I'm coming back to write the Second Chapter.

Hello, friend.

It’s been a while. The last time I wrote here, in December, I admitted I had grown tired of my own repertoire. In every edition of my newsletter, I explained at length what I thought was wrong with the biggest stories of the current news cycle. What I struggled to say was: here is what should exist instead. “Tearing things apart is not a home,” I wrote. Then I paused the newsletter, promising to return once I found something more useful to do. This newsletter, Odds & Sods, was the first chapter in my attempt to find my voice in a tech world I largely disagree with.

Now, I’m building something new.

Alongside Eleanor, I’m starting a media company about European technology, business, culture and power. We want to make room for proper reporting, longer conversations and ideas that deserve more attention than the feed allows. Who gets to build the future? Who benefits from it? What happens to culture, institutions and, most crucially, our working lives when technology companies present their interests as the natural order of things? And can Europe develop a technological culture that is neither provincial nor a delayed imitation of Silicon Valley?

Second Chapter is an attempt to engage those questions more constructively: not by pretending the problems are small, but by making something useful, independent and alive in response to them. Our publication is built on the belief that readers still want depth, at a time when much of the available tech coverage is alarmist, promotional, or written from Silicon Valley.

Eleanor is the main character here. As editor-in-chief, she calls the shots. She has advised VCs, helped build Every and worked at The Wall Street Journal. Though I know her from her time as deputy editor of Sifted. Then there’s Amone, our chief operating officer, whose experience includes Meta and Vodafone. Our pitch deck puts the combination neatly: “journalists who build, operators who commercialise”.

So this is, I suppose, a return — though perhaps not a return to the same place.

This is not a conversion story. I remain sceptical about LLMs, pessimistic about the concentration of power around AI, and unconvinced that Europe’s highest ambition should be to produce its own versions of American or Chinese monopolies. Starting a company has not cured any of this.

But it does expose me to something which being a mere commentator conveniently avoids: having to produce something that can itself be judged. A publication is not an alternative social order. It is, however, something I know how to help make — and somewhere to pursue the questions I keep returning to, without assuming the answer must always be another elegant description of the trap.

We will launch in about two weeks, and I want you to be our first readers. Sign up today to receive our launch pieces on November 17^th.

And one thing will never change, wherever I am, whatever I do: I sincerely invite you to reach out and tell me whatever is on your mind about our work.