During the Cold War, we had brilliant and popular spy thrillers like John Le Carré’s masterpieces to help explain our perilous and ever-changing world. Why didn’t the genre play a similar part during the war on terror? In this episode of Call Me Ishmael, Peter Theroux—former CIA agent, scion of one of America’s most celebrated literary families, and a leading translator of Arabic literature—addresses this question and discusses the evolution of the spy novel and the role it played in shaping American culture and politics.