She received a PhD in English and American Studies from UC Berkeley, and in 1997 published the widely cited book, White Trash: Race and Class in America. From 2004–2005 she was a policy analyst for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She writes for many periodicals from ‘Popular Science’ to ‘Wired,’ and from 1999 to 2008 wrote a syndicated weekly column called ‘Techsploitation.’ She co-founded ‘other’ magazine in 2002, which was published triannually until 2007. Since 2008, she is editor-in-chief of ‘io9,’ a Gawker-owned science fiction blog, which was named in 2010 by The Times as one of the top science blogs on the internet.