Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind | Annalee Newitz

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.

About the Author

Annalee Newitz writes fiction and nonfiction about the intersection of science, technology and culture.

Their first novel, Autonomous, won the Lambda Literary Award and was nominated for the Nebula and Locus Awards. Their book Scatter, Adapt, and Remember was nominated for the LA Times Book Award. They are currently a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times. Previously, they were the founding editor of io9, and served as the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo and as the tech culture editor at Ars Technica. They have also written for publications including Wired, Popular Science, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Slate, Washington Post, Smithsonian Magazine, and more. They have published short stories in Lightspeed, Shimmer, Apex, and Technology Review's Twelve Tomorrows.

Annalee is the co-host of the Hugo Award-winning podcast, Our Opinions Are Correct.

They were the recipient of a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT, worked as a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and has a Ph.D. in English and American Studies from UC Berkeley.

Learn more at AnnaleeNewitz.com or follow them on Twitter @annaleen.