Thanks Peter! I quite liked your essay as well, although I'm not sure it qualifies as lying "somewhere between the level of Scientific American and a review article in Science or Nature" (but from your first comment on your own essay, I guess you realise that yourself).
You are of course right that my condensed-matter starting point is not wholly original, although I don't think it's really "well-known", as you put it: even most quantum gravity specialists are only starting to take this approach seriously, or at most see it as a phenomenological one, and the "diverse, highly-educated but non-specialist audience" is barely aware that there exists anything related to quantum gravity apart from strings and LQG, let alone that they would know about emergent gravity in general or a condensed-matter approach in particular. Which is not very surprising, since as far as I know little effort has been put in popularising these views (yet) to a broader audience.
In any case, glad you liked my essay and good luck to you too!