Grayson Clary lives and works in Washington, DC.
Grayson Clary
Advertisement
Writing on Public Books
Bond? James Bond?
Just as no prophet is recognized in his own country, James Bond always incarnates to cries that he is not James Bond. Sean Connery, in the view of Ian Fleming, was not Bond but rather “an overgrown stunt-man,” though Fleming would turn heel and revise Bond’s ancestry to match Connery’s. George Lazenby objected as Bond that he […]
Tsuris, FREEDOM, and Guantanamo Bay
Wherever secrecy abrades democracy, tragicomedy builds up. It’s cultural nacre: a way of processing with less pain the absurdist bent in national security. This May, Congress used a chunk of its working hours to debate renewing Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, a provision the Obama administration had interpreted to allow the bulk collection […]
The Particular Obligations of the Spy Writer
For the bleeding edge of American epistemology, I look to the Central Intelligence Agency. In that regard, the spy service’s response to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s “torture report,” which documents abuses associated with the CIA’s detention and interrogation program in the early 2000s, didn’t disappoint. Did torture work, by whatever wretched metric applies in the […]
