“As we grow more reliant on applications and algorithms, we become less capable of acting without their aid.”
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Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
The Things In Our Diaries: A Reading List
Age 7: Dear Diary, Today I went to Clarisse’s house. It was fun. Age 13: Dear Diary, We are leaving for Mom-mom’s funeral soon. Mom and Dad are fighting and THE WORLD IS FALLING OVER. Age 23 [written on this laptop, not my Moleskine]: I am fulfilling my daydream of feeling like a Privileged Artist […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Ana Montes: The Most Important Spy You’ve Never Heard Of
How a U.S. intelligence analyst ended up spying for Cuba for 17 years—all while surrounded by family members who also worked for the FBI: “Montes must have seemed a godsend. She was a leftist with a soft spot for bullied nations. She was bilingual and had dazzled her DOJ supervisors with her ambition and smarts. […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
From Student to Spy, And Back Again
An American community college student who converted to Islam before 9/11 emails the CIA and volunteers himself as a spy: “At the time of his email, intelligence agencies were eager to exploit an opportunity presented by the capture of John Walker Lindh, a U.S. citizen who had converted to Islam and gone abroad to join […]
Posted inUncategorized
Resurfaced: Peter Perl’s ‘The Spy Who’s Been Left in the Cold’ (1998)
We’re excited to introduce this new recurring series, in which we work with publishers to dig up notable stories from their archives that were previously unpublished on the web. We’re especially excited to kick this off with The Washington Post. Today’s piece is “The Spy Who’s Been Left in the Cold,” a 1998 Washington Post […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Confessions of a Corporate Spy
[Not single-page] A competitive intelligence consultant on how he acquires information about competitors for various companies: “As the sales manager and I surfed Talbots’s website together, looking for the green mini my wife saw on the website earlier that day, I mentioned offhand that I had just graduated from business school. I talked about how […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Spy Novelist Who Knows Too Much
On the work of Gérard de Villiers, an 83-year-old French writer whose pulpy S.A.S. books have turned out to be eerily accurate: “The books are strange hybrids: top-selling pulp-fiction vehicles that also serve as intelligence drop boxes for spy agencies around the world. De Villiers has spent most of his life cultivating spies and diplomats, […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Inside the Greatest Writers Room You’ve Never Heard Of
Scovell, a former writer for Spy magazine, joins a group of up-and-coming writers to work on a Fox late-night show called The Wilton North Report: “In October 1987, I was offered a job on a new, late-night variety talk show and, without thinking twice, I relocated from New York City to Hollywood, where the sunshine […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Inconvenient Astrologer Of MI5
The story of an astrologer who claimed in a 1941 keynote address that the stars indicated Hitler would invade the United States from Brazil and eventually be defeated. The astrologer, Louis de Wohl, was actually an agent for the British government: “What no one realized was that de Wohl’s lecture was pure propaganda from the […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
CIA Divorces: The Secrecy When Spies Split
When your wedding doubles as a covert operation. A look at the complications of CIA marriages, and how secrets often lead to separation: “The Fredericksburg woman divorcing her husband laid out all the messy details, including the most secret of them all. Her husband, she wrote in now-sealed court documents, is a covert operations officer […]
