Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter . In 2022, Sammy Loren published a fourteen-part short story in La Prensa , one of Mexico’s most-read tabloids. He had been living in Mexico City and developed a deep admiration for the country’s yellow press. Later, when he moved back home, to the United States, he reached out to American tabloids, hoping they, too, would want to publish his fiction. “But no one was interested,” he told me. So Loren decided to take matters into his own hands with On the Rag , a literary tabloid he described as a “gossip rag,” a “conceptual art project,” and an “earnest attempt” at a literary journal. (Rachel Kushner, Alexis Okeowo, and Hedi El Kholti are among the editorial directors.) The name, a vulgar reference to menstruation, came before anything else. “It of course has all the rich connotations of when it was a pejorative phrase, but I feel like saying someone is ‘on the rag’ as an insult has faded,” Loren said. Irony is central to his project.…