Annalee Newitz (born May 7, 1969) is an American journalist, editor, and author of both fiction and nonfiction. From 1999 to 2008, Newitz wrote a syndicated weekly column called Techsploitation, and from 2000 to 2004 was the culture editor of the San Francisco Bay Guardian. In 2004, Newitz became a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. With Charlie Jane Anders, they also co-founded Other magazine, a periodical that ran from 2002 to 2007. From 2008 to 2015, Newitz was editor-in-chief of Gawker-owned media venture io9, and subsequently its direct descendant Gizmodo, Gawker's design and technology blog. They have written for the periodicals Popular Science, Film Quarterly and Wired. As of 2019, Newitz is a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times.

Early life

Newitz was born in 1969, and grew up in Irvine, California, graduating from Irvine High School, and in 1987 moved to Berkeley, California. In 1996, Newitz started doing freelance writing, and in 1998 completed a Ph.D. in English and American Studies from UC Berkeley, with a dissertation on images of monsters, psychopaths, and capitalism in twentieth century American popular culture, the content of which later appeared in book form from Duke University Press. Around 1999, Newitz co-founded the Post-World War II American Literature and Culture Database in an attempt to chronicle modern literature and popular culture.

Career

Newitz became a full-time writer and journalist in 1999 with an invitation to write a weekly column for the Metro Silicon Valley, a column which then ran in various venues for nine years. Then they served as the culture editor at the San Francisco Bay Guardian from 2000 to 2004. Newitz was awarded a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship for 2002 to 2003, supporting them as a research fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 2004 to 2005 Newitz was a policy analyst for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and from 2007 to 2009 was on the board of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders, a Hugo award-winning author and commentator, co-founded Other magazine. In 2008, Gawker media asked Newitz to start a blog about science and science fiction, dubbed io9, for which Newitz served as editor-in-chief from its founding until 2015 when it merged with Gizmodo, another Gawker media design and technology blog property; Newitz then took on the same leadership of the new venture. In November 2015, Newitz left Gawker to join Ars Technica, where Newitz has been employed as tech culture editor since December 2015. Newitz is a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times. Newitz's first novel, Autonomous, was published in 2017. Autonomous won the Lambda Literary Award and was nominated for the Nebula Award and Locus Award in 2018 for best novel. Newitz's second novel, The Future of Another Timeline, published in 2019, was described on their website as: "[...] about time travel and what it would be like to meet yourself as a teenager and have a really, really intense conversation with her about how fucked up your high school friends are." The book was received with acclaim by critics, and was a nominee for the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. Their 2014 non-fiction science book Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize. They also wrote Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age, published in 2021. They have also written for publications including Wired, Popular Science, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Slate, The Washington Post, Smithsonian, and more. They have published short stories in Lightspeed, Shimmer Magazine, Apex, and Technology Review's Twelve Tomorrows. In March 2018, with their partner and co-host Charlie Jane Anders, Newitz launched the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct, which "explor[es] the meaning of science fiction, and how it's relevant to real-life science and society." The podcast won the Hugo Award for Best Fancast in 2019.

Personal life

Newitz is the child of two English teachers. Their mother, Cynthia, worked at a high school, and their father, Marty, at a community college. Since 2000, Newitz has been in a relationship with Charlie Jane Anders. The two began the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct in March 2018. Newitz has used singular they pronouns since 2019.

Venues

Awards and nominations

Novels

Short stories

Non-fiction