Longreads

In 2008, Katherine Eban became a contributing editor at Condé Nast's Portfolio magazine. With about 12 years of experience as a journalist -- a few years on staff at The New York Times, a bit…

On Father’s Day three years ago, biologist Jonathan Eisen decided he’d like to republish all his father’s papers. His father, Howard Eisen, a biologist and a researcher at the National Institutes of Health, had published 40-some-odd papers by the time that he died by suicide at age 45.

Spy novels embrace clichés—the double agent, the bomb-rigged briefcase—and “Assassin of Secrets,” published last fall, made a virtue of this tendency, piling one trope…