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.