Recent reading

[troisoiseaux]

Read The Sisterhood: The Secret History of Women at the CIA by Liza Mundy, per this year's trend of nonfiction books about spies. Overall, it was more focused on the CIA as a workplace - and the individual stories of women who worked there - than the CIA as an institutional actor, although the balance tipped in a couple of chapters, e.g., grappling with the CIA's post-9/11 actions. Super interesting read, if sometimes a pretty depressing one— turns out that systemically sidelining and downplaying/disregarding the contributions of a solid percentage of your workforce because sexism can have significant consequences when their job is to, say, track international security threats. :/

(Tangentially related fun fact, though: Liza Mundy is married to Bill Nye the Science Guy, who she met after writing about his mother - a codebreaker during WWII - in her previous book, Code Girls.)