Lean In and Wear Prada

Guess what, GFPs? I. Have. FILED! My book, that is. I can’t actually feel that excited about it yet as there is still at least one round of edits to go, and June is likely to be as hellish as January to mid-May has been. But still! The big bulk of the work is done (I hope 😖) and there is a conceivable future in which a new book by me will *actually* be sitting in a bookshop near you 😱. I promise I will give more details on this as soon as I get the OK from my editor; what I will say for now is that this has been a BEAST of a project and I am e.x.h.a.u.s.t.e.d.

And on the subject of books by GFPs, last month I delivered the Unwin Lecture at an event in London where the winner of the 2026 Unwin Award was announced. The Unwin Award recognises non-fiction authors in the early stages of their career, whose work has made a “significant contribution” to the world, and the winner this year was the very impressive Hannah Ritchie, for her work challenging the doom-suffused narrative on climate change. To be clear, Ritchie is no climate change denier; rather she recognises the dangers of the helpless fatalism that has taken hold of so many of us — a fatalism which, she argues, is unwarranted, because progress has been and continues to be made. I know I needed to hear that message — and accordingly I have started listening to her book “Not the End of the World” on xigxag, which for those of you who have been hunting for an Bezos audiobook alternative, I can highly recommend. (I also refuse to be fatalistic about funnelling all of my money into Big Tech…although that’s a whole other newsletter.) Or is it…as also on the shortlist was Sarah Wynn-Williams, the bestselling author of Careless People: A story of where I used to work, and, it transpires, a raging GFP! Well, I have added on the raging bit, but luckily for me Wynn-Williams is almost certainly too busy being sued into bankruptcy by the massive cry-bully otherwise known as Mark Zuckerberg to complain.

Wynn-Williams started working at Facebook in 2011, taking on a role in public policy that she pretty much designed for herself, after many months spent trying to convince Facebook leadership that their website had outsized implications for global politics, and Careless People details her journey from starry-eyed true believer to disillusioned apostate, as she witnesses the company that she once believed could be a force for good in the world boast to advertisers about exploiting user data to prey on vulnerable teens; negotiate surveillance and censorship tactics with the Chinese government; and hand-wave over its role in the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar — and so so much more. Naturally, the man who has recently taken to wearing custom t-shirts saying things like “Aut Zuck aut nihil” (which is Latin for “I’m so lonely” “Zuck or nothing”) and “Carthago delenda est” (Homer-Simpson-cymbal-monkey.gif) has not taken kindly to this exposé and has obtained an emergency injunction against Wynn-Williams while The Company Formerly Known As Facebook pursues a legal case against her — not, crucially, on the basis that what she said was libellous, but that she had breached the “non-disparagement” clause of her severance agreement. As a result of Facebook/Meta’s emergency injunction, Wynn-Williams is not allowed to say anything, not even in the privacy of her own home, that might constitute disparagement of people it is basically impossible not to disparage — that is unless she wants to pay a $50,000 fine.

Largely thanks to Zuckerberg’s apparent lack of familiarity with the Streisand effect I had, of course, heard of Wynn-Williams before the award ceremony, but I hadn’t read her book, partly because I haven’t really had time to read anything at all while I’ve been finishing off my own, but also because I am a big baby and thought it would be too depressing. In my defence, Careless People was published in March 2025, at a time when the victory of the world’s careless people felt too raw for me to engage with. Two months into the second Trump presidency, “move fast and break things” seemed to have become official government policy in the most powerful country in the world, the wanton destruction headed up by a gurning shit-poster called Elon Musk, you may have heard of him. A couple of weeks prior to the publication of Careless People, and shortly after Musk had boasted online about stripping the world’s most vulnerable people of food, shelter and vital healthcare, he had paraded triumphantly on-stage at a major international conservative political conference, brandishing a gleaming chainsaw to thunderous cheers. These fundamentally unserious people were causing breathtakingly serious damage — and I didn’t relish the idea of spending any more time in their company. Still, the GFP-draw is powerful, and so on the train home after the ceremony I cracked open my new copy (unsigned, because lonely boy wouldn’t like it) and found that it is, in the words of The Sunday Times, “darkly funny.” You know, funny like Dr Strangelove.