Newsroom
The Observer Book Club with Naomi Alderman
Invited experts
Erica Wagner
Naomi Alderman
Erica Wagner
Naomi Alderman
Join us for an Observer Book Club evening with Naomi Alderman, award-winning author of The Power, as she discusses her latest book, Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today, an electrifying exploration of how the digital era is reshaping our world.
Developed from her ground-breaking Radio 4 essay series, Alderman argues that we are living through a third great information crisis, as the internet floods us with knowledge, opinion and misinformation, reshaping how we think, dividing us and rewriting our sense of history. Ranging from the invention of writing 5,000 years ago to the Gutenberg press, from conspiracy theories to online pile-ons, she shows how past communication revolutions disrupted societies in ways that feel eerily familiar today - and what their turmoil and advances can teach us about surviving the current storm of outrage, panic and digital noise.
In the Observer newsroom, in conversation with the Observer’s Deputy Opinion Editor Erica Wagner, Alderman will unpack the emotional and cognitive upheavals of the information age, drawing on philosophers, historians and the realities of misinformation, groupthink and public disagreement. Together, they’ll ask how new technologies are changing who we can be, how we might navigate this crisis without turning on one another - and, as the title insists, why whatever else happens, we should not burn anyone at the stake today.
Invited experts
Erica Wagner
Naomi Alderman
Erica Wagner
Naomi Alderman
Join us for an Observer Book Club evening with Naomi Alderman, award-winning author of The Power, as she discusses her latest book, Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today, an electrifying exploration of how the digital era is reshaping our world.
Developed from her ground-breaking Radio 4 essay series, Alderman argues that we are living through a third great information crisis, as the internet floods us with knowledge, opinion and misinformation, reshaping how we think, dividing us and rewriting our sense of history. Ranging from the invention of writing 5,000 years ago to the Gutenberg press, from conspiracy theories to online pile-ons, she shows how past communication revolutions disrupted societies in ways that feel eerily familiar today - and what their turmoil and advances can teach us about surviving the current storm of outrage, panic and digital noise.
In the Observer newsroom, in conversation with the Observer’s Deputy Opinion Editor Erica Wagner, Alderman will unpack the emotional and cognitive upheavals of the information age, drawing on philosophers, historians and the realities of misinformation, groupthink and public disagreement. Together, they’ll ask how new technologies are changing who we can be, how we might navigate this crisis without turning on one another - and, as the title insists, why whatever else happens, we should not burn anyone at the stake today.