Hi friends,

I’m thrilled to announce that my new book, On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear, is available for pre-order wherever books are sold. Co-authored with former White House senior advisor, Ami Fields-Meyer, the book will be published June 30 by the Harper Collins Mariner imprint.

This book was a reporting project unlike any I have done before. Ami and I interviewed more than 100 dissidents from around the world and distilled their experiences into 16 practical lessons on how to overcome fear and fight for what you believe in. 

Reporting these stories felt like chasing hope. Again and again, dissidents told us they were not willing to give up their hopes for a better world, even at great personal cost. They talked about the ways that they nurtured their hope and overcame their fears. Their faith was infectious, giving me great hope for the ways that humanity’s better instincts can surface even in the most repressive circumstances.

For me, chasing hope in this way is a bit new. I’ve spent my career as an investigative reporter unearthing stories of how power has been abused and how people have been harmed — how your privacy was being violated, how algorithms were being used to exacerbate bias, how AI bot were providing inaccurate information during a high stakes election. My hope in writing those stories was that they would spark change — which sometimes happened, and sometimes didn’t.

To paraphrase my friend Surya Mattu, investigative journalism can feel like a service akin to trash collection. It’s a necessary check on power for a healthy democracy but consuming it is not always everyone’s favorite leisure time activity.

But this reporting exercise felt like it was yielding something different — something you might want to read in your free time. Our investigation into what it takes to build and maintain hope, how to use it wisely and spread it widely, felt like an antidote to the deluge of bad news in our feeds.

Breaking courage into its component parts has also allowed me to see it everywhere in ways that weren’t obvious to me before - whether it is in the disciplined nonviolence of the Minneapolis ICE protesters, the growing list of successful boycott movements, or the principled defiance of federal judges.

The reporting also revealed how courage takes many forms. We found that the work of caring for your neighbors is as much as dissident practice as marching in the streets. That organizing your colleagues, testifying in a court case or documenting state violence are also necessary forms of dissident work.

I hope that in our pages, readers will find inspiration to forge their own path toward combatting the rising tide of authoritarianism that is surging around the world. 

If you are willing to take an early bet on our offering of hope, we would be so grateful if you would consider pre-ordering the book. Early sales are very important to authors because they send an important signal to booksellers that the book is worth investing in.

As always, thank you for reading.

Best

Julia Angwin