# What You Can Learn from a Great Spy Novel

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/firewall-with-bradley-tusk-7228/what-you-can-learn-from-a-great-spy-novel
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/firewall-with-bradley-tusk-7228/what-you-can-learn-from-a-great-spy-novel.md
Podcast: [Firewall with Bradley Tusk](https://stenobird.com/podcast/firewall-with-bradley-tusk-7228)
Published: 2026-08-13T09:00:00+00:00
Episode link: http://firewall.media
Audio file: https://episodes.captivate.fm/episode/1fdea550-f7a7-48aa-a876-587ec9f97907.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/firewall-with-bradley-tusk-7228/episodes/what-you-can-learn-from-a-great-spy-novel
Duration seconds: 2243

## Resource

Bradley talks to Michael Idov, author of The Cormorant Hunt , about how his own life — coming to the US from Latvia at age 16, running a café on the Lower East Side into the ground, getting discovered by Nora Ephron and moving to Moscow as editor of GQ Russia — feeds his fiction, as well as the passage from his novel that turned Bradley into a superfan: "The left-right distinction, he kept having to remind himself, no longer applied. The only existential standoff now was between the people who wanted to replace institutions with better institutions and the people who wanted to replace institutions with themselves." This episode was taped at P&T Knitwear at 180 Orchard Street — New York City’s only free podcast recording studio. Send us an email with your thoughts on today’s episode: info@firewall.media . Subscribe to Bradley's weekly newsletter and follow Bradley on Linkedin + Substack .

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## Transcript

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