Day after day, we're bombarded with the drumbeat of news that veers from the shocking to the unfathomable. How do we come to grips with this chaos?

For years, in his multi-award-winning column, that is exactly what Waleed Aly has done. In this book, he revisits these articles, written during a concentrated period of profound upheaval, to see what they reveal.

The columns are not simply reproduced: they are sorted into themes that give them new life, illuminating each other and highlighting common threads between disparate events that surprised even their author.

Tying all these together are twelve new essays that reflect upon the definitive elements of this chaotic age: parsing what is revolutionary in this moment but also what is not; examining our changing relationships with technology and each other; and identifying the things that really matter in life even as the upheaval tries to obscure them. If the environment is one of disorder and disorientation, the task is finding one's bearings.

These are real-time reflections cast in a new light. They distil what it is like to live in a time when the old order is collapsing but the new one is not yet born.