Oh brave new world that has such links in it:

• Vahni Capildeo can lucid dream. If an earthquake struck your dream, you might die, you’d at least panic, but not Vahni Capildeo. She thinks, ‘This is a dream, if I choose to I can float’, and survives. In an interview with Eva Lacey, she describes the joys of her rich dream life and how its troubling power haunts her: ‘I felt within the narrative I didn’t deserve to have survived.’ Vahni Capildeo’s prowess as a dreamer is matched by her talent as a poet – she’s just won the Forward Prize for Best Collection of poetry with Measures of Expatriation, awarded last year to Claudia Rankine · Prac Crit

• Italo Calvino died thirty-one years ago this week. In a rare 1985 interview from his final year, the BBC spoke with the author of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller at his home in Tuscany – Calvino shows off the diagrams and graphs he makes in the margins of his manuscripts. ‘I don’t remember what I meant with these little drawings I did. Sometimes I get crazy when I’m writing, you see?’ · BBC

• Brexit, Trump, Putin. ‘We are living in a ‘post-fact’ world’, writes Peter Pomerantsev, blaming the post-modern notion that ‘the only thing you can know is your own mind’. Rebecca Solnit points the finger at our modern obsession with individual freedom and libertarianism: ‘yourself for yourself on your own’. Both make a compelling argument that reality is in trouble · Granta and Harper’s

• Andrew O’Hagan joins the flocks of journalists searching for the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the elusive inventor of bitcoin. ‘His identity was one of the great mysteries of the internet, and a holy grail of investigative reporting’. O’Hagan’s essay clocks in at 33,000 words, just shy of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness – but it’s worth the word count. And for everything you wanted to know about bitcoin but were too afraid to ask, turn to John Lanchester on how the radical new currency works · LRB

• In 2008 Martin Amis published a story in Granta titled ‘The Unknown Known’, a nod to Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous response to the revelation that there was no evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The satirical story follows a group of fundamentalists brainstorming ways to destroy the West. Amis’s unease about the subject is striking – the story remains unfinished, and in a postscript he defends his implicit criticism of Islam: ‘Islamism is a total system,’ he writes, ‘and like all such it is eerily amenable to satire’ · Granta