#0: Welcome to my newsletter ^_^

Some time last year, a dear friend said to me: "I don't know how anyone gets by without an Io in their life."

On reflection, I agree. Which is why I am starting this newsletter.

Hello! Welcome to Iosphere. My name is Io Dodds (that's 'io' with an 'i', pronounced "eye-oh"), and I'm a British journalist in San Francisco who covers tech, politics, and LGBT+ affairs for The Independent. In past life, I was an opinion editor and then a tech reporter for the UK's Daily Telegraph, as well as a TEDx speaker, recreational crisis simulator, and semi-professional gambler.

So if you're coming here cold, what exactly is my deal?

I honestly kinda struggle with self-promotion, so here are some quotes I solicited from other people:

• "Welcome to the Io Dodds newsletter. May God have mercy on everyone else who writes one." — Eric Garcia, Washington DC bureau chief for The Independent

• "Io unleashed should terrify us all... a badass transexual nerd who can storytell your fucking socks off about things you'd never even considered existing." — my friend ██████, award-winning journalist turned ██████

• “Io is too smart for her own good and how lucky the rest of us are to read her clever, insightful, sometimes bitchy as hell words!” — Amber Jamieson, my editor at The Independent

• "io dodds has a large head that is not infrequently filled with correct thoughts." — my beloved partner

Holy fuck. This person sounds incredibly cool! Though also scary? I wasn't expecting that part.

Other important information about me:

• I'm 35 and grew up in the strange radiance of the early internet (which has profoundly shaped my way of looking at the world!)

• I once edited future British prime minister Boris Johnson

• I was the first reporter ever to detail the inner workings of Facebook's speech council

• I am autistic, which shocked basically zero people in my life when it was diagnosed

• I'm a biological female cisgender woman

The concept of this newsletter is pretty simple. I want to make it as easy as possible for people who appreciate my work to follow it, while incentivising myself to share thoughts that don't fit within the format of traditional news media. Each week or so, I'll post links to recent work that I’m proud of, and often there will also be an essay like this one. Basically, it’s a blog (long live blogs!!!!).

What will I blog about? Tech, journalism, gender, politics, comic books, history, fanfiction; anything that interests me. The point is to be my whole messy self, to unite the varied and contradictory people that inhabit my brain, in the hope that you'll find that at least equally compelling as the mask I wear when I'm beneath a masthead. Just like my other journalism, the animating force will be my curiosity: about what makes people tick, why systems fail, and the invisible forces that govern our lives.

Okay, fine, I suppose there is one more thing. Last year, a woman called Lynn Conway died at the age of 86. Her death hit me kind of hard, for reasons I wrote about here. What matters right now is that I meant to stay more in touch with her, to keep up our correspondence. And then it was too late.

I don't want that to happen again. I want to keep in contact with interesting people I click with, which if you're reading this very likely includes you. So I encourage readers to respond by email and share their thoughts when the mood takes them; I will try to reply in kind.

Thanks for reading. I'll see you again soon. 💚