Writer Jonn Elledge (the 131st dining stranger) is writing his next book, “The World as We Built It: A History of Civilisation in 31 Innovations.” Wildfire Books will be publishing it, slated for August 2026.
Wildfire Books says in a press release, “The book tracks the ideas and inventions that enabled humanity to become, by the early 21st century, a majority urban species for the first time, and looks at how essential infrastructure of modern life – the innovations that we barely even notice, but without which our world would fall apart – happened.”
And in the same release, Jonn says, “We all accept the world we’re born into, with roads and trains and parks and central-heating systems, as just the natural order of things. But it isn’t – people had to create it all, and mostly within the past 200 years. This book – the one I’ve been wanting to write for many years, and wanting to read since I was the sort of kid who had a tube map on his wall – will explain how that happened, and ask what becoming a primarily urban species has done to our brains.”
I met Jonn in January for the first dinner interview in almost five years, after pausing Dining With Strangers once the pandemic started in early 2020. We met to discuss another of his books, “A (Brief) History of the World in 47 Borders.” It’s a collection of uniformly fascinating essays that offer a rough outline of world history through stories about borders. It reveals how societies evolve and borders and boundaries fluctuate, not always for the better when it comes to peace and stability.
Jonn is thoroughly charming company; I didn’t want to leave the dinner table. He’s smart, quick-witted and inquisitive, and those same qualities come across in his writing as well.