STORIES ARE WEAPONS

A Book Riot Best Book of 2024
One of Publishers Weekly’s Top 10 Politics/Current Events books of Spring 2024

A sharp and timely exploration of the dark art of manipulation through weaponized storytelling, from the best-selling author of Four Lost Cities.

In Stories Are Weapons, best-selling author Annalee 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. Newitz delves into America?s deep-rooted history with psychological operations, beginning with Benjamin Franklin?s Revolutionary War era fake newspaper and nineteenth-century wars on Indigenous nations, and reaching its apotheosis with the Cold War and twenty-first-century influence campaigns online. America?s secret weapon has long been coercive storytelling. And there?s a reason for that: operatives who shaped modern psychological warfare drew on their experiences as science fiction writers and in the advertising industry.