diff --git a/Cargo.toml b/Cargo.toml
index 78dbaa168..d80d0b7cc 100644
--- a/Cargo.toml
+++ b/Cargo.toml
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 [package]
 name = "rayon"
-version = "0.8.0"
+version = "0.8.1"
 authors = ["Niko Matsakis <niko@alum.mit.edu>",
            "Josh Stone <cuviper@gmail.com>"]
 description = "Simple work-stealing parallelism for Rust"
@@ -13,7 +13,7 @@ members = ["rayon-demo", "rayon-core"]
 exclude = ["ci"]
 
 [dependencies]
-rayon-core = { version = "1.1", path = "rayon-core" }
+rayon-core = { version = "1.2", path = "rayon-core" }
 
 [dev-dependencies]
 compiletest_rs = "0.2.1"
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index 1e3c9f0a2..5fc9cc6dc 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -40,7 +40,7 @@ as:
 
 ```rust
 [dependencies]
-rayon = 0.8.0
+rayon = 0.8.1
 ```
 
 and then add the following to to your `lib.rs`:
diff --git a/RELEASES.md b/RELEASES.md
index 373b595a8..5ac5915ba 100644
--- a/RELEASES.md
+++ b/RELEASES.md
@@ -1,3 +1,32 @@
+# Release rayon 0.8.1 / rayon-core 1.2.0
+
+This is a "patch" release that aims to correct the situation with
+unstable features, in response to some breakage that we observed in
+the previous setup. This release simultaneously stabilizes a number of
+previously unstable APIs (thus committing to them) and also makes the
+use of the remaining unstable features more inconvenient (to avoid
+similar problems in the future).
+
+The following core APIs are being stabilized:
+
+- `rayon::spawn()` -- spawns a task into the Rayon threadpool; as it
+  is contained in the global scope (rather than a user-created
+  scope), the task cannot capture anything from the current stack
+  frame.
+- `ThreadPool::join()`, `ThreadPool::spawn()`, `ThreadPool::scope()`
+  -- convenience APIs for launching new work within a thread-pool. 
+
+The APIs related to futures-integration remain unstable, along with
+some other minor APIs. Unstable APIs are available for
+experimentation, but do not come with any promise of compatibility (in
+other words, we might change them in arbitrary ways in any
+release). Previously, we designated such APIs using a Cargo feature
+"unstable". Now, we are using a regular `#[cfg]` flag. This means that
+to see the unstable APIs, you must do `RUSTFLAGS='--cfg
+rayon_unstable' cargo build`. This is intentionally inconvenient; in
+particular, if you are a library, then your clients must also modify
+their environment, signaling their agreement to instability.
+
 # Release rayon 0.8.0 / rayon-core 1.1.0
 
 ## Rayon 0.8.0
diff --git a/rayon-core/Cargo.toml b/rayon-core/Cargo.toml
index 5ec7da063..4d46d545a 100644
--- a/rayon-core/Cargo.toml
+++ b/rayon-core/Cargo.toml
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 [package]
 name = "rayon-core"
-version = "1.1.0"
+version = "1.2.0"
 authors = ["Niko Matsakis <niko@alum.mit.edu>",
            "Josh Stone <cuviper@gmail.com>"]
 description = "Core APIs for Rayon"