Melanie Walsh

Home The Post45 Data Collective peer reviews and houses literary and cultural data from 1945 to the present.

Just got out of the first ever @post45data.bsky.social grad workshop. Fantastic projects drawing and testing the limits of the literary and cultural data sets. You can find the peer-reviewed sets at the link: use them, critique them, submit new ones.
data.post45.org

We are very grateful that J.D. served as one of our faculty respondents at the inaugural Post45 Data Collective Grad Workshop.

It was wonderful to gather with such bright young scholars and to see all the creative research they're doing with, against, and alongside cultural data.

The WNBA Is a Perfectly Choreographed TV Drama Women’s basketball is bigger than it’s ever been on television, and the player’s association is taking advantage of the spotlight to tell a gripping story about labor.

Last year, I wrote about how the WNBA is the best show about labor on TV. I was, and remain, right.

Today, the players association enters their 4th marathon day of negotiations with the league. There's no earthly reason to root for anyone other than the players.

newrepublic.com/article/1962...

Right? 🫠

I Watched 6 Hours of DOGE Bro Testimony. Here's What They Had to Say For Themselves The hours of videos provide fascinating, or perhaps horrifying, insight into the thinking of someone inside DOGE.

I have watched 6 hours of a DOGE bro deposition. The whole thing, start to finish. It's a fascinating, and horrifying, look at the people who caused so much damage, didn't really achieve anything at all, while still being so sure they are right. Here's what they said: www.404media.co/i-watched-6-...

TOO TRUE

every quantitative measure is actually a stack of qualitative assumptions in a trenchcoat

This is so so upsetting. So Grammerly is violating the memory of bell hooks AND making AI versions of the rest of us before we're even dead. Someone tell me who to sue, not even joking.

Time-Wasting, Truth-Wasting Exercises | Los Angeles Review of Books Samuel Cohen’s anthology on book banning diagnoses a recent swell in censorship that’s problematic for more reasons than you’d think.

Wrote about @samcohen.bsky.social’s book banning volume for @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social. The volume invites us to consider why books matter—and it shows the many ways they’re under attack, even here in progressive NYC.

lareviewofbooks.org/article/bann...

Also I’m sorry but how have we not advanced glaucoma testing beyond the dirty trick of “oh look at that barn way out in the distance“ and then a cruel surprise PUFF blast straight to the pupil

So my prescription in my left eye just improved… there’s a strong chance I’m turning into Spider-Man or Benjamin Button-ing… if you see me webbing up the side of a building or transformed into a baby, I’m fine, and my eyesight has never been better.

The laid-off lawyers and PhDs training AI to steal their careers Experienced white-collar workers are now part of a miserable gig economy.

AI companies are paying screenwriters, lawyers, and other white-collar professionals to produce the training data needed to automate their jobs. I spoke with more than 30 workers about conditions inside this fast-growing and extremely secretive new gig economy.

What If Readers Like A.I.-Generated Fiction? If economic and technological transformations have changed our relationship with literature before, they could do so again.

You can find similar but more interesting experiments in Vauhini Vara's recent New Yorker piece, and/or @tuhinchakr.bsky.social's work, and lots of other places!

www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

arxiv.org/abs/2601.18353

There's a million things to say about this, but I hate when these little AI quizzes are so contrived & random.

Like these aren't equivalent passages at all? They're cherry-picked quotations on totally different subjects in different styles. All else aside, we can beef up the experimental design...

Bluesky CEO Jay Graber will step aside 40 million users later

Bluesky CEO Jay Graber will step aside

Heroes. Quite the effort and dedication on this one. Unfortunately, not an easily repeatable process for most researchers looking for access, but can hopefully inform lawmakers.

I didn't even include the lawyer's best burn!

Lawyer: You say you have an understanding of what DEI means and when I ask you, you say you need to reference the Executive Order [EO].

Do you need to reference EOs to define every word you use in your everyday life?

Opposing Lawyer: Objection.

Photocopier : Xerox :: DEI : "gender fluidity and um like promoting subsets of LGBTQ+ in ways that alienate me"

😆

bsky.app/profile/char...

Video of ICE shooting of Texas man raises questions about government claim An Immigration and Customs Enforcement official said Ruben Martinez “intentionally ran over” an agent before being killed by another agent in south Texas last year.

We know about the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. But there was a very similar killing of a young man named Ruben Martinez in which immigration agents claimed he attacked them with his car before they shot him. New video suggests that too may be a lie. www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/...

True. But on a side note I hope people don't replace names with things like "DOGE Boy" moving forward; we should know exactly who these people were.

Good point!

These people are, to be blunt, substantially less intelligent than they believe they are.

New “what’s a photocopier” just dropped

EXACTLY.

And then they labelled a grant that was preserving Pittsburgh's industrial heritage as DEI 😆 It makes absolutely no sense.

bsky.app/profile/dmim...

High School English and the Making of American Readers Abstract. The high school English classroom is the most influential literary institution in the United States, and the most overlooked by literary scholars

"Recent attacks on specific works of literature by Republican state legislatures and conservative orgs...pale in comparison to the large-scale divestment from literature to which liberal and conservative forces alike contribute."

so good, @manshel.bsky.social

academic.oup.com/alh/article/...

This is absolutely hilarious and deserves a Veep-style TV adaptation.

This is a fascinating connection: AI personas are confusing, but perhaps no more so than fictional characters once were.

Related, I couldn’t understand the complex ambiguity around Greeks mythology until a classics prof compared it to the many contradictory myths surrounding Santa Claus.