Quotes from Annalee Newitz

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.'

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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?

Fifty years ago, historians advised politicians and policy-makers. They helped chart the future of nations by helping leaders learn from past mistakes in history. But then something changed, and we began making decisions based on economic principles rather than historical ones. The results were catastrophic.

Technological change is both familiar and easy to observe.

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

But now we know there has been no one great disaster—only the slow-motion disaster of capitalism converting every living thing and idea into property.

For all the robots who question their programming.

Everybody is an outsider, if you go deep enough. The trick is reassuring people that you're their kind of outsider.

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