War has always had a digital shadow, and in the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, that shadow is written in the language of data centers, server racks, and automated bots. When Ukrainian forces carried out strikes on some of Yandex’s largest data centers, it felt like a significant turning point. For a brief moment, the numbers seemed to reflect a genuine setback for Russian online infrastructure: bot traffic originating from Russia appeared to be slowing down, and there was a sense that perhaps these physical blows had dealt real damage to the machinery of disinformation and cyberattacks. But as with so…

There are moments in a reader’s life when a thriller stops being just a game and becomes a mirror, and David McCloskey’s The Persian is exactly that kind of book. Published by W.W. Norton & Co./Jonathan Ball Publishers, it poses a question that feels painfully current: what happens when a spy is forced to reckon with the consequences of his deception? If that idea appeals, then this geopolitical thriller could almost have been lifted from a 2026 news headline. The novel explores the shadow war between Israel’s Mossad and Iran’s Qods Force, but it does not linger on boardroom briefings…