Mostly I write books of the nonfiction and fiction varieties.

My first novel, Autonomous, come out from Tor in September 2017. I’m also the author of Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction (Doubleday and Anchor), which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize in science. I am currently working on another novel for Tor, as well as a nonfiction book for W.W. Norton about ancient abandoned cities.

I’m the founding editor of io9, and was the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo. I’m currently an editor-at-large for Ars Technica, as well as a freelancer for magazines and newspapers.

My nonfiction has appeared in Slate, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Wired, The Smithsonian Magazine, The Washington Post, 2600, New Scientist, Technology Review, Popular Science, Discover and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. I’m the co-editor of the essay collection She’s Such A Geek (Seal Press), and author of Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture (Duke University Press).

Formerly, I was a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and a lecturer in American Studies at UC Berkeley. I was the recipient of a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT, and have a Ph.D. in English and American Studies from UC Berkeley.