and become condensed, what are they called?
A: Clouds.

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–­from “Lesson XIX” of James Monteith’s Manual of Geography, Combined with History and Astronomy (revised edition, 1868)

*

A brown book, foxed and broken-­spined, the leather back of the binding almost gone. Maybe a teacher used it; maybe some students passed it around. The rear cover notes that it’s one of the National Geographical Series and that “These books have been used with great success in Schools of every State in the Union, and their circulation is constantly increasing.”

Look at any page of this book long enough—­say, the little woodcut on page thirty-nine, featuring a tall ship, a mighty whale, men exploded from their narrow boat and suspended above the waves, captioned WHALE FISHING IN THE NORTHERN SEAS—­WHALERS OF MASSACHUSETTS—­PERILS OF WHALING—ICEBERGS—­and a whole world opens up. Characters appear. Lives suggest themselves.

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How that happens, both to me and to other writers, is what I mean to talk about here. Not a history of one writer (me), but some thoughts about how and why any writer (including me) might make fiction from such scraps of history as that worn brown book.

I often write fiction set in times and places other than my own: fiction rooted in facts, the facts shaped by story and character. Partly that’s because I have a scholar’s interest in science and history without the corresponding intellectual stamina and skill; as a young woman, I went briefly to graduate school first in zoology and then in history but was quickly appalled by the actual work required and dismayed by my dislike of the methods.

Partly it’s a matter of temperament; I don’t like writing about myself, and although beautiful books have been made by writers drawing exclusively on autobiographical material, a first novel touching on family stories taught me that this wasn’t my path. Where, then, was I to look for material?

I don’t like writing about myself, and although beautiful books have been made by writers drawing exclusively on autobiographical material, a first novel touching on family stories taught me that this wasn’t my path. Where, then, was I to look for material?

Last spring I watched a phoebe try to build a nest on a half-­inch ledge over my front door. All my husband and I noticed at first was a smear of mud on top of the ledge and scraps of wet vegetation littering the porch. Twice I threw the bits away.

Finally we realized that a bird (a phoebe, we learned from her call) was ferrying over those strands of moss and lichen and trying to glue them with spit and mud on a spot far too small to support them. When my husband nailed a scrap of shingle to the ledge, a compact mud nest lined with threads of grass, moss, hair, fur, and feathers appeared the next day. Three nestlings soon followed.

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No part of this sight, or of what I read to understand what was happening, would have seemed like promising material for fiction when I was young. Then it did: the biggest change in my writing life.

Over the course of my first few novels, I learned to reach outward, into the enormous richness of the world, and also backward, into the past beneath our present. Happily, the materials of history, art, science, medicine, and the natural world—­the things that most intrigue me—­are endless, as are the stacks of books and drifts of paper piled in used bookstores, libraries, attics, archives, everywhere.

Monteith’s Manual of Geography, for one, which was given to me by a dear friend. Or the book, so delightfully titled The Forms of Water in Clouds and Rivers, Ice and Glaciers, that slipped from a bookstore shelf as I reached for something else, and later lit the way for a novel.

Still, even as I reached deeper into the past and began, with Ship Fever, to write stories set wholly in times and places I hadn’t inhabited, I didn’t think of myself as writing “historical fiction.”

That label meant, for me, the huge volumes I’d read as a girl, galloping through wild and melodramatic plots while convinced that I was also learning some history. During the summer when I was thirteen, I needed that diversion especially badly. Confined by my own bad behavior and a new family situation to a shady room in an unfamiliar house, waiting to start high school in a new town, I had nothing to do but read.

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The room looked out onto a marsh, delineated from the yard by a white retaining wall. Beyond the wall was the world I couldn’t enter. The pale celadon bookshelves framing the windows offered the world I could.

My family weren’t readers, but the house’s previous owners must have been, as they left behind an array of books, mostly novels, many Book-­of-­the-­Month Club or Literary Guild editions. Mostly—­how curious this seems, in retrospect—­historical fiction. It’s possible I read all of them.

Leon Uris’s Mila 18 (1961), for example, which for decades would be almost all I’d know about the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Uris’ Exodus (1958), about the founding of Israel (ditto). Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy (1961), about Michelangelo, and his Lust for Life (1934), about van Gogh. I read Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth (1931), about life in a Chinese village; Anya Seton’s Katherine (1954), about John of Gaunt’s lover, who was also Geoffrey Chaucer’s sister-in-­law—­and more, so many more.

A lot was trash, some wasn’t—­Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter (1920–­22), depicting medieval Norwegian life, was there as well—­but I’m not sure I could tell the difference then. I’m quite sure I didn’t sense the political attitudes, cultural prejudices, and judgments about characters I was unconsciously absorbing. Later, I’d have to unlearn a great deal.

But that early immersion must have given me a sense that fiction set in the past was possible, even if it didn’t give me models of what I’d most need decades later. Maybe it helped teach me what I didn’t want to write? In the early 1990s, when I first started writing fiction set in the past, I couldn’t find many examples of what, for lack of a better name, I’ll call “literary historical fiction.”

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Mostly I found heaps of books like those I’d found on the pale-­green shelves—­fat action-­filled novels about the First and Second World Wars, the American Civil War, the French Revolution, other wars—­mingled with costume dramas and historical romances. None suggested what I longed to write.

Friends eventually steered me toward some helpful inspirations. Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), of course. A clutch of British books: Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World (1986), Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Beginning of Spring (1988) and The Gate of Angels (1990), Pat Barker’s Regeneration (1991), and A.S. Byatt’s Possession (1990).

French writer Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian (1951) dazzled me, as did Australian David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life (1978) and Remembering Babylon (1993). Canadian Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion (1987) led me to From Ink Lake: Canadian Stories (1990): stories chosen by Ondaatje, many set in the past, by Alistair MacLeod, Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Timothy Findley, and others then unfamiliar to me. Further work by each of those writers would in turn guide me, especially the great beacon of Alice Munro’s Open Secrets (1994).

So I set off on my own little path, which after thirty years has braided with many others to become a rich tapestry. Wonderful fictions set in the past abound, now; work quite different, written with different intentions, than the books from the celadon shelves.

One tiny sample from my own shelves: Shirley Hazzard’s The Great Fire (2003), Edward P. Jones’ The Known World (2003), Colm Tóibín’s The Master (2004), Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin (2009), Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic (2011), Paul Yoon’s Snow Hunters (2013), Damon Galgut’s Arctic Summer (2014), Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys (2019), Lauren Groff’s Matrix (2021), and Yiyun Li’s The Book of Goose (2022). You could make a different, equally sparkling list in a minute.

Why wouldn’t we suspect that, if every generation needs to rewrite history, we also need to reimagine our historical fiction?

Just in 2023 you could spin between the visions of Zadie Smith’s The Fraud, set in nineteenth-­century England and Jamaica, Jesmyn Ward’s Let Us Descend, set in the pre–­Civil War American South, Tan Twan Eng’s The House of Doors, set in Malaysia during the 1920s, and Alice McDermott’s Absolution, set in Saigon during the Vietnam War—­a banquet hard to imagine a few decades ago.

In her essay in The New Yorker titled “On Killing Charles Dickens,” Smith, an outstanding critic as well as a novelist, claimed to have long disliked historical fiction and wrote that for some years she’d “retained a prejudice against the form, dating back to student days, when we were inclined to think of historical novels as aesthetically and politically conservative by definition.”

Later, converted by several brilliant examples (including the same Memoirs of Hadrian I’d found so staggering), she realized that historical fiction offered rich possibilities for new perspectives and could do more than “cosplay its era.”

Why wouldn’t we suspect that, if every generation needs to rewrite history, we also need to reimagine our historical fiction? Forgotten voices, documents lost or destroyed or ignored, entire fields of experience scanted, peoples and cultures misrepresented or not represented at all—­so much to write about, so much to explore!

And so many ways to do it. A fresh way of rendering the past offers as much news as the most contemporary portrait—and can be equally radical in its intentions, form, and language, jolting one to think about all the forms of narrative delving into the materials of the past.

______________________________

Excerpted from Dust and Light: On the Art of Fact in Fiction. Copyright (c) 2025 by Andrea Barrett. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

The post Andrea Barrett on Learning to Write Fresh Historical Fiction ‹ appeared first on Our Story Insight.

February 21, 2025, 10:21am

Photo by Mindy Tucker

Telling a good, smart joke about immigration is hard. Not only is it a fraught and complicated topic, but it’s a space that’s overstuffed with bad, right-wing attempts at comedy. Too often immigrants are the targets of mean-spirited jokes by hacks — as comedy writer Felipe Torres Medina told me, “a lot of jerks are already making fun of these incredibly brave people and most of them have jobs in the current administration.”

Felipe should know, as an expert in both joke writing and American immigration. The Colombian writer has been working in comedy for years, widely publishing short humor before landing a job at The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Next month he has a new book coming out, which tackles head-on the labyrinthian process of becoming American.

America, Let Me In: A Choose Your Own Immigration Story is a satirical and at times serious look at the US immigration system. The book’s choose-your-own-adventure elements involve exploring “a multitude of possible immigration stories,” guided by the reader’s choices: are you a model? Do you have an EB-5 Investor Visa? Do you know who The Smiths are? Some of the fictional outcomes are silly, some are poignant, and some are drawn from Felipe’s own experiences.

The book is also a lot more informative than I would have guessed, something that comes from the pressure for immigrants to have an “encyclopedic knowledge of the immigration system to know what your options are,” as Felipe put it. Amongst the humor, there’s a lot about specific immigration forms, processes and terms — the glossary in the back has some of my favorite jokes in the book.

I talked to Felipe over email about his forthcoming book, his literary inspirations, and what it’s like to write comedy right now.

The interview has been trimmed from our original conversations for clarity and length.

Tell me about the origin of America Let Me In — when did you first start thinking about the idea that would become the book?

I got the idea for the book sometime in 2017. I moved to the U.S. in 2013 for school and by the time I had this idea, I had already navigated getting or attempting to get three or four kinds of visas. When you’re an immigrant and you’re trying to remain in the country and you’re neurotic like me, you have to acquire this sort of encyclopedic knowledge of the immigration system to know what your options are.

2017 was a very strange time for immigrants because Trump had so obviously made immigration the key to his campaign and people had, after eight years of Obama where liberals mostly ignored the subject, come to learn that it is 1. a huge issue, and 2. full of contradictions. It was a period of time where I found myself explaining to all my American friends just how hard and expensive it is to move here “the right way.”

So, in a mix of frustration and inspiration I decided to try to write a how-to guide about immigration but actually make it funny.

I’m not sure a lot of people look at the American immigration system and think “comedy goldmine” — were there moments from your own immigration that struck you as funny or sparked your comedy brain?

Yes! The immigration system is so chaotic and insane that it is inherently funny. For example, because I am Colombian, before I even moved here, my family and I had to apply for a tourist visa as a teen to come to the U.S. because we wanted to go to Disney World. When you’re filling out the online questionnaire that starts your application (you later have to go to an in-person interview at the embassy) the questions can range from “What’s your name?” and “What’s your address?” to “Have you ever been a part of a terrorist organization?” and “Have you ever participated in genocide?”

The tonal shift is funny in and of itself, but I remember as a teen growing up in the middle of the Iraq War and the War on Terror, picturing the members of ISIS or Al Qaeda filling out the form to try and enter the U.S. to do some terror attacks and being like “Ope! They asked the question if we’re terrorists. Guess we gotta answer honestly! Agh, we were so close!”

There are a lot of layers in this book: there’s obviously tons of comedy, but there’s also some stuff that feels pulled from your own life, as well as some grounded and not-fully-tongue-in-cheek explainers about our immigration system. How did you balance humor, memoir, and explanation?

My main goal was to always write a funny book. That was going to be the thing that would make this book actually enjoyable to me and, I think, to the reader. The immigration system needed explaining, but I knew I had to make it funny because otherwise talking about immigration is at best dreadfully boring and at worst depressing/rage-inducing.

I also knew from the beginning I didn’t want to write a memoir because I have huge respect for the genre and very little respect for my life’s story. I just don’t think I’m that interesting. I’m not Carrie Fisher or Prince Harry. Like, those are people who’ve had interesting lives. I, for the most part, tried to move to America and succeeded. That’s it.

That said, once I realized I was going to tell a lot of stories about immigration, I understood that telling mine would be important because there were many humorous things that happened to me in my journey.

Why a choose your own adventure? Did you read those books as a kid?

I did! I grew up in Bogotá, Colombia, but my school had a great library stocked up with a lot of books in English. We had two Choose Your Own Adventure books for a whole class of 103 students, so it was always a battle to get them. I remember liking them, but not enjoying a book that killed me within a few pages. So while I played with them, I think I very quickly got over them and went back to my Tintin books.

However, the format came back to my life in my last year of high school when I read Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela (Hopscotch in English.) In that book, Cortázar encourages the reader to read in an order jumping between passages and parts of the book as you would when playing hopscotch. I was a Latin American kid deeply immersed in the literature of the Latin American Boom writers and reading this was one of those “Oh wow, I didn’t know that you could do this!” moments you have as an artist.

What were some of your inspirations working on this book? What other books or authors did you have close to mind while writing?

When I write I imagine all the great writers that have come before me. I imagine flipping William Shakespeare off and saying, “You couldn’t do this, baldy,” as I drive past him in the convertible I bought with my royalties money.

Seriously, great humorous writers were always my inspiration for this. My comedic education came by way of Simon Rich and great contemporary satire writers like Alexandra Petri, but I am also a huge fan of Vonnegut and George Saunders who are able to—much more successfully than I could aspire to—blend humor with pathos and talk about “serious” issues in texts that are laugh-out-loud funny. I also don’t think I would’ve started reading and writing humor if it weren’t for Tina Fey’s Bossypants, The Daily Show’s America: The Book, and Stephen Colbert’s I Am America (And So Can You!).

As I read and researched the book, I also read Georges Perec’s The Art of Asking Your Boss for A Raise and Ellis Island and some Latin American writers who worked around multiple paths and choices like the aforementioned Rayuela by Cortázar and the works in Borges’ Ficciones, specifically stories like “The Garden of Forking Paths” and “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” which is very funny.

As I struggled with finding some sort of conclusion to this book in the wake of the 2024 election (which was just about starting when I finished my manuscript) I found it very useful to read David Mitchell’s Unruly, which is a history of British kings. I love Mitchell and his work from his sketch shows, his sitcoms, to his columns on The Guardian, and while I read this book as a little treat to myself (History??? Written by a comedian I love??? Papa like!) I ended up really enjoying the introduction and conclusion to the book. I liked the parts in between too! But reading that really helped me ask myself why I believed moving to America was an endeavor worth pursuing.

It is very Samuel Adams of me that it took a Brit’s perspective on English kings to make me be able to elucidate why the United States is an experiment worth fighting for.

I know you’re originally from Bogotá, and I’m curious what funny writing you grew up with. What is the Spanish language prose comedy world like?

The Spanish-speaking world is immense and as such the comedy culture in each country is different. Sadly, humor writing and comedy in Colombia is not great. There was one great satirist in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, named Jaime Garzón. I remember my dad watching him every week as he lampooned politicians and celebrities, and I tried to do the same as a kid. Sadly, he flew too close to the sun in a country that was, at the time, plagued with political violence and a deadly drug trade fueled by Americans’ unending appetite for cocaine, and was murdered by a right-wing death squad.

My dad also showed me an incredible, hilarious Argentine musical comedy troupe called Les Luthiers, who I can best call the Latin American Monty Python. They are incredibly formative for me and for many Latin Americans.

I don’t want to spoil anything, but toward the end of the book, there’s a moment where you draw a line and say that there are some things that you don’t want to make light of. In general, is the line between what you want to joke about and what you don’t pretty firm? Or is it more contingent?

I don’t like to draw huge lines in the sand about what can and cannot be funny. I think that is counterproductive, but as I say in the book, I think the stories of migrants who come here walking through the jungles and deserts of ten or more countries aren’t really comedy fodder. A lot of jerks are already making fun of these incredibly brave people and most of them have jobs in the current administration. I think those stories are important and should be told, but the tone of the book would not do the stories justice.

You were working on this book during some—to put it lightly—big years for the immigration debate in this country. Did the book, or the way you thought about the book, shift as you were writing?

The reason I wanted to write this book is because I feel like people talk about immigration but have no idea what they’re talking about. So the book wouldn’t exist if immigration weren’t a huge debate in this country. If Obama had successfully passed DACA, if Congress under any administration had any real intention of creating comprehensive immigration reform, immigration probably would not have been the subject of my first book.

That said, I would rather the book be unimportant or passé or even non-existent if it meant the lives of immigrants were easier than it is right now.

When you’re working on something topical, whether it be for TV, or for McSweeney’s, or for your book, who do you imagine as your ideal audience? What do you hope people take away from your satire?

I try to write things that will make me laugh. That is always the first directive. I don’t think I really try to look for an audience for satirical humor. However, the ideal audience for my book is a very rich person who will like it so much, they will buy millions of copies of it.

How does it feel to be an American, an immigrant, and a comedy writer these days? How are you doing?

I’ll get back to you when I am an American. I don’t have U.S. citizenship yet; I am merely a permanent resident. That means I have a green card, which is better than a visa. I know these terms are confusing, but if you want to understand all of this, I have a great book for you.

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