Join bestelling author Annalee Newitz in conversation with journalist and KQED Forum co-host Alexis Madrigal on Newitz’s new book, Stories are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind.
In Stories Are Weapons, 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. America’s secret weapon has long been coercive storytelling. Now, through a weapons-transfer program long unacknowledged, psyops have found their way into the hands of culture warriors, transforming democratic debates into toxic wars over American identity. Crucially, Newitz delivers a powerful counternarrative, speaking with the researchers and activists who are outlining a pathway to achieving psychological disarmament and cultural peace. Incisive and essential, Stories are Weapons reveals how our minds have been turned into blood-soaked battlegrounds—and how we can put down our weapons to build something better.
Annalee Newitz writes science fiction and nonfiction. They are the author of three novels: The Terraformers, The Future of Another Timeline, and Autonomous, which won the Lambda Literary Award. As a science journalist, they are the author of Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age and Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction, which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize in science. They are a writer for the New York Times and elsewhere, and have a monthly column in New Scientist. They have published in The Washington Post, Slate, Popular Science, Ars Technica, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among others. They are the co-host of the Hugo Award-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. Previously, they were the founder of io9, and served as the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.
Alexis Madrigal is the co-host of KQED's Forum and a contributing writer at The Atlantic. He co-founded The COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic and was the editor-in-chief of Fusion at Univision. He's working on a book about Oakland and transnational capitalism's effects on urban America with MCD, an imprint of FSG. He's been a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Information School and UC Berkeley's Center for the Study of Technology, Science, and Medicine as well as an affiliate with Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. He's the author of Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology and is the proprietor of the Oakland Garden Club.
