Dear friends and readers,

It’s been a minute. Some news; I’m waist-deep in book-writing, and that book is currently called Rewild the Internet: This is how we resist Big Tech. All going well it’ll be published in Spring 2028 in the US and Canada by Simon & Schuster, and in the UK, Ireland and other English-speaking countries by Bloomsbury. The book grows out of the ideas Robin Berjon and I first wrote about in Noema two years ago; ‘We need to rewild the internet’. That piece went on to be anthologised in The Best American Science and Nature Writing of 2025, published late last year. (And still available! There’s some incredible writing and reporting in there. Dizzying company.)

I’ll tell you the story of how the book of internet rewilding came to be under contract another time. For now, I’ve got two fantastic editors; Alessandra Bastagli in New York, who runs an imprint called One Signal, and Octavia Stocker in London, at Bloomsbury. (Which is, yes, right in the heart of Bloomsbury, where it never gets old to sit in their colourful foyer and gaze up at the framed covers of books by my literary heroes, especially Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi. Possibly the most perfect novel yet, this century.)

The submission process on both continents involved video calls with various publishers in a two-way courtship. I knew I was in good hands when I asked Alessandra how she might respond to any political and corporate pressure to censor progressive books under the Trump regime. She said her whole team do what they do because they want to know that during a time of genocide they stood for what mattered. I know my book won’t have supernatural powers to affect any of our daily horrors, but it feels essential to be working with people who are clear about the stakes and the pitfalls of putting bold new ideas out into the world right now.