Ana Marie Cox (born September 23, 1972) is an American author, blogger, political columnist, and critic. The founding editor of the political blog Wonkette, she was also the Senior Political Correspondent for MTV News, and conducted the "Talk" interviews featured in The New York Times Magazine from 2015 to 2017. In 2010, Cox held the position of Washington correspondent for GQ. Cox has been a contributor for The Daily Beast since 2009. She previously worked at Air America Media. She was a lead blogger on U.S. politics for The Guardian, until August 2014, and an editor at Mother Jones. Early life Cox was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Her family is from Texas and is of Scots-Irish descent. She attended Lincoln Southeast High School in Lincoln, Nebraska, where she wrote for the school's newspaper, The Clarion. She graduated from the University of Chicago with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history in 1994. She began graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, where she was studying American history, but left school, and instead became an editorial assistant at the publishing company Alfred A. Knopf. Career Cox was an editor of the progressive online magazine Bad Subjects. Later, she was an executive editor of Suck.com, where she wrote under the pen name Ann O'Tate, a wordplay on annotate. In 2004, Cox became the founding editor of the political blog Wonkette. Under her tenure, Wonkette was a sportive commentary on Capitol Hill Washington politics, as well as more serious matters of politics and policy. Cox and Wonkette gained notoriety in the political world for publicizing the story of Jessica Cutler, also known as "Washingtonienne," a staff assistant to Senator Mike DeWine (R-Ohio) who accepted money from a George W. Bush administration official and others in exchange for sexual favors. On January 5, 2006, Cox officially announced her retirement as the blog's editor and her imminent transition to "Wonkette Emerita." Cox's novel Dog Days, a satire of Washington, D.C. life for which she was reportedly paid $250,000, was published on January 6, 2006. The book received generally negative reviews. In The New York Times, Christopher Buckley described it as a "brisk, smart, smutty, knowing and very well-written first novel." In the Times as well, Janet Maslin wrote that despite Cox's "satirical expertise," the novel is replete with "stock characters" and "manages to be doubly conventional: it follows both an old-fashioned love-betrayal-redemption