Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today
  • Published: 13 November 2025
  • ISBN: 9781405981408
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 224

Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today

(and other lessons from history about living through an information crisis)

Formats & editions
EBook
13 Nov 2025
Audiobook
13 Nov 2025
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An electrifying, thought-provoking exploration of how the digital era is reshaping our world, by bestselling, Women's Prize-winning writer Naomi Alderman

What’s the most useful thing you could know about your own life?

In this era-defining book, developed from her ground-breaking Radio 4 essay series, Naomi Alderman turns her boundless curiosity and incisive thinking to a question that affects us all – how do we understand, and navigate, the epoch we’re living through? She calls this epoch the Information Crisis.

The internet has flooded us with more knowledge, opinions, ideas, opportunities, as well as verbal attacks and misinformation than ever before. It lets us learn more quickly and also spread falsehood more quickly, it brings us together and also divides us in new ways, it is now the lens through which we perceive and understand the world. There is no going back. But we have been here before. In fact, this is humanity's third information crisis.

The first, the invention of writing 5,000 years ago and the second, the invention of the printing press, 600 years ago, drastically reshaped our perceptions, interactions and mental landscapes in ways that feel acutely familiar. Overwhelmed by information, people become afraid and angry, unsettled and distressed as well as more knowledgeable, educated and curious. By looking at those previous information crises, both the turmoil and the advances, Alderman asks what we can learn from the past to better understand, and navigate, our present and our future.

Drawing on the work of philosophers and historians, Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today explores how new technology opens up new ways of being and helps us chart a way forward (once again), through the turbulent seas of information overload.
  • Published: 13 November 2025
  • ISBN: 9781405981408
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 224
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About the author

Naomi Alderman

Naomi A. Alderman's first novel, Disobedience, was published in 2006 in ten languages and won the Orange Award for New Writers. In 2007, she was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, and one of Waterstone's 25 Writers for the Future. Her second novel, The Lessons, was published in April 2010. Naomi was lead writer on the BAFTA-shortlisted alternate reality game Perplex City and writes a weekly games column for the Guardian. Naomi A. Alderman's 2017 novel, The Power was the winner of the 2017 Baileys women’s prize for fiction.

portrait photo of Naomi Alderman

Also by Naomi Alderman

The Power
Disobedience
Penguin Readers Level 5: Doctor Who: Borrowed Time (ELT Graded Reader)
The Liars' Gospel
Doctor Who: Borrowed Time
The Lessons
See all

Praise for Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today

How fortunate we are to have Naomi Alderman as our companion in these confusing, challenging and dangerous times. Don't Burn Anyone at the Stake Today is a serious — and also very funny — history of how we got to this point in the information revolution and a wise guide to navigating our way through it. Essential reading for the 21st century

Erica Wagner

Nobody who surveys today's toxic internet can doubt that something is badly wrong. But now those of us who want to come through the information crisis wiser, better, and more deeply connected to other human beings have a trusted guide we can rely on

Bill Thompson  

Brisk, insightful, thought-provoking and powerfully empathetic: I started laughing and learning things on the first page and didn't stop until I hit the last one. Don't Burn Anyone at the Stake Today is the product of really deep thinking and a tremendously generous mind. It is the antidote to doom scrolling: a book that made me think in an entirely new way about the age we live in and which will make you excited about our era rather than merely terrified of it

Ian Dunt

The best book about the Internet I've ever read. Changed how I think about human history, the people I fight with on social media AND my own relationship with my phone, which is quite a lot for 150 pages

Jonn Elledge

it's a welcome appeal for nuance and thought in a world increasingly dominated by by rapid responses, false assumptions and casual cruelties driven by fear. I loved it - it's wise and compassionate, acknowledging that humans change, and make mistakes, and sometimes even grow beyond them

Joanne Harris

You know how the best writers pinpoint something you’ve felt for ages but haven’t been able to articulate? This is like that. It’s so good. She should give Radio 4’s next Reith Lectures

Guardian

Original, witty and profound – Naomi Alderman's broad historical perspective makes sense of our turbulent age with verve and wisdom

Rafael Behr

You know how the best writers pinpoint something you’ve felt for ages but haven’t been able to articulate? This is like that. It’s so good. She should give Radio 4’s next Reith Lectures

Guardian