For those of us in the media who write about the media, tackling something like Inside.com is a lose-lose proposition. Fulsome praise might be interpreted, at worst, as job hunting (Kurt, you still have my risumi?) and at best as the sort of hall-of-mirrors reporting that people outside the media abhor. Criticism, of course, would sound like sour grapes, an SOS from a fishing boat about to be swept up in a tsunami.

That said, I have to admit that my first reaction to the site (which will cost $19.95 a month but is available now on a free 30-day trial basis) was weariness. It made me tired. Not bored, or filled with ennui (that describes the rest of my life), just intimidated by the seeming depth of Inside’s coverage.

It reminded me of when I first began working on the Web five years ago. I called a movie publicist I knew to tell her about my new venture. She was more annoyed than intrigued.

“What is that, something else I have to learn?” she asked bitterly. “I already follow magazines, newspapers, film and TV — now I have to look at something else?”

That’s roughly how I felt upon first viewing Inside, like someone had just dropped a phone book on top of my pile of morning reading material and said, “Be sure to finish that by noon.” I called some of my fellow media watchers to see if they felt similarly intimidated.

“I think the technology is terrific, but it still has a few start-up glitches — such as Inside Dope not showing up for me when I clicked on [it] earlier today [Monday],” said Keith Kelly of the New York Post. “My job of finding and publishing scoops in the Post has so far not become any harder (or for that matter any easier) now that Powerful Media has added its own reporters to the beats I cover. That said, they have talented people plying the waters and I’d expect them to bring in some big catches at some point.”

Other people seemed overwhelmed — or maybe just annoyed — by the basic ambition of the thing. “Inside’s like reading an application for a kid trying to get into Harvard,” said New York magazine’s Carl Swanson. “It’s intelligently, even hyperkinetically compiled to appeal to the insider, but in the end so densely well rounded to the point of being undifferentiated. It’s hard to tell in all that blue text what’s new, what’s Web-speed ‘news’ and what’s going to be just fun to read, and why I can’t figure out whether those charts and data snippets that take up a huge part of the page are actually important. Being definitive is an awful lot of pressure to put on yourself.”

All that copy — diced up into comestible lists, numbers and gossip — shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with Andersen’s C.V. Spy magazine, which he co-edited with Graydon Carter, was chock-full o’ graphs and dingbats, a rolling parody of infofluff culture in the ’80s, and New York magazine took on its own mildly subversive slant — much to its owners’ chagrin — under his editorship. The problem with such an online embarrassment of riches is how to sort it all out.

Inside offers subscribers the chance to “customize” the site according to their interests. I ignored this feature at first and logged on Monday to find the late-breaking salvation of “Friends” at the top of The Big News, a feature on the front page. Fascinated as I was to learn that Lisa Kudrow and David Schwimmer were determined to hold out for $1 million an episode (I guess the success of “The Pallbearer” really went to Schwimmer’s head), I thought there must be more to life than this. So I made a hierarchy of my interests with media on top and TV on the bottom, reloaded the page — and nothing changed.

Of course, it could be that I’m doing it wrong …

One of the nicest things about Inside is that it puts its writers first. In early partnership talks with other media companies, the creators touted the talent they were bringing on board, and bylines and voices are prominent throughout. David Carr, late of Washington City Paper, writes about media. He debuted with a thoughtful, well-reported piece about the much-anticipated changing of the guard at the Washington Monthly.

“This guy is a master of reporting, analysis and prose style,” says Village Voice Press Clips author Cynthia Cotts. “The rest of us media reporters might possibly be qualified to clean his monitor and keyboard.”

The Inside masthead is listed alphabetically, like the credits for some Robert Altman movie. Star writer Kim Masters gets second billing to a relative unknown like Denise Levin. Recently fired Mercury Records wunderkind Danny Goldberg, now hawking his new independent label, is also a contributor.

But this nonhierarchical approach does not permeate the site. The Power Index (a list of media moguls and their relative place in the pecking order) is all too familiar, and its billing seems like a parody of itself. As Andersen prophesied in his novel “Turn of the Century,” it’s EW for Kids.

“Check in throughout the day to see how the moguls are doing as they buy and sell companies, announce new deals and initiatives, demote and are demoted,” reads the intro. Suck did this for Net Moguls and managed to make it funny.

But it’s early yet. The tech problems will doubtless be sorted out, and, given the pedigree of the talent involved, so will the funny business. A few magazine editors have already told me that they could have gotten a pedicure while waiting for Inside’s pages to reload. Others have found valuable information on the site — information they would have paid a researcher to find for them — and will happily subscribe.

Of course, they’ll be writing off their subscription (as will I). The skeptics among Inside’s readers insist there aren’t enough of us with expense accounts to justify the site’s business model. Who cares? The fact that so much of the criticism of Inside.com (criticism that began long before its launch) focuses on whether it can last is bizarre to me. Call it the anticipation of schadenfreude. The failure of such an ambitious site won’t benefit any of us, nor will its success spell our demise (I hope).

One complaint I’ve heard is that all this information is available elsewhere. “I’ve already got places bookmarked to read all this stuff,” gURL producer Tanya Edwards posted on Media News. And though Inside’s Latest Deals and Job Changes puts me in mind of Done Deal, among other insider sites, it’s nice to think I might find a lot of this stuff in one place.

The supermarket needn’t kill the boulangerie, you know, especially if the latter offers cheaper fresh-baked goods. Me, I like shopping at both — just as long as I don’t go hungry.

And the Naz said, “Straighten cat with the bent frame.” After it was reported last week that CBS would not run ads for Christian Web site iBelieve.com during its miniseries “Jesus,” more than 95 CBS affiliates contacted the site to offer to run the ad locally. Now iBelieve spots will be featured in 16 major markets when the two-part biopic concludes Wednesday. (Part 1 pulled in an ungodly 8.2 Nielsen rating Sunday — I read it on Inside.com! — and millions more are expected to tune in to find out what happens to the Nazarene.) Call it the power of prayer.

In an interview, Mr. Carle said his supervisor at the National Intelligence Council told him in 2005 that White House officials wanted “to get” Professor Cole, and made clear that he wanted Mr. Carle to collect information about him, an effort Mr. Carle rebuffed. Months later, Mr. Carle said, he confronted a C.I.A. official after learning of another attempt to collect information about Professor Cole. Mr. Carle said he contended at the time that such actions would have been unlawful.

If Carle’s claims are true, it would likely mean the CIA acted illegally; as former Agency lawyer Jeffrey H. Smith tells Risen: “The statute makes it very clear: you can’t spy on Americans.”

Cole has already responded to the news on his blog, calling for a full congressional investigation of Carle’s claims, which he says he believes are true:

It seems to me clear that the Bush White House was upset by my blogging of the Iraq War, in which I was using Arabic and other primary sources, and which contradicted the propaganda efforts of the administration attempting to make the enterprise look like a wild shining success.

Carle’s revelations come as a visceral shock. You had thought that with all the shennanigans of the CIA against anti-Vietnam war protesters and then Nixon’s use of the agency against critics like Daniel Ellsberg, that the Company and successive White Houses would have learned that the agency had no business spying on American citizens. …

I hope that the Senate and House Intelligence Committees will immediately launch an investigation of this clear violation of the law by the Bush White House and by the CIA officials concerned.

He concludes by telling readers “what alarms [him] most”: “I know I am a relatively small fish and it seems to me rather likely that I was not the only target of the baleful team at the White House.”

Foster and Julia McWilliams (Child’s maiden name) were part of a cohort of women (invariably referred to as “girls” by their colleagues) who signed up to work for William “Wild Bill” Donovan’s OSS during the war. They wanted to serve their country, but most of them — Julia especially — were looking for adventure, too. Foster’s ability to speak Malayan (the legacy of a brief marriage to a Dutch diplomat in her early 20s) and Julia’s superior administrative skills made them desirable recruits. So did their backgrounds.

Both women were from wealthy, prominent, conservative California families and had gone to tony women’s colleges, as did Betty MacDonald, one of Conant’s primary sources. The word around the OSS offices was that Donovan’s idea of the ideal female hire was “a cross between a Smith graduate, a Powers model and a Katie Gibbs secretary.” He liked to recruit rich Ivy Leaguers of both genders, reasoning that they were more resistant to bribes. Julia — tall, a bit gawky and unworldly — was intent on livening up her own personality after a youth spent in the narrow-minded upper echelons of Pasadena society. Foster, on the other hand, devoted herself to livening up everyone else’s.

Foster seems to have adopted the “madcap heiress” of 1930s Hollywood comedies as a role model. In her first posting, Ceylon, Foster adopted a baby chipmunk, which she raised, named Christopher and took to carrying around in her pocket. The animal’s many escapes and Foster’s subsequent pursuits led to absurd scandals, such as the time Foster crawled under a table to look for the rodent and ran her hand up a general’s pant leg. Charged with Morale Operations (propaganda), Foster devised a notorious operation in which hundreds of condoms were stuffed with anti-Japanese tracts and malaria medication then released by passing submarines off the coasts of Malaysia and Indonesia. She ran local agents and helped devise bogus news reports that mimicked Japanese broadcasts but were subtly tweaked to offend the native population of enemy-occupied territory.

Foster’s duties resembled those of a CIA case officer, although the CIA did not yet exist; Julia, on the other hand, ran the OSS camp’s “nerve center,” compiling the research that came in from the field and dispatching it to Washington and the field operations that needed it. Arguably, Julia’s was the more important job (she had a higher security clearance), but Foster’s was the more thrilling. And while the levelheaded, famously discreet Julia spent her time in the CBI (China-Burma-India) theater pining over Paul Child, who would not realize how perfectly suited they were to each other until after the war, Foster had tragic affairs, got into countless comical scrapes and saw much more of the conflict firsthand.

Things began to go wrong for Foster after the war, when she was sent to Indonesia and Vietnam to help supervise the liberation of POWs and otherwise keep an eye on things. The U.S. was so focused on rebuilding Europe that it was willing to sacrifice many Asian allies who had expected to be granted independence as a reward for helping to defeat the Japanese. Instead, the old, hated, European colonial powers began to reestablish their hold, unimpeded by the Americans. This outraged Foster, who witnessed atrocities and other injustices committed by Dutch and French troops against Indonesian and Vietnamese civilians and believed the U.S was seriously undermining its own interests. She wrote a blistering white paper condemning American policy in Indonesia (it was ignored) and quit her government job to head back to the States.

Meanwhile, after weathering a rough-and-ready posting in Chungking (“It’s dirty beyond belief, utterly inconvenient, full of disease, misery, corruption and mystery,” Paul Child wrote to his twin brother, “but I love it.”), the Childs finally concluded their long courtship. He went to work for the United States Information Service in Paris and she decided to learn to cook. They would not reconnect with Foster until 1952, when they discovered that she, too, was living in Paris, working as a painter under the name Madame Zlatovski. (She had married — or rather, remarried, since it turned out she’d been secretly married to a Russian immigrant throughout the war.) They found her, in Paul’s words, “just as lazy, hazy, impractical and loveable as she was seven years ago.”

The happiness of that reunion was short-lived. Foster and her husband were soon embroiled in the Red Scare, and Paul Child himself was briefly and scarily caught up in the slipstream of her troubles. “A Covert Affair” is a skillfully told tale of espionage, combining just enough background information with the right amount of boisterous anecdote to make the reader feel simultaneously amused and informed. For the early parts of the book, Conant leans heavily on Foster’s own memoirs, as well as Paul Child’s marvelous letters home. But when she gets to Foster’s indictment by a federal grand jury on charges of espionage for the Soviet Union, she has to pick her way across far more uncertain ground. She does so with aplomb.

Was Foster a Soviet spy or a victim of overzealous anti-Communist crusaders who were far too willing to believe the testimony of a showboating informer who also happened to be a proven plagiarist and con man? Without relinquishing her fundamental sympathy with Foster, Conant faults her subject for “her denial and her self-delusion” as well as her refusal “to confront the truth about herself at the most fundamental level.”

The larkish first half of “A Covert Affair” gives way to a much darker but more intriguing consideration of how personality becomes destiny; the very qualities that make Foster so much fun to read about also led to her downfall. The Childs are relegated to the sidelines in this final act, but it hardly matters; by that point, Foster is the one you really care about. Her considerable talents went to waste after the war, mostly because she insisted on saying things about Southeast Asia that the officials back home just didn’t want to hear. No surprise, they all turned out to be true.

Researchers are even exploring ways to implant surveillance and other equipment into an insect as it is undergoing metamorphosis. They want to be able to control the creature.

The devices could end up being used by police officers and firefighters.

Their potential use outside of battle zones, however, is raising questions about privacy and the dangers of the winged creatures buzzing around in the same skies as aircraft.

For now, most of these devices are just inspiring awe.

With a 6.5-inch wing span, the remote-controlled bird weighs less than a AA battery and can fly at speeds of up to 11 mph, propelled only by the flapping of its two wings. A tiny video camera sits in its belly.

The bird can climb and descend vertically, fly sideways, forward and backward. It can rotate clockwise and counterclockwise.

Most of all it can hover and perch on a window ledge while it gathers intelligence, unbeknownst to the enemy.

“We were almost laughing out of being scared because we had signed up to do this,” said Matt Keennon, senior project engineer of California’s AeroVironment, which built the hummingbird.

The Pentagon asked them to develop a pocket-sized aircraft for surveillance and reconnaissance that mimicked biology. It could be anything, they said, from a dragonfly to a hummingbird.

Five years and $4 million later, the company has developed what it calls the world’s first hummingbird spy plane.

“It was very daunting up front and remained that way for quite some time into the project,” he said, after the drone blew by his head and landed on his hand during a media demonstration.

The toughest challenges were building a tiny vehicle that can fly for a prolonged period and be controlled or control itself.

AeroVironment has a history of developing such aircraft.

Over the decades, the Monrovia, Calif.-based company has developed everything from a flying mechanical reptile to a hydrogen-powered plane capable of flying in the stratosphere and surveying an area larger than Afghanistan at one glance.

It has become a leader in the hand-launched drone industry.

Troops fling a four-pound plane, called the Raven, into the air. They have come to rely on the real-time video it sends back, using it to locate roadside bombs or get a glimpse of what is happening over the next hill or around a corner.

The success of the hummingbird drone, however, “paves the way for a new generation of aircraft with the agility and appearance of small birds,” said Todd Hylton of the Pentagon’s research arm, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

These drones are not just birds.

Lockheed Martin has developed a fake maple leaf seed, or so-called whirly bird, loaded with navigation equipment and imaging sensors. The spy plane weighs .07 ounces.

On the far end of the research spectrum, DARPA is also exploring the possibility of implanting live insects during metamorphosis with video cameras or sensors and controlling them by applying electrical stimulation to their wings.

The idea is for the military to be able to send in a swarm of bugs loaded with spy gear.

The military is also eyeing other uses.

The drones could be sent in to search buildings in urban combat zones. Police are interested in using them, among other things, to detect a hazardous chemical leak. Firefighters could fling them out over a disaster to get better data, quickly.

It is hard to tell what, if anything, will make it out of the lab, but their emergence presents challenges and not just with physics.

What are the legal implications, especially with interest among police in using tiny drones for surveillance, and their potential to invade people’s privacy, asks Peter W. Singer, author of the book, “Wired for War” about robotic warfare.

Singer said these questions will be increasingly discussed as robotics become a greater part of everyday life.

“It’s the equivalent to the advent of the printing press, the computer, gun powder,” he said. “It’s that scale of change.”

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Wednesday that Assange’s statements “are both ridiculous and absurd.” Clinton, he said, has done nothing wrong, and U.S. diplomats do not engage in spying. He spoke in an interview on NBC’s “Today” show.

State Department officials said Tuesday that secret instructions to American diplomats to gather sensitive personal information about foreign leaders originated from the U.S. intelligence community but did not require diplomats to spy. Requests for DNA and biometric data on foreign officials were contained in leaked classified cables published by WikiLeaks.

“Secretary Clinton is doing a great job,” Gibbs said. “The president has great confidence in and admires the work that Secretary Clinton has done.”

Further reports on the story are sure to observe that the entire episode might have been plucked from the movies. This is incorrect. Plucked from films, yes. The story is half-ready for the art house. Strip the tale of glamour, remove any potential for excitement and you’ve not only got a greenlight, but guaranteed analysis in Cineaste, and a panel accompanying the New York opening consisting of Naomi Klein, a New York University expert on the Middle East, and any film critic dextrous enough to use “hegemony” in a sentence.

But the movies? Forget it. Hollywood is too besotted with sequels, reboots, animation to stick a toe into the real world. And the supposed change from this routine that the holiday season offers consists usually of adaptations of the kind of novels (usually Booker winners) that are purchased instead of read, or a Nancy Myers comedy in which a 50-ish divorcee (Meryl/Goldie/Diane) who has founded her own successful wrapping-paper company has to decide if her heart lies with her younger lesbian business partner (Debra Messing) or with a rakish older European diplomat (Bernard-Henri Levy).

Opportunities for film viewing in Kabul are understandably sparse. Salon’s sources in the city report that there are only two screens in operation at the city’s sixplex and they are currently offering “Speed Racer” and “Lambada: The Forbidden Dance.” Clearly, it’s time for America to intervene. Despite our massive expenditures in the country, our officials can surely afford a selection of DVDs designed to train Afghan officials on not falling for an impostor.

We suggest:

“Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” (1967) — We direct Afghan leaders to the suspicion shown by Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in the early part of the film toward the doctor their daughter brings home as her fiancé. The audience may consider their fears unreasonable because the doctor is, after all, Sidney Poitier and the young woman could as easily have brought home Eldridge Cleaver or Sonny Liston. But had the Afghans treated the impostor’s moderate proposals with even a smidge of the skepticism Spence and Kate show toward even such a paragon as Poitier, surely this embarrassing situation might have been avoided.

“Brokeback Mountain” (2005) — Was this individual really in close contact with the Taliban? If he had, he surely would have shown some inclination to the rugged, and all too often lonely, life that solitary figures like insurgents or closeted gay cowboys lead. Simply the mention of certain items — Ralph Lauren flannel shirts; beef jerky; a pet mule named Faiza — would have elicited a certain gleam in the eye of the real McCoy.

“Footloose” (1984) — Certainly only as dedicated a zealot as an actual Taliban leader could resist the combined lure of Kevin Bacon’s dancing and Kenny Loggins’ music. Slip the movie on during a break in negotations. Does this alleged mullah tap his feet, or nod his head sternly during John Lithgow’s fire-and-brimstone sermons? For the sake of the money you’ve just shelled out, pray it’s the latter.

“The Passion of the Christ” (2004) Four words: It’s the Jews’ fault. Sure to warm the heart of any true jihadist.

“Sex and the City 2″ (2010): Watch your man as he watches Carrie and the girls live it up in Abu Dhabi. Does he chuckle at their antics or make proclamations about profanations of the infidel harlots? (Note: The film can also be useful for other methods of recognition. See: “Brokeback Mountain.”)

Charles Taylor is a writer in New York.