News | Annalee Newitz

My latest short story, “The Weird Visa” is up on The Message

January 4, 2016

Medium’s magazine The Message has just published my story “The Weird Visa,” which was inspired by editor Evan Hanson asking me what I thought would happen if there were an ISIS crackdown on social media. Of course, I immediately thought of all the innocent people who would be caught up in the data-mining mess that would no doubt ensue. Read about one such innocent, Bill Hernandez, whose Rolod.ex account has just been blocked for no apparent reason…

“On the Media” Interviews Me About the Ashley Madison Fembots

September 30, 2015

In this episode of NPR’s On the Media, you can hear me talk about my series about sifting through emails, databases and source code to discover what was really going on at “cheater” site Ashley Madison. It was great to discuss how data journalism works — and what it means that the people you’re flirting with online may not be real.

Read My Four-Part Series About the Ashley Madison Fembot Scandal

September 30, 2015

In this series, I did a realtime data analysis of the leaked Ashley Madison “data dump,” which included company emails, part of their membership database, credit card transactions, and source code. It was particularly interesting because in my first article I misunderstood an odd data anomaly in the membership database — and when readers pointed out the misunderstanding, it led to an even more bizarre discovery, which you can read about in Part III and Part IV. You can read my whole Ashley Madison data dump series in these articles on Gizmodo:

Part I: Almost None of the Women in the Ashley Madison Database Ever Used the Site

Part II: The Fembots of Ashley Madison

Part III: Ashley Madison Code Shows More Women, and More Bots

Part IV: How Ashley Madison Hid Its Fembot Con from Users and Investigators

The Information Age Is Over. Welcome to the Infrastructure Age.

July 22, 2015

Nobody wants to say it outright, but the Apple Watch sucks. So do most smartwatches. Every time I use my beautiful Moto 360, its lack of functionality makes me despair. But the problem isn’t our gadgets. It’s that the future of consumer tech isn’t going to come from information devices. It’s going to come from infrastructure.

See my manifesto for infrastructure at Gizmodo.

Drones Don’t Kill People

July 22, 2015

Check out my short story about what happens when drones start an anti-war movement. It’s in Lightspeed Magazine.

Mass Extinction Events: Why They Happen, and When

July 22, 2015

I had a blast doing this interview with the folks from How Stuff Works. We talked about Earth’s biggest extinction events, and what caused them to happen.

Lee Hotz Interviews Me for NYU’s “Inside Out” Series

January 14, 2015

Inside Out: Annalee Newitz from NYU Journalism on Vimeo.

NYU puts on a series of interviews with science journalists before a live audience of students and interested members of the community. I participated in November 2014, and had a blast. Now you can watch the video!

Will online conflict lead to war?

January 13, 2015

The New York Times‘ Anna North interviewed me about the future, and we talked about everything from online political movements and war, to the rise of cyborgs and the return of Occupy. Check it out!

Here’s my presentation from the Authors@Google series

May 14, 2014

I spoke in the Authors@Google series last month. Now you can watch on YouTube!

Interview on The Rumpus: Species that Survive

May 14, 2014

The fantastic author Jeff VanderMeer interviewed me for The Rumpus about my book, the future of the environment, and species that survive mass extinctions. He asked great questions — it’s a really comprehensive interview.