In many cities, it's become popular to hate 'gentrifiers,' rich people who move in and drive up housing prices - pushing everyone else out.
— Annalee Newitz
Before the 21st century, stories became popular because people talked about them in other publications or shared magazine and newspaper clippings with friends.
The first time I saw 'Star Wars,' I got so excited that I threw up.
When I was a lecturer at UC Berkeley, I wrote a book about monsters.
You've probably heard the stories about how io9 got its name. And maybe you know that io9 co-founder Charlie Jane Anders and I were inspired by Kathy Keeton, whose groundbreaking magazine 'Omni' combined coverage of real science with science fiction. But what you probably don't know is how unlikely it was that io9 ever succeeded at all.
When Usenet was eclipsed by websites in the late 1990s, people from that world - many of them programmers - wanted to bring the freewheeling, amazing discussions of Usenet to the web. And thus, RSS was born.
Science fiction is exciting because it promises to show the world and the universe from perspectives radically unlike what we've seen before.
Critics have called alien epic 'Avatar' a version of 'Dances With Wolves' because it's about a white guy going native and becoming a great leader. But Avatar is just the latest scifi rehash of an old white guilt fantasy.
There is evidence that we are headed into what would be the planet's sixth mass extinction. It's hard to know for sure if you're in one because a mass extinction is an event where over 75 percent of the species on the planet die out over a - usually about a million-year period. The fastest it might happen is in hundreds of thousands of years.
To share a story is in part to take ownership of it, especially because you are often able to comment on a story that you are sharing on social media.
Once you've worked as a writer and editor in the world of social media for a decade, the way I have, you start to notice patterns.
When I was a journalist at Wired, I convinced a doctor to implant an RFID tracking device in my arm.
You are ruled by change whether you like it or not, and io9's future path lies with joining a larger site that covers technology as well as science and science fiction.
I founded io9 back in 2008, and I watched it journey from the farthest reaches of space to its current home under this atmosphere bubble on Ceres.
RSS, as a format and an idea, grew directly out of an internet culture that many people online today know nothing about: Usenet.
'Avatar' imaginatively revisits the crime scene of white America's foundational act of genocide, in which entire native tribes and civilizations were wiped out by European immigrants to the American continent.
If we lose bees, we may be looking at losing apples and oranges. We may be looking at losing a great deal of other crops, as well, and other animals that depend on those crops.
It is true that I will confess that I have an incredible fascination for pop-culture stories about the Apocalypse and the end of the world.
A hard-hitting investigative report that uncovers a nugget of genuine truth is the ultimate viral hit.
We sometimes allow writers to publish their work without editing on io9.
When I was a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, I became obsessed with end user license agreements.
io9 was the last standalone site that Gawker Media ever launched. It was born at a time when many of the company's other famous sites, from Consumerist and Wonkette to Fleshbot and Idolator, were being sold off or shuttered.
At last we've seen the first installment of Joss Whedon's new web series, 'Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog,' and it's sweeter than we'd ever imagined.
Reader was by far the most popular feed reader out there, and its user base had been in a steep decline for two years before Google decided to shut it down.
Whether 'Avatar' is racist is a matter for debate. Regardless of where you come down on that question, it's undeniable that the film - like alien apartheid flick 'District 9', released earlier this year - is emphatically a fantasy about race.
Humans have obviously contributed a great deal of carbon to the atmosphere. So we are warming the planet up.
