Hello again readers: I know some of you are braving extreme cold, and others getting soaked, so I hope you are staying warm indoors. I’ve been watching season 2 of Slow Horses on Apple+, a very old-school spy thriller which, like the books on which it is based, is almost anachronistic. How much we still long for the Cold War in popular culture! We built an entire genre around Le Carré stories of meetings in dingy alleyways with KGB informants. Today’s spy stories still either focus on holdovers from that period (aging spies), or are set in the past to recreate it.