Quotes About Newitz

#1. And there's nothing wrong with spinsters, anyway. They have nice cats and little bowls full of candy. Mrs. Bailey and Mrs. Newitz are the kindest ladies you'll ever meet, and they have nips of whiskey in their tea like cowboys.

Catherynne M Valente

#2. I think a lot of us responded intensely to 'True Detective' because it was so incredibly earnest. That's what made it heartbreaking and involving.

Annalee Newitz

#3. Publishers often push women in a subtle way to focus on fantasy and paranormal writing.

Annalee Newitz

#4. 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.

Annalee Newitz

#5. I think small animals can escape from many kinds of natural disaster more easily. There are just more places for them to hide, and more ways for them to find safe habitats. So this means that rats are set up to rule the Earth, but most of us already knew that. Now you know why.

Annalee Newitz

#6. 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.

Annalee Newitz

#7. The myth that young people should leave the nest at 18, never to return, started with iconic American Benjamin Franklin.

Annalee Newitz

#8. 'World War Z' is basically a big-budget B-movie.

Annalee Newitz

#9. When Usenet was eclipsed by websites in the late 1990s, people from that world - many of them programmers - wanted to bring the freewheeling, amazing discussions of Usenet to the web. And thus, RSS was born.

Annalee Newitz

#10. The U.N.'s current projection is that humanity will number 9.3 billion individuals in 2050 and then hit 10.1 billion by 2100. Meanwhile, our energy resources are dwindling, and droughts threaten our food supplies.

Annalee Newitz

#11. The novel 'World War Z' is told from the perspectives of so many people - speaking to the narrator - that there's no way a movie could capture all of them. Still, the idea of turning a zombie pandemic into a war story is fascinating and could have translated easily to film.

Annalee Newitz

#12. If we lose bees, we may be looking at losing apples and oranges. We may be looking at losing a great deal of other crops, as well, and other animals that depend on those crops.

Annalee Newitz

#13. 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?

Annalee Newitz

#14. So science alone cannot solve this problem [mass extinction of humans]. It's something that we can only tackle by bringing science together with culture, economics, and even politics.

Annalee Newitz

#15. I believe that it's fine if [the] university wants to regulate, for example, bandwidth access, but they should treat the students data as private data.

Annalee Newitz

#16. Once you've worked as a writer and editor in the world of social media for a decade, the way I have, you start to notice patterns.

Annalee Newitz

#17. When I was a lecturer at UC Berkeley, I wrote a book about monsters.

Annalee Newitz

#18. Evolution, climate change, and the construction of the physical universe down to its atoms are processes that we measure in millions or billions of years.

Annalee Newitz

#19. Turning a zombie pandemic into a generic disaster movie robs the zombies of their dirty, nasty edginess and robs the disaster of its epic scope.

Annalee Newitz

#20. Cities might become biological entities, walls hung with curtains of algae that glow at night and sequester carbon, and floors made from tweaked cellular material that strengthens like bones as we walk on it.

Annalee Newitz

#21. Utopian speculations ... must come back into fashion. They are a way of affirming faith in the possibility of solving problems that seem at the moment insoluble. Today even the survival of humanity is a utopian hope.

Norman O. Brown

#22. Watching 'Interstellar' is really like watching two movies slowly collide with each other.

Annalee Newitz

#23. In many cities, it's become popular to hate 'gentrifiers,' rich people who move in and drive up housing prices - pushing everyone else out.

Annalee Newitz

#24. What can we expect from this latest crop of indie directors who have been sucked into the franchise factory? I'm especially curious about 'Star Wars,' which will feature an all-indie crew after J. J. Abrams finishes with 'Episode VII.'

Annalee Newitz

#25. In the 1970s, as historians became enchanted with microhistories, economists were expanding the reach of their discipline. Nations, states and cities began to plan for the future by consulting with economists whose prognostications were shaped by investment cycles rather than historical ones.

Annalee Newitz

#26. Your fragile mind can't have forgotten the terrifying technothriller series known 'Scorpion'. Because it features the worst hacking scenes ever broadcast in any medium.

Annalee Newitz

#27. 'Interstellar' is a thematic sequel to Christopher Nolan's last original film, 'Inception'. It drops us into a dark future full of otherworldly landscapes and time distortions.

Annalee Newitz

#28. Sometimes it's hard to take everyday concerns seriously when you think about vanished ecosystems that existed 300 million years ago and were eradicated by giant explosions. My goals haven't changed, because my goal has always been to save the world!

Annalee Newitz

#29. Max Brooks' novel 'World War Z' is one of the greatest zombie stories ever written, partly for reasons that make it basically unfilmable.

Annalee Newitz

#30. You are ruled by change whether you like it or not, and io9's future path lies with joining a larger site that covers technology as well as science and science fiction.

Annalee Newitz

#31. I am a big proponent of character arcs that show us how people change over time.

Annalee Newitz

#32. A hundred years ago, this City[...]'s energy production, its food and fuel, came from all over the world, often traveling thousands of miles. People used energy just to ship more energy to the places that needed it. When you're high on fossil fuel fumes, I guess almost anything can make sense.

Annalee Newitz

#33. RSS, as a format and an idea, grew directly out of an internet culture that many people online today know nothing about: Usenet.

Annalee Newitz

#34. The first time I saw 'Star Wars,' I got so excited that I threw up.

Annalee Newitz

#35. When I was a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, I became obsessed with end user license agreements.

Annalee Newitz

#36. Before the 21st century, stories became popular because people talked about them in other publications or shared magazine and newspaper clippings with friends.

Annalee Newitz

#37. With technology tracking us everywhere we go, 'cosplay' might become our best defense against surveillance.

Annalee Newitz

#38. I disagree that we need to contemplate eliminating ourselves in order to move forward. Sure, I think a good dystopian story can serve to steer us on the right path toward a better world. But we also need stories that offer solutions to our problems that are realistic, and workable today.

Annalee Newitz

#39. Technological change is both familiar and easy to observe.

Annalee Newitz

#40. In terms of fiction, there are a number of writers who are thinking about the future of the environment whose work complements mine. Kim Stanley Robinson's novel 2312 is a great example, as is Tobias Buckell's novel Arctic Rising.

Annalee Newitz

#41. Part of what I wanted to do in my book was point out that we have almost reached the point where we can prevent a mass extinction with the science and technology we have today. We can build carbon neutral cities.

Annalee Newitz

#42. A series of studies in the 1990s and 2000s revealed that as women gained more access to education, jobs, and birth control, they had fewer children. As a result, developed countries in western Europe, Japan, and the Americas were seeing zero or negative population growth.

Annalee Newitz

#43. Humans are a great survivor species but our survival will be pretty grim if all of the plants and animals we depend on die out. That's why any human survival strategy has to include a plan to maintain our environment roughly in the state that it's in now.

Annalee Newitz

#44. We sometimes allow writers to publish their work without editing on io9.

Annalee Newitz

#45. If outsider perspectives made 'Lord of the Rings' and 'Dark Knight' into fantastic franchises, imagine what would happen if you brought in the perspectives of women and people of color.

Annalee Newitz

#46. Everything I had read in the fields of fiction and science led me to a single, dark conclusion. Humans are screwed, and so is our planet.

Annalee Newitz

#47. Using predictive models from engineering and public health, designers will plan safer, healthier cities that could allow us to survive natural disasters, pandemics, and even a radiation calamity that drives us underground.

Annalee Newitz

#48. I try to be realistic and pragmatic. I have a lot of hope for humanity as a species, but obviously as individuals we can be extremely flawed. We may have to go through some very terrible times in the near future, even if we ultimately survive as Homo sapiens.

Annalee Newitz

#49. If you love epic space opera, you shouldn't miss 'Interstellar'.

Annalee Newitz

#50. Women are being welcomed into science fiction, but it's through the back door.

Annalee Newitz

#51. There can be problems with extended families, and it can get a little close for comfort. But for the younger generations, it's clear that this option is becoming almost as appealing as living alone.

Annalee Newitz

#52. 'The Red' delivers intense action, leavened by a genuinely sympathetic portrait of soldiers caught up in battles they never chose.

Annalee Newitz

#53. At last we've seen the first installment of Joss Whedon's new web series, 'Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog,' and it's sweeter than we'd ever imagined.

Annalee Newitz

#54. To share a story is in part to take ownership of it, especially because you are often able to comment on a story that you are sharing on social media.

Annalee Newitz

#55. Back in the 1980s, you could learn how to add memory cards to your PC in a Radio Shack.

Annalee Newitz

#56. I think in the long run, it will be better for us if we solve our problems without suffering through some terrible disaster. I like the idea of change without Apocalypse.

Annalee Newitz

#57. 'The Red' is the first book in a trilogy that gained a big following as a self-published e-book, and is now out in paper from Saga. It introduces us to reluctant hero Shelley, a former anti-war activist who chooses to join the military rather than serve jail time after being arrested at a protest.

Annalee Newitz

#58. 'Avatar' imaginatively revisits the crime scene of white America's foundational act of genocide, in which entire native tribes and civilizations were wiped out by European immigrants to the American continent.

Annalee Newitz

#59. We're seeing a new 'Gilded Age,' where inheritance is a deciding factor in who becomes the wealthiest.

Annalee Newitz

#60. It's only been in the past two generations that we truly understood the impact our civilization has had on the natural world. To our credit as a species, we have turned this obscure scientific fact about carbon cycles into one of the most important political issues of the 21st century.

Annalee Newitz

#61. Science fiction is exciting because it promises to show the world and the universe from perspectives radically unlike what we've seen before.

Annalee Newitz

#62. 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.

Annalee Newitz

#63. 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.

Annalee Newitz

#64. The fact that we have been able to perturb the carbon cycle with our industrial revolution is evidence of how vulnerable we are - because when we destroy our environments, we destroy our food and energy supplies. In short, we destroy ourselves.

Annalee Newitz

#65. A hard-hitting investigative report that uncovers a nugget of genuine truth is the ultimate viral hit.

Annalee Newitz

#66. Capitalism is, fundamentally, an economic system that promotes inequality.

Annalee Newitz

#67. Survivor species tend to have huge populations, so they can afford to lose many individuals and still survive as a species. They also tend to be small. If you're small, you need less food - which is great in a situation where famine is everywhere.

Annalee Newitz

#68. I am sorry you have to live in the time of terraforming, and not in the spring that follows.

Annalee Newitz

#69. People who gentrify are usually new transplants to a city, changing it to suit their particular cultural needs and whims.

Annalee Newitz

#70. If we look at the past two centuries of economic history in Europe and the United States, we see an astounding pattern. Capital will accumulate in a tiny portion of the population, no matter what we do.

Annalee Newitz

#71. We can celebrate how far we've come from our sexist past when women and men are equally represented in the pages of science fiction anthologies.

Annalee Newitz

#72. Economic systems rise and fall just like empires. That's the kind of perspective we need to take if we hope to prosper for centuries rather than for the next quarter.

Annalee Newitz

#73. Io9 was the last standalone site that Gawker Media ever launched. It was born at a time when many of the company's other famous sites, from Consumerist and Wonkette to Fleshbot and Idolator, were being sold off or shuttered.

Annalee Newitz

#74. Put simply, 'Interstellar' has a strong undercurrent of cheesiness.

Annalee Newitz

#75. Cities are not static objects to be feared or admired, but are instead a living process that residents are changing all the time.

Annalee Newitz

#76. Humans have obviously contributed a great deal of carbon to the atmosphere. So we are warming the planet up.

Annalee Newitz

#77. It is true that I will confess that I have an incredible fascination for pop-culture stories about the Apocalypse and the end of the world.

Annalee Newitz

#78. I'm going to have to class 'True Detective's first season with so many other shows that were great until the final episode(s) and then lost their way. I still love this show, but I would have preferred no ending at all to this one.

Annalee Newitz

#79. A group of scientists wanted to find the most effective mosquito repellents. So they tested 10 different substances, including campout standbys like DEET, as well as a random choice: Victoria's Secret perfume Bombshell. Turns out the perfume is almost as good as DEET.

Annalee Newitz

#80. When I was a journalist at Wired, I convinced a doctor to implant an RFID tracking device in my arm.

Annalee Newitz

#81. To understand the future properly, it's crucial that we listen to geologists as often as we do computer scientists.

Annalee Newitz

#82. Suddenly, all the giant Hollywood franchises are being driven by alternative filmmakers.

Annalee Newitz

#83. Gentrification is a form of immigration, though almost nobody calls it that.

Annalee Newitz

#84. 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.

Annalee Newitz

#85. Think we're still stuck in that agricultural mindset, where we imagine that we can shape the Earth. Sure, we can do that. But the Earth has the power to shape us much more powerfully. To survive climate change, we'll have to realize how dependent we are on our ecosystems for our own survival.

Annalee Newitz

#86. As fears about the energy and environmental crises reach a fever pitch, we're all searching for solutions. And one possibility is that we could fix everything if we'd just shrink our population back down to about 2 billion people - which would put us roughly where we were at 80 years ago.

Annalee Newitz

#87. Millions of nerdy kids who grew up in the 1980s could only find the components they needed at local Radio Shacks, and the stores were like a lifeline to a better world where everybody understood computers.

Annalee Newitz

#88. Evolutionary psychology has often been a field whose most prominent practitioners get embroiled in controversy - witness the 2010 case of Harvard professor Marc Hauser, whose graduate students came forward to say he'd been faking evidence for years.

Annalee Newitz

#89. I founded io9 back in 2008, and I watched it journey from the farthest reaches of space to its current home under this atmosphere bubble on Ceres.

Annalee Newitz

#90. When you consider that our technology has advanced from the first telephones to smart phones in roughly a century, it's easy to understand why it seems like tomorrow is arriving faster than it ever did.

Annalee Newitz