Annalee Newitz - Life and Career

Life and Career

Newitz was born in 1969, the daughter of two English teachers – her mother, Cynthia, teaching high school, and her father, Marty, at community college — and grew up in Irvine, California. She once called herself "biethnic", as her father was born Jewish and her mother is a white Southerner and former Methodist who converted to Reform Judaism.

She graduated from Irvine High School, and in 1987 moved to Berkeley, California. In 1996, Newitz started doing some of her own freelance writing, and in 1998, she received a PhD in English and American Studies from UC Berkeley, with a dissertation on images of monsters, psychopaths, and capitalism in twentieth century American popular culture (later published as a book). She worked briefly as an adjunct professor, and in 1999 became a fulltime writer and journalist.

In 2002, she was awarded a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship, and was a research fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 2004–2005 she was a policy analyst for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and from 2007–2009 she was on the board of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.

She is partners with author Charlie Anders. The couple co-founded other magazine, a tri-annual periodical which ran from 2002 to 2007, and was described as "pop culture and politics for the new outcast". In 2008, Gawker media asked Newitz to start a blog about science and science fiction, which was dubbed io9. Newitz has remained editor-in-chief since its founding, and in 2010, io9 was named one of the top 30 science blogs by The Times.