I’m a nonfiction author with a PhD in Anthropology from Princeton University. My books are about remembering, honouring, and telling the story of those who came before us. 
 
My work is animated by the belief that every forgotten culture was an entire world unto itself. Each way of being teaches us something previously unimaginable about what it means to be a human. And each voice has something unique to say, even as it is muffled, misrepresented, or mocked by the colonialists, missionaries, and conquerors who ever took the time to write any of it down. But if you hear these people you will, I believe, agree with me - the challenge, as always, is mostly about finding and communicating it to a modern audience. Above all, I do this for my readers because the path to clarity is knowing that things can be - and very often were - completely and almost indescribably different. 
 
In my new book, Written By the Victors, I embark with the reader on a two-millennia long journey towards appreciating the dark side of the invention of alphabetic literacy. It is hard to find anyone who thinks that reading and writing is anything other than a Good Thing - and books are, of course, my life and income. But there is much more to this story than the triumph of progress over barbarism. The majority of human cultures, groups, and tribes who encountered literacy did so with a response of horror and trepidation. It appeared as a form of magic. Dark, serious, satanic magic.

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My first book, What Brexit Means, came out of my original PhD work at Princeton. This first book was a systematic investigation of how the traditional concepts in anthropology can explain something as ostensibly modern as the vote to leave the European Union. It, too, is preoccupied with giving a voice to an otherwise largely marginalized group condemned as the enemies of progress: right-wing populists.​Beyond my nonfiction books, I am a regular contributor to both podcasts and popular magazines​ like The Spectator, where I write around topics like Artificial Intelligence, Latin American politics, English eccentrics, social media, and the perilous risks of modern technology. Above all, I like to bring in the wider anthropological perspective on what’s going on in the world today, especially given the rapid and often amnesiac speed of content production.

I am represented by Jack Ramm at Aevitas Creative, and I am a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts.