Katie Hafner

Katie Hafner (born December 5, 1957) is an American journalist and author. She is a former staff member of ''The New York Times'', and has written articles about technology, healthcare, and society, and books about the computer underground, the history of the Internet, Glenn Gould's piano, and Germany during the fall of the Berlin Wall. Her first novel, ''The Boys'', was praised in The New York Times as "a wonder of storytelling."

Early life and education

Hafner was born in Rochester, New York, and raised in Amherst, Massachusetts. She earned a bachelor's degree in German literature from the University of California at San Diego in 1979 and a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1981.

Career

Beginning in 1983, Hafner worked as a reporter at ''Computerworld'' and then at ''The San Diego Union''. She became a staff editor at ''Business Week'' in 1986, leaving in 1989. From 1990 to 1994, she worked freelance, writing articles and books, before becoming technology correspondent at ''Newsweek''. In February 1998 she became a writer for the weekly ''Circuits'' section of ''The New York Times'', where she remained on staff for a decade. She has also written for ''Esquire'', ''Wired'', ''The New Republic'', and ''The New York Times Magazine''.

Hafner's first book was ''Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier'' (1991), an exploration of youth computer-hacking in three parts, co-written with John Markoff. In 1996, with her then husband, Matthew Lyon, she published ''Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet''. Her 2001 book on the online community The WELL, an expansion of a 1997 article for ''Wired'', was praised there for "flashes of genuine insight". Her sixth book, ''Mother Daughter Me'' (2013), a memoir about trying to live with her mother and her teenage daughter in a house in San Francisco, was named one of "Ten Titles to Pick Up Now" in the August 2013 issue of ''O Magazine'' and was on other lists of recommendations including ''Parade'' magazine's 2013 "Summer Reading List".

Her first novel, ''The Boys'', was published in July 2022, the first novel to be published by the relaunched Spiegel & Grau.

Hafner's 2006 ''New York Times'' article "Growing Wikipedia Refines its 'Anyone Can Edit' Policy" is included in the second edition of ''The McGraw-Hill Guide Writing for College, Writing for Life'', an English composition textbook.

She is on the advisory board of the Internet Hall of Fame. She is interviewed in the John Korty documentary ''Miracle in a Box'', about the rebuilding of a Steinway piano.

Hafner is co-executive producer and host of a podcast series called ''Lost Women of Science''. they have produced two seasons. The first one tells the story of Dr. Dorothy Andersen, the first person to identify the disease Cystic Fibrosis. The second season is the story of Klára Dán von Neumann, the first person to have written a modern-style computer code. The third season is about Yvonne Young Clark, a mechanical engineer who was the first women to earn a degree in mechanical engineering from Howard University and the first Black member of the Society of Women Engineers.

Personal life

Hafner married Matt Lyon, a university administrator, in 1992; they had a daughter. He died in February 2002. In 2012 she remarried to Robert M. Wachter, who is chairman of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. In June 2022, he announced that she was probably suffering from long COVID.

Books

* ''Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier'' (with John Markoff) (Simon & Schuster, 1991)
* ''The House at the Bridge: A Story of Modern Germany'' (Scribner, 1995)
* ''Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet'' (with Matthew Lyon) (Simon & Schuster, 1996)
* ''The Well: A Story of Love, Death and Real Life in the Seminal Online Community'' (Carroll & Graf, 2001)
* ''A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould's Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano'' (Bloomsbury, 2008)
* ''Mother Daughter Me'' (Random House, 2013)
* ''The Boys'' (Spiegel & Grau, 2022)

References

External links

Official website

Recent and archived work by Katie Hafner for ''The New York Times''

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hafner, Katie
American technology writers
1957 births
Living people
The New York Times writers
Women technology writers
Writers from Rochester, New York
University of California, San Diego alumni
Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism alumni