Annalee Newitz
Annalee Newitz
Annalee Newitzis an American journalist, editor, and author of both fiction and nonfiction. She is the recipient of a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship from MIT, and has written for periodicals such as Popular Science and Wired. From 1999 to 2008 she wrote a syndicated weekly column called Techsploitation, and from 2000–2004 she was the culture editor of the San Francisco Bay Guardian. In 2004 she became a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She also co-founded other magazine with...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
CountryUnited States of America
We have converted huge swaths of land and ocean into human habitats where we live and grow food and harvest energy. But there's been a sea change in the past century.
If we return abruptly to a Miocene-like climate, it's reasonable to think that we would experience a lot of extinctions, and maybe even a mass extinction in the long term. Would the life on Earth be radically different? Of course we can't say for sure, but I think a lot of it would look familiar. Like a lot of people, I worry a lot about whether marine mammals would survive, especially whales. Ocean acidification is one of the major killers in climate change events, and that makes the ocean a very inhospitable place.
Critics have called alien epic 'Avatar' a version of 'Dances With Wolves' because it's about a white guy going native and becoming a great leader. But Avatar is just the latest scifi rehash of an old white guilt fantasy.
Science fiction is exciting because it promises to show the world and the universe from perspectives radically unlike what we've seen before.
Put simply, 'Interstellar' has a strong undercurrent of cheesiness.
Publishers often push women in a subtle way to focus on fantasy and paranormal writing.
Radio Shack is meeting the fate of many other stores that were wildly popular in the twentieth century, including record stores, comic book stores, bookstores and video stores.
Reader was by far the most popular feed reader out there, and its user base had been in a steep decline for two years before Google decided to shut it down.
People who gentrify are usually new transplants to a city, changing it to suit their particular cultural needs and whims.
Technological change is both familiar and easy to observe.
RSS, as a format and an idea, grew directly out of an internet culture that many people online today know nothing about: Usenet.
Michel Gondry's 'Green Hornet' was another franchise flick that felt like it came out of left field - I thought in a good way, but most audiences disagreed.
Whether 'Avatar' is racist is a matter for debate. Regardless of where you come down on that question, it's undeniable that the film - like alien apartheid flick 'District 9', released earlier this year - is emphatically a fantasy about race.
When it comes to the population explosion, there are two questions on the table. One, is our population growth going to kill us all? And two, is there any ethical way to prevent that from happening?