Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind

A history of psychological warfare in the United States and of how its methods moved from foreign campaigns into domestic culture wars, by the journalist and novelist Annalee Newitz.

Newitz begins with Benjamin Franklin's fake newspaper in the Revolutionary War and the nineteenth-century wars on Indigenous nations, and follows the line through the Cold War to online influence campaigns. The book argues that postwar psychological operatives drew on science fiction writing and advertising, and that these tactics now appear in fights over race and intelligence, school boards and LGBT students, and feminism. It closes on researchers and activists working toward what Newitz calls psychological disarmament. Norton published the hardcover on 4 June 2024.

Newitz is a science journalist who also writes fiction, and was the founder of io9 and editor-in-chief of Gizmodo. Earlier nonfiction includes Four Lost Cities and Scatter, Adapt, and Remember. Their novels include Autonomous, The Future of Another Timeline and The Terraformers.