Quotes by Annalee Newitz

Are we not witnessing a strange tableau of survival whenever a bird alights on the head of a crocodile, bringing together the evolutionary offspring of Triassic and Jurassic?

How many times had Paladin looked into this human face, its features animated by neurological impulse alone? He did not know. Even if he were to sort through his video memories and count them up one by one, he still didnt think he would have the right answer. But after todays mission, human faces would always look different to him. They would remind him of what it felt like to suffer, and to be relieved of suffering.

As UC Berkeley economics professor Brad DeLong put it to me:You get famine if the price of food spikes far beyond that of some peoples means. This can be because food is short, objectively. This can be because the rich have bid the resources normally used to produce food away to other uses. You also get famine when the price of food is moderate if the incomes of large groups collapse.... In all of this, the lesson is that a properly functioning market does not seek to advance human happiness but rather to advance human wealth. What speaks in the market is money: purchasing power. If you have no money, you have no voice in the market. The market acts as if it does not know you exist and does not care whether you live or die.DeLong describes a marketplace that leaves people to die - not out of malice , but out of indifference.

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.

io9 was the last standalone site that Gawker Media ever launched. It was born at a time when many of the companys other famous sites, from Consumerist and Wonkette to Fleshbot and Idolator, were being sold off or shuttered.

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

Women are being welcomed into science fiction, but its through the back door.

Were seeing a new Gilded Age, where inheritance is a deciding factor in who becomes the wealthiest.

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.

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

Humans have continued to evolve quite a lot over the past ten thousand years, and certainly over 100 thousand. Sure, our biology affects our behavior. But its unlikely that humans early evolution is deeply relevant to contemporary psychological questions about dating or the willpower to complete a dissertation.

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

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

“Are we not witnessing a strange tableau of survival whenever a bird alights on the head of a crocodile, bringing together the evolutionary offspring of Triassic and Jurassic?”