The Russian agents' spy ring is really too funny to pass up.

According to newspaper reports of the last few days, several people, including a "sexy" spy were trained for years in Russia to learn the ways of Americans and blend into suburbia complete with backyard barbeques, difficult teenagers and minivan trips to the mall. Several of them were so successful at blending in, they even prospered. One of them had a successful brokerage firm worth $2M. Imagine: An anti-American games the system then becomes more American than us. (They must have read Malcolm Gladwell's most recent book Outliers)

Everyone -- columnists, spy experts, historians, former Sovietologists and cold war experts, are scrambling to make sense of this nonsense. How was it worth the expense and decades-long work for the SVR (the Russian spy agency)? Yesterday's Times reports there were few if any secrets gleaned from living in Montclair, NJ.

But the real answer may be in the idea that spying is a human activity not necessarily driven by nationalistic aims. We do it all the time. We want to know. We don't necessarily want to feel, but we want to know what are our spouses doing, our kids, even our therapists? One therapist said to me recently that with the advent of the internet, many of her patients spend a good deal of time spying on her. They glean bits and pieces of her personal life from comments she made on news websites. They know how many children she has, even the kind of pet food she buys.