Nature Physics featured in its September issue an Insight collection dedicated to “Complex Optics” and invited several teams to provide their input to this focus issue. Together with Hui Cao and Allard Mosk we contributed a review article on “Shaping the propagation of light in complex media” that has now been published here. Many thanks go to Hui and Allard for the great collaborative effort and to Nina Meinzer and her team for putting this issue together!