Lean In and Wear Prada
reaching legion-level before the apocalypse
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.
The Unwin Award was not, it transpires, the first time I met Wynn-Williams; she reminded me that we had actually shared a platform at the UN, as members of a panel convened to discuss the growing problem of online misogyny (a few months earlier I had been on the receiving end of a deluge of explicit rape and death threats, while thousands of people hunted me down, publishing my contact details and my —thankfully outdated— home address online), and I thought a lot about this event while I was reading Wynn-Williams’ book. The UN panel was, I believe, in the autumn of 2013, and I think Wynn-Williams and I both had hope back then that social media, which gave voice to the previously unvoiced and challenged the gatekeepers of default male truth, could be shaped into a net social good. After all, while it was true social media had been used to terrorise me, I had also used these platforms to convince the Bank of England to represent female historical figures on banknotes and to set up a database of experts to challenge male over-representation in the media. And, shortly after my adventures in online harassment, we had pressured Twitter into addressing its woefully inadequate procedures for reporting abuse on the platform, a success which still sometimes gets mentioned when I am introduced on-stage at events — and every time it does, now I see what social media has become, I cringe at my naivety for ever believing we could make these careless people care.
For obvious reasons I was also struck as I read by the disparity between Sheryl Sandberg’s peak Lean In era, and the reality of how Wynn-Williams was treated. Of course, from its title onwards, the Lean In gospel was never a radical one; it always implied that women who were unable to overcome the structural obstacles of patriarchal capitalism had, in the end, only themselves to blame. Still, the book itself did at least pay lip service to the existence of structural discrimination, even if it lacked the ambition to dispense with the master’s tools. But in the real-life company where Sandberg ran operations, Wynn-Williams writes that while she was giving birth to her first baby, she had to compose meeting notes for Sandberg in between contractions, and that after she returned from a shorter maternity leave than she was technically (if not implicitly) entitled to, her first performance review complained that her baby could be heard in the background of calls; “[t]he expectation at Facebook is that mothering is invisible, and the more skilled you are, the more invisible it is,” Wynn-Williams explains. “These are personal issues,” her superior reprimands her, when Wynn-Williams fails to completely conceal an emergency with her baby. “When you’re with the most senior members on the team, Mark, Elliot, Javi, you need to be professional and focused on them.”
The pattern repeats itself (as farce or tragedy, you decide) during Wynn-Williams’ second pregnancy. A few weeks before she is due, she is pressured to produce a doctor’s note clearing her for travel to Davos (a full-term pregnancy is around 40 weeks and, doctors note or not, many commercial airlines will not fly a pregnant woman past 36 weeks because of the risk of spontaneous labour). Even after Wynn-Williams nearly dies from postpartum haemorrhage, she says she was not left in peace to recover, and within two weeks, while she was still bleeding and heavily medicated for the pain, she was having to take part in weekly video-conferences and dealing with an influx of messages and emails. The first day back, her boss gives her a performance review.
“You weren’t responsive enough,” he says.
“In my defence, I was in a coma for some of it.”
“It’s not just me, Sarah. Some of your other colleagues found it challenging to engage with you.”
“I mean, you know, I was in hospital, in a coma and near death, but I accept that this did make it hard to engage with me at times.”
Irrespective, this leads him to conclude that there were “issues limiting my effectiveness” and both he and my peers say I was difficult to work with during this period.” Sadly, he notes that he is unable to put a formal performance rating in the system to accompany this feedback because I was “out of the system” for most of the performance cycle, but he wants me to know that if he could, it would be bad.
But sure, it’s a total mystery why women aren’t queuing up to have babies.
A couple of weeks later, while Wynn-Williams says she was still at risk of post-surgical complications, such as a repeat, life-threatening haemorrhage, she was, she writes, pressured onto a twenty-hour flight to India. It is during this period that Wynn-Williams says sexual harassment from one of her bosses ramps up, including performing work calls from his bed and asking intrusive questions about her body (such as where she is bleeding from following childbirth). She ultimately filed a report against her boss for sexual harassment, which was not upheld; shortly thereafter she was fired.
Meta has dismissed Wynn-Williams’ book as “a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives,” and it’s certainly true that some of the revelations, such as targeting vulnerable teens or negligence in the face of genocide, aren’t what you would call brand new information, although in what way that is a defence for any of their actions remains unclear to me. In any case, it’s not so much the specifics of what they did and didn’t do that makes this book such a shocking read (although to be clear, I find Wynn-Williams’ account credible), but the sheer, well, carelessness, with which they did it. Carelessness, which morphed into ruthlessness and now the Zuckerbergs of the world are building private apocalypse bunkers to escape the world they broke. As for Meta’s legal case against Wynn-Williams, I interpret it very differently now. Before I read Careless People I had been baffled by the, as it seemed to me, entirely counter-productive attempt to suppress her narrative; now I wonder if I’m being as naive as I was back in 2013 when I thought we could fix twitter. I wonder if Meta is less concerned with suppressing Wynn-Williams’ narrative and more concerned with very publicly punishing her, just as autocracies have done throughout history, as a warning to other would-be apostates. I cannot help wondering if this is less an exercise in legal technicalities, and more a show of pure, unrestrained — and unrestrainable — moneyed power. I cannot help wondering if the shamelessness is the point.
Shortly after Trump’s was first elected as President of the US, and less than a year before she was fired, Wynn-Williams travels with Zuckerberg and other members of Facebook leadership to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Peru, where, she realises, the centre of global power has shifted.
…President Peña Nieto chides, as he interrupts John Key to get Mark’s attention. He’s double-booked for the session and came by to personally apologize to Mark for missing it and to get a photo with him. Canadian president Justin Trudeau approaches and also asks for a photo, as does Australia’s prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull. It’s like Mark’s a kingmaker, and they’re there to bend the knee.
I drag Mark into the Grand Hall for the session he will chair. It’s a vast space, with large red screens reminiscent of the Chinese flag projecting the APEC logo. In the middle of the room a circle of wooden tables has been assembled, with microphones, chairs, and nameplates for each of the presidents and prime ministers. At the centre is Mark Zuckerberg. I sit directly behind Mark, with Elliot perched beside me.
Once we’re settled in with all these heads of state, it’s surprising how many are familiar faces. People I’ve met either with Mark or in my own role. We know that many of the global leaders we’ve built relationships with are coming to the end of their terms; some are already gone, and in some cases we’ve already successfully transitioned to their successors. I’m struck by the impermanence of importance. And yet Mark could conceivably continue to hold his place chairing world leaders for another fifty years. He’ll see these leaders off and the generations of leaders that follow them. Like the queen.
Leave Emily Alone!
GFPs, a few weeks ago I watched The Devil Wears Prada 2 so you don’t have to. OK, that’s not strictly true: I watched it because the first one was delightfully frivolous fashion-forward fun and I thought this one would be too. Sadly, what it actually was, was profoundly disappointing. In the original both Miranda and Emily were wonderfully bitchy to the end; in this one, which I can only assume was plotted by AI, everyone had to have their saccharine redemption arc, no matter how unbelievable. Case in point (and look away now if you don’t want a spoiler / to have the original ruined for you), Emily and Andy have a gal-pal lunch right at the end of the film where Emily reveals she had tried to call Andy after she left Runway all those years ago because she thought they could be buddies?? Emily would NEVER, get your mawkish hands off my girl! I simply refuse to accept this as canon. They couldn’t even get the villains right; I won’t pretend I didn’t snigger a bit at the obvious Bezos parody, and who doesn’t enjoy mocking the be-vested finance bro brigade, but on the whole the satire was as disappointingly lazy as the characterization, and as for the girl-boss moral of the story, 2012 called it wants its feminist analysis back.
And if you enjoyed that, there is more below the fold, where, in a new addition to this newsletter, I discuss a few other bits and pieces (tv shows, films, socks, Heritage Foundation reports on how to save the American Family) that I have liked/not liked recently, as well as some further Devil-Wears-Prada-2-inspired thoughts on (the dishonesty of) the anti-ageing industrial complex…enjoy! And for those of you not joining us behind the paywall, see you next time! xoxoxo
Oh and PS, before I go beyond the fold! A quick plug for my “sharply witty, almost sexily cerebral” friend Alex Kealy, co-host of the Gig Pigs podcast with Ivo Graham and a BBC Radio 4’s The News Quiz and The Now Show alumnus. Alex is performing a comedy special at The Courtyard Theatre in London on the 9th June, and you can nab yourself a ticket here!