Wendy M. Grossman

Wendy M. Grossman

Wendy M. Grossman (born January 26, 1954 in New York City) is a journalist, blogger, and folksinger.

Grossman graduated from Cornell University in 1975 and Riverdale Country School in 1971. She was a full-time folksinger from 1975–83 and her folk album Roseville Fair was released in 1980; MP3s from it are available on her website. She also played on Archie Fisher's 1976 LP The Man With a Rhyme.

In 1987, she founded the magazine The Skeptic in the United Kingdom and edited it for two years, resuming the editorship from 1999 to 2001. As founder and editor, she has appeared on numerous UK TV and radio programmes.

Her credits since 1990 include work for Scientific American, The Guardian, and the Daily Telegraph, as well as New Scientist, Wired and Wired News, and The Inquirer for which she wrote a regular weekly net.wars column. That column continues in NewsWireless and on her own site every Friday. She was a columnist for Internet Today from July 1996 until it closed in April 1997, and together with Dominic Young ran the Fleet Street Forum on CompuServe UK in the mid-1990s. She also sometimes writes about tennis.

She edited an anthology of interviews with leading computer industry figures taken from the pages of the British computer magazine Personal Computer World. Entitled Remembering the Future, it was published in January 1997 by Springer Verlag. Her 1998 book net.wars was one of the first to have its full text published on the Web. She was a member of the external advisory board of the Intellectual Property and Law Centre at Edinburgh University (the board was disbanded after the centre became established). She was president of the Cornell Folk Song Club, the oldest university-affiliated, student-run folk song club in the US, from 1973 to 1975.

She sits on the executive committee of the Association of British Science Writers and the Advisory Councils of the Open Rights Group and Privacy International. In February 2011 Grossman was elected as a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.

In 2005, Grossman featured in a debate with psychic Shirley Ghostman on the BBC World documentary series High Spirits. Neutral observers and viewers surprisingly felt that Grossman came off second best as Ghostman countered every sceptical point with factual analysis. In 2013, Grossman was the winner of the Enigma Award, part of the BT Information Security Journalism Awards, "for her dedication and outstanding contribution to information security journalism, recognising her extensive writing on the subject for several publications over a number of years".

Works

• Remembering the Future: Interviews from Personal Computer World (1996)
• Net.Wars (1998)
• From Anarchy to Power: The Net Comes of Age (2001)
• The Daily Telegraph A-Z Guide to the Internet (2001)
• The Daily Telegraph Small Business Guide to Computer Networking (2003)
• Why Statues Weep: The Best of the "Skeptic" (2010) – with Chris French

External links

• Official website
• Wendy Grossman on LiveJournal
• Wendy Grossman in The Guardian
• NewsWirelessNet, where her column net.wars appears every Friday
• The Skeptic
• Full text of net.wars, Wendy Grossman, 1997–99 NYU Press, ISBN 0-8147-3103-1