I recently had a conversation with a politician who’s running for Congress. They were angry about a story I wrote. I reminded them that if they have conflicts of interest, I’m going to write about them. In the nicest way possible, I told them they’d have to suck it up, because they were running for office and I wasn’t going to stop asking tough questions. They looked at me like I was nuts.
I was also recently in a graveyard where several young Black boys were buried and forgotten, children whose stories gave me nightmares. I remember waking up at 2:30 in the morning to the sound of spirits calling out to me, the way they had in the graveyard. They told me they were lost, all of them lost, and asked me not to forget them. I begged them to let me sleep. I begged them to remember that I wasn’t the one who did the harm, and that I only wanted to make things right.
There have been a number of moments worth mentioning lately that I haven’t gotten around to writing about for this newsletter, because... I got a book deal! So this week I’m going to stray from the usual newsletter path to let you in on the deets.
I don’t know if “manifesting” is real, but if it is, I manifested the hell out of this deal. Back in February, I wrote about my obsession with data centers and how they were disrupting American society. I knew then, and I wrote, that I would turn that obsession into something tangible, maybe even a book. Then I signed with my agent in April and met with multiple publishers last month. In the end, I sold my proposal, nearly 100 pages written in Paris and Maryland, to Grand Central in a pre-empt (publishing-speak for an offer that takes a book off the table before it goes to auction).
The book is called How to Kill a Data Center. It’s character-driven, and it tells the story behind America’s compute arms race through the people at ground zero: one community’s fight over a data center in a Maryland suburb. It’s my attempt to unveil the policy, civics and politics behind this fight, and to tell the stories of the real people at the center of it. For too long, I think, we’ve left the term ‘creative destruction’ as an abstraction. This book will try to make it concrete.
It’s scary and ambitious, and it’s a challenge I’ve been waiting years to take on. I’m so excited to make this dream a reality. And I hope you all stay on this journey with me.
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So far, I’ve really enjoyed writing Worth Mentioning. It’s fun to share parts of conversations that don’t make it into stories but are still worth discussing. Let me know what you think. I read everything.
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