Congratulations to Warwick Anderson on the publication of Spectacles of Waste (Polity). The book reveals how human excrement has always complicated humanity’s attempts to become modern. From wastewater epidemiology and sewage snooping to faecal transplants and excremental art, he argues that our insistence on separating ourselves from our bodily waste has fundamentally shaped our philosophies, social theories, literature and art—even the emergence of high-tech science as we understand it today. Spectacles of Waste is, according to Ann Laura Stoler, ‘a testimony to the degree to which the repugnant shapes our lives’, and it is ‘exemplary of what ethnographic history can be’. Congratulations Warwick!