Are you hyper-vigilant about your health, constantly monitoring yourself and panicking when you feel the slightest symptom? You're not alone. Writer Caroline Crampton has a new book about illness anxiety disorder, a.k.a. hypochondria. We talk about our evolving understanding of the disorder, its connection to PTSD, and new treatments. Her book is A Body Made of Glass. John Powers reviews two new spy series, Black Doves and The Agency.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
What is hypochondria and how is it defined?
Was it three glasses, though?
Four. Five. And a line of what I thought was cocaine, but I'm starting to suspect may have been ketamine.
Oh, great. Cool. So, a bottle of wine and some horse tranquilizer. Anything else? Did you shoot up under a bridge on your way here?
Listen, I have just left a very enjoyable evening with some old friends to come and murder a hired contract killer for you. So let's tone down the judgment a tad, shall we?
Helen and Sam are so enjoyable in such scenes, and their friendship so palpable, that it's easy to lose sight of the immorality of what they do, especially as both are capable of profound love and generosity. The human cost of spying is less breezy in the agency, whose provenance could hardly be finer.
It's an American transposition of maybe the best spy show of all time, the French series The Bureau. Based in a CIA outpost in London and dealing with issues torn from our headlines, it centers on the spies who live for years in foreign lands under fake identities and the desk jockey agents who run them. ambiguously handsome Michael Fassbender stars as the crack agent known as Martian.
As the series begins, he's suddenly called back to London from Addis Ababa, forcing him to leave behind his Ethiopian lover Sami. That's Jodie Turner-Smith. He tells his superiors, played by the likes of Jeffrey Wright, Katherine Waterston, and Richard Gere, that he and Sami are over, but he's actually still in love with her.
In the spy world, this lie is profoundly compromising, and it sets in motion all manner of trouble. You see, not only is he training a young woman agent, played by Saura Lightfoot-Leone, for an undercover job in Tehran, he's helping endangered assets in Ukraine. If Black Doves gallops forward like a racehorse, the agency is quieter and more precise, like dressage.
Although I've only been able to preview the first few episodes, the show closely follows the Bureau's template. It carefully lays out the agency's daily life, with its strong personalities, office politics, and murky missions. Then it starts tightening the screws of suspense. Like most spy stories, the agency taps into our modern obsession with identity.
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