Annalee Newitz has been in they Bay Area since 1987, when she was an undergrad at UC Berkeley. She stayed on and did a Ph.D. at Berkeley, where she edited a book on white trash and started Bad Subjects, one of the first online magazines. After finishing her doctrate, Annalee did a brief sting teaching in the English and American Studies departments before abandoning academia behind and moving to San Francisco to become a full-time writer. Her first job was working as an editor with RU Sirius at Gettingit.com, the best underground magazine that nobody ever heard of. Annalee spent the next few years as an editor at the excellent San Francisco Bay Guardian, and now works as a policy analyst at the civil liberties organization Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Through it all, Annalee has written her weekly syndicated column Techsploitation (now with an RSS feed), and has freelanced for places like Salon, Wired, Popular Science, and The Believer.

Special thanks to our editor, Jackson, who charmed Annalee into doing this interview with his boozy, blogging ways.

Name
Annalee Newitz

Introduce yourself in one sentence
I can kill you with my mind.

Age and Occupation
35, writer and analyst

Home Town
San Francisco

Favorite website
I have to pick *one*? That's so 1993. How about if I tell you my favorite layer of the OSI Reference Model? Surprise -- it's the application layer!

Favorite local business
Le Video.

What I'm currently Reading
Hm. _Lincoln's Dreams_ by Connie Willis, _No Place to Hide_ by Robert O'Harrow, "Nymity, P2P, and ISPs" by Ian Kerr and Alex Cameron, and _Man into Woman_,edited by Niels Hoyer.

Best Deal in San Francisco
Dinner at Naan and Curry.

Favorite mode of transportation
Walking.

Best Band or Musician to come out of the Bay Area
Sagan.

Favorite local hangout
Maxfield's House of Caffeine.

SF has the BEST:
Perverts

You've never lived in SF until:
You've seen the ruins of the Sutro Baths at Ocean Beach.

Favorite Bay area politician of past or present:
I like the 1970s-era Jerry Brown. But not the present-day one.

You can tell someone is a local here IF:
They know the fastest route from the Mission to the Haight.

SF would be soooo much better if only:
There were more bus lines and the busses came more often.

Best Burrito:
Taqueria Cancun

Best Restaurant:
Too many to name! Currently obsessed with Emmy's Spaghetti Shack, Citizen Cake, and Burma Super Star.

Best movie scene filmed in or about SF:
When the giant octopus tries to eat the Ferry Building in It Came From Beneath the Sea.

Favorite artist to come out of the bay area:
Mark Pauline

Favorite author to come out of the bay area:
Frank Norris, Allen Ginsberg, Gertrude Stein, John Marr, Judith Butler, R. Crumb, Adrian Tomine, Lawrence Lessig, Carol Queen, etc. etc.

Place you always tell visitors to check out:
Clement Street

Favorite Bridge in the area:
Bay Bridge

You have two hours and $15 bucks to kill in SF, what are you going to do?
First, buy a cheap used science fiction novel at Borderlands Books. Then read it while eating a melty cheese sandwich at Tartine and sipping one of those giant bowls of latte. The absolutely perfect afternoon.

I have found/sold/bought the following on craigslist:
Gave away: old 22" Sony Trinitron TV. Bought: housecleaning services from a nice art history graduate student who taught me about the Earthworks movement.

I want all the SFists out there to know:
That Jackson West is absolutely the most interesting blogger to get intoxicated with in San Francisco.

Tell us a San Francisco Story:
I was working on a story for Wired which is partly about these fMRI studies at Rutgers University that focused on women who can induce orgasms merely by thinking. The researchers were of course very interested to see what this looked like in the women's brains, and I was going to interview a woman who had participated in the studies as a test subject. I had her name and phone number on my desk because I was going to call her, and my girlfriend saw it. She said, "Hey, that's the girl I'm going out on a date with next week! Are you dating her too?" I said no and explained the situation, which left my girlfriend pretty excited about her upcoming date. Anyway, I interviewed the woman the following week. But then I randomly ran into her at an event shortly thereafter. She was dressed as a man -- looked very hot, by the way -- and told me all about how she's studying to be a minister. F***, I just love the Bay Area.

Question you'd ask if you were doing this interview:
What is your favorite local blog? Your favorite blogging software? Your theory about who really invented RSS?