Sarah Lyall, in the Times:

Briefly, he led a triple life: diplomat, spy, novelist, writing his first book, “Call for the Dead” (1961), in longhand in red notebooks. The story of the unveiling of an East German spy operation, it was notable mostly for the introduction of Smiley and his faithless wife, Ann. (Ann was the name of Mr. le Carré’s wife at the time, though when they divorced, in 1971, it seems to have been his infidelity that was a problem, not hers).

Forbidden by his employers to write under his own name, the author fixed on “John le Carré.” Over the years he gave various explanations for it, finally admitting that he could not remember which, if any, were true.

“The Spy Who Came in From the Cold,” the author’s third novel, was published to instant acclaim and worldwide best-sellerdom. It was a shock of a book. Its hero, Alec Leamas, is a worn-out spy sent down a rabbit hole of deception, betrayal and personal tragedy in a mission that he thinks is one thing but that is really another. To readers used to tidy fantasy endings, the book’s conclusion is like a blow to the head.

A singular life, to be sure — it would be hard to argue against le Carré as a definitive chronicler of how the world sorted out after the end of the second World War. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is a perfect novel, I need to make an effort to read some of his later work.

James Fallows has written a framework for how to stabilize the government once Biden takes office.

Trump undermined legal standards through a willing-accomplice attorney general and through the systematic removal of inspectors general, whose common fault was that they initiated investigations of Trump himself or of Trump appointees inside their departments. Biden’s response should be to repair the structure of checks and balances, and then let it do its work. His most important appointment may be a new attorney general, chosen to embody the very principles that Barr, who served in essence as Trump’s personal lawyer and adjunct campaign manager, traduced.

In the early 1960s, it was common to think, “We are building a new computer, so we need a new programming language.”

Nice piece of history reporting from Ars Technica, pairs well with last year’s history of Unix.

What a wonderful piece of Bret Victor-esque interactive storytelling by Bartosz Ciechanowski. I’m a long-time camera nerd and decidedly pro-am photographer — my undergraduate degree is visual journalism and I once thought I’d be an actual professional photog one day — and I learned so much from this.

I seriously can not say enough great things about how delightful this is — every link and interactive widget is just a joy to play with and invites new opportunities for discovery even if you have a solid understanding of how photography works. It works particularly well on an iPad where you can manipulate the explainers with multitouch.

Sarah Zhang, writing in The Atlantic, about the ensuing confusion coming as the vaccine rolls out over the next six months. Given how badly the Trump government has botched managing the pandemic and politicized even basic understanding, I’m not optimistic about how people are going to react once there’s a divide between people who’ve been vaccinated and people who haven’t. This is a helpful and clear-eyed assessment, though.

Brian Feldman explains what’s wrong with Cyberpunk 2077.

Another historic headline: the Supreme Court has rejected the absurd lawsuit by the state of Texas that was attempting to overturn the election results in battleground states Trump lost.

Adam Liptak, writing for The New York Times:

The court, in a brief unsigned order, said Texas lacked standing to pursue the case, saying it “has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another state conducts its elections.”

The order, coupled with another one on Tuesday turning away a similar request from Pennsylvania Republicans, signaled that a conservative court with three justices appointed by Mr. Trump refused to be drawn into the extraordinary effort by the president and many prominent members of his party to deny his Democratic opponent, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., his victory.

The best response to the frankly insane lawsuit from Texas came, naturally, from Pennsylvania, who correctly accused Texas of sedition:

In a series of briefs filed Thursday, the four states that Texas sought to sue condemned the effort. “The court should not abide this seditious abuse of the judicial process, and should send a clear and unmistakable signal that such abuse must never be replicated,” a brief for Pennsylvania said.

Allen West, a single term congressman who once tortured an Iraqi detainee and is now, of course, the chair of the Texas GOP, issued a statement¹ that ended with what can only be read as a move from sedition to a call for actual secession: “Perhaps law-abiding states should bond together and form a Union of states that will abide by the constitution”.

All of the idiotic, Trumpian theatrics aside, it’s useful to remember that this extralegal bullshit failed because the election wasn’t close. Twenty years ago, a much less brazen GOP, with a slimmer Supreme Court majority and less polarized cultural environment, was able to overturn the presidential election. It’s hard to celebrate this as a victory.

Helen Branswell, writing for Stat:

The Food and Drug Administration on Friday issued an emergency authorization for a Covid-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer and its German partner, BioNTech, a seminal moment in the effort to curb a pandemic that has so far infected an estimated 16 million people and killed nearly 300,000 in the United States.

This historic decision, which came pretty quietly on a Friday night, means vaccinations will now begin in a few days. There’s still so much work to do, and months of difficulty and continuing to remain vigilant ahead, but what an incredible accomplishment.

Charles Duhigg, writing for The New Yorker, with as damning a portrait of contemporary VC culture as I’ve seen. The entire piece is masterly crafted, using the failure of WeWork as a lens on the rot at the heart of tech and finance today. A few choice quotes:

V.C.s seem like these quiet, boring guys who are good at math, encourage you to dream big, and have private planes. You know who else is quiet, good at math, and has private planes? Drug cartels.

Turns out the VCs aren’t even good at math.

On being “founder friendly”:

Particularly in Silicon Valley, founders often want venture capitalists who promise not to interfere or to ask too many questions. V.C.s have started boasting that they are “founder-friendly” and uninterested in, say, spending an afternoon a week at a company’s offices or second-guessing a young C.E.O. Josh Lerner, a professor at Harvard Business School, told me, “Proclaiming founder loyalty is kind of expected now.” One of the bigger V.C. firms, the Founders Fund, which has more than six billion dollars under management, declares on its Web site that it “has never removed a single founder” and that, when it finds entrepreneurs with “audacious vision,” “a near-messianic attitude,” and “wild-eyed passion,” it essentially seeks to give them veto-proof authority over the board of directors, so that an entrepreneur need never worry about being reined in, let alone fired.

Whereas venture capitalists like Tom Perkins once prided themselves on installing good governance and closely monitoring companies, V.C.s today are more likely to encourage entrepreneurs’ undisciplined eccentricities. Masayoshi Son, the SoftBank venture capitalist who promised WeWork $4.4 billion after less than twenty minutes, embodies this approach. In 2016, he began raising a hundred-billion-dollar Vision Fund, the largest pool of money ever devoted to venture-capital investment. “Masa decided to deliberately inject cocaine into the bloodstream of these young companies,” a former SoftBank senior executive said.

What one exec called “willful ignorance” is probably better classified as criminal neglect:

Many WeWork executives suspected that the S-1 might cause problems when it became public, but they didn’t say anything, because “there was this massive pot of gold just over the horizon,” one former executive told me. “Basically, we chose willful ignorance and greed over admitting this was obviously batshit crazy.

“And you know what? If it had worked, and we had gotten rich, then everyone in tech and Wall Street would be saying that Adam was a genius right now, and that WeWork is an example of how American capitalism is supposed to work.”

The idea of building a canoe in the middle of everything else falling apart deeply resonated.