book news!
Thinking
The official Publishers Marketplace announcement is out and the contract is signed, so I guess it is time to send out the news here: I'm writing a book!
Here's the PM deal report:
Jillian Foley's FREE SPEECH AND MAGIC MONEY, tracing cryptography's development from a secret US military weapon to a technology seen as central to debates over the protection of free speech and privacy, to Rachel Field at Harvard University Press, by Jonathan Agin at O'Connor Literary Agency (world).
I don't have a publication date yet, but it won't be until next year at the absolute earliest. The book is based on my dissertation research so I am not writing this from scratch, but there's a lot of work to do to get it into book shape by my March draft deadline. I'm very excited to work with my editor at HUP on this, and grateful to my agent for sticking with me for the two years it took me to actually finish the proposal.
One my goals with this project is showing how pieces of this story are everywhere, once you start looking, without making the present the focus of the book. Trump's second-term speedrun towards authoritarianism has only intensified this. DOGE's smash-and-grab tactics are making people worried about government databases? That's what the Privacy Act of 1974 was supposed to protect against—the law that helped spur the creation of the first Data Encryption Standard (currently Chapter 2 in my working outline). Government agencies stripping funding away from academic research, threatening suppression and even prosecution for discussing research findings? The NSA tried to do that to academic cryptographers in the 1980s (Chapter 3). Useless memecoins? Chapter 6, essentially (and the title). History should not be read backwards, but it is still a useful exercise to see how ideas and narratives and instructive examples are picked up and turned around and redeployed over the years.
These things also help answer the question so, what is your book about?, which I need to get significantly better at answering in 30 seconds or fewer. Turns out that doing a history PhD does not really build skill for elevator pitches.
Reading
I have been listening to the audiobook for John Ganz's When The Clock Broke. I can already tell I should buy a hard copy to make highlights in. It's one of those books where every so often you have to stop and say to yourself, ohhh that's what [awful thing] is like that.
Doing
It's rhubarb season, baby! I got my hands on this cute little cookbook and I'm trying to pace myself so my family doesn't mutiny. I started with cake, always a fan favorite. I also planted a pair of rhubarb plants! And they haven't died yet! unlike my attempt at blackberries.