Non-Fiction Books

In Pretend We’re Dead , Annalee Newitz argues that the slimy zombies and gore-soaked murderers who have stormed through American film and literature over the past century embody the violent contradictions of capitalism. Ravaged by overwork, alienated by corporate conformity, and mutilated by the unfettered lust for profit, fictional monsters act out the problems with an economic system that seems designed to eat people whole. Newitz looks at representations of serial killers, mad doctors, the undead, cyborgs, and unfortunates mutated by their involvement with the mass media industry. Whether considering the serial killer who turns murder into a kind of labor by mass producing dead bodies, or the hack writers and bloodthirsty actresses trapped inside Hollywood’s profit-mad storytelling machine, she reveals that each creature has its own tale to tell about how a freewheeling market economy turns human beings into monstrosities. Newitz tracks the monsters spawned by capitalism through b movies, Hollywood blockbusters, pulp fiction, and American literary classics, looking at their manifestations in works such as Norman Mailer’s “true life novel” The Executioner’s Song ; the short stories of Isaac Asimov and H. P. Lovecraft; the cyberpunk novels of William Gibson and Marge Piercy; true-crime books about the serial killers Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer; and movies including Modern Times (1936), Donovan’s Brain (1953), Night of the Living Dead (1968), RoboCop (1987), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), and Artificial Intelligence: AI (2001). Newitz shows that as literature and film tell it, the story of American capitalism since the late nineteenth century is a tale of body-mangling, soul-crushing horror.

As a species, Homo sapiens is at a crossroads. Study of our planet’s turbulent past suggests  that we are overdue for a catastrophic disaster, whether caused by nature or by human  interference. It’s a frightening prospect, as each of the Earth’s past major disasters resulted  in a mass extinction, where more than 75 percent of the planet’s species died out. But in Scatter, Adapt, and Remember , Annalee Newitz explains that although global disaster is  all but inevitable, our chances of long-term species survival are better than ever. This brilliantly speculative work of popular science focuses on humanity’s long history  of dodging the bullet, as well as on new threats that we may face in years to come. Most  important, it explores how scientific breakthroughs today will help us avoid disasters  tomorrow. From simulating tsunamis, to studying central Turkey’s ancient underground  cities, to designing space elevators to make space colonies cost-effective—scientists and  researchers the world over are discovering the keys to long-term resilience and learning  how humans can choose life over death. Newitz’s remarkable and fascinating journey through the science of mass extinctions  is a powerful argument about human ingenuity and our ability to change. In a world  populated by doomsday preppers and media commentators obsessively forecasting our  demise, Scatter, Adapt, and Remember is a compelling voice of hope.

One of Publishers Weekly 's Top 10 Politics/Current Events books of Spring 2024 “Newitz is so skillful at elucidating such a tangled, morally contentious history that I never felt lost.” ?Jennifer Szalai, New York Times A sharp and timely exploration of the dark art of manipulation through weaponized storytelling, from the best-selling author of Four Lost Cities . In Stories Are Weapons , best-selling author Annalee Newitz traces the way disinformation, propaganda, and violent threats—the essential tool kit for psychological warfare—have evolved from military weapons deployed against foreign adversaries into tools in domestic culture wars. Newitz delves into America’s deep-rooted history with psychological operations, beginning with Benjamin Franklin’s Revolutionary War–era fake newspaper and nineteenth-century wars on Indigenous nations, and reaching its apotheosis with the Cold War and twenty-first-century influence campaigns online. America’s secret weapon has long been coercive storytelling. And there’s a reason for that: operatives who shaped modern psychological warfare drew on their experiences as science fiction writers and in the advertising industry. Now, through a weapons-transfer program long unacknowledged, psyops have found their way into the hands of culture warriors, transforming democratic debates into toxic wars over American identity. Newitz zeroes in on conflicts over race and intelligence, school board fights over LGBT students, and campaigns against feminist viewpoints, revealing how, in each case, specific groups of Americans are singled out and treated as enemies of the state. Crucially, Newitz delivers a powerful counternarrative, speaking with the researchers and activists who are outlining a pathway to achieving psychological disarmament and cultural peace. Incisive and essential, Stories are Weapons reveals how our minds have been turned into blood-soaked battlegrounds—and how we can put down our weapons to build something better.