Growing up, I learned The Way Things Work from author David Macaulay’s incredible illustrated books.

This week, I was surprised to see Macaulay’s endorsement in my inbox for a new illustrated explainer by a different author — but the surprise didn’t last long.

Fifteen minutes after I began skimming through an advance copy of Hidden Systems, which just came out this week, I immediately ordered the book for my kids. It looks like a fantastic way to help them conceptualize the internet, the world’s water supply, and our power grid — and get them thinking about the infrastructure of the world they’ll someday inherit.

In 262 pages, author and cartoonist Dan Nott tackles each of these systems in comic panel form, piecing together the building blocks of how they work and the basics of how they were conceived, all without ignoring the societal challenges facing each one. “I began drawing about hidden systems because comics seem to have this superpower-like ability to compare how we think about something with how it works concretely,” writes Nott in the book.

Source: Hidden Systems is a book that could teach your kids how the internet works – The Verge