Melanie Mallon

Melanie is a freelance editor and writer living in a small town outside Minneapolis with her husband, two kids, dog, and two cats. When not making fun of bad charts or running the Uncensorship Project, she spends her time wrangling commas, making colon jokes, and putting out random dumpster fires. You can find her on Twitter as @MelMall, on Facebook, and on Instagram.

Politics
Melanie MallonFebruary 24, 2020
526

Quickies: School Choice = Segregation, Greyhound vs. ICE, and Constitutional Punishment for Voter Suppression

School Vouchers Are Just Code for ‘Segregation Forever’, the Daily Beast: “Their advocates claim that vouchers and “school choice” constitute a civil right, a social justice issue. In fact, the call for “school choice” today echoes the language of Southern segregationists who called for “freedom of choice” to evade school desegregation. And today’s advocates employ many of the same arguments…
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Politics
Melanie MallonFebruary 17, 2020
791

Quickies: Trolling Ted Cruz, Black Punk Bands, Back to the Future Deepfake

Ted Cruz Positively Outraged That The Government Would Interfere With His Reproductive Rights, Wonkette: In the time-honored tradition of trolling forced-birth conservatives by introducing legislation to control men’s reproductive rights, Alabama state rep. Rolanda Hollis has introduced a bill requiring men to undergo a vasectomy at age 50 or after fathering a third child, and Ted Cruz is pretending he’s…
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Random Asides
Melanie MallonFebruary 13, 2020
4 1,121

BCT: A Boring Boring Chart

This week’s post is a brief and uneventful break from all the digital BS we wade through every day lately. It comes from the Upside Down a published source, a magazine for structural engineers, who apparently read with mirrors while standing on their head. Behold, the Boring Spacing Trends chart! At first glance, the years being at the top instead…
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Politics
Melanie MallonFebruary 11, 2020
8 1,971

The Evolution of Racism in America

Some of the most eye-opening information on the internet comes in the form of a tweet thread, with Black twitter and History twitter leading the way. This week’s post combines the best of those worlds with a thread on the history of racism in the United States, by Michael Harriot of the Root. “One of the most popular misconceptions about…
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Politics
Melanie MallonFebruary 10, 2020
2 546

Quickies: Death by Meteor 2020, Black SF Authors to Read, White Nationalists Get DC Police Escort

Large Majority of New Hampshire Democrats Prefer Death by Meteor Than to See Trump Win Again, Rolling Stone: “Somewhat surprisingly, 28 percent of conservatives joined the majority of Democrats on wiping out all of mankind rather than dealing with another four years of Trump. And to no one’s surprise, 68 percent of women polled, more than any other group, would…
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Politics
Melanie MallonFebruary 6, 2020
1,620

Bad Chart Thursday: How Trump Sees Voters

In response to an argument no one was making, a Trump supporter gifted everyone on a Facebook thread with this week’s featured chart. I think it was secretly a cry for help because it (unintentionally?) mocks Trump. Here’s the chart in question: The top of the chart is not credited, although it resembles a US government agency pie chart, such…
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Politics
Melanie MallonFebruary 3, 2020
909

Fact Check: Uncensured Lies on the Senate Floor

I masochistically watched nearly every hour of the Senate impeachment trial*, and I can say unequivocally that Trump’s lawyers’ defenses were blatant lies. This is not surprising, of course, but these lies are vastly more dangerous when they are repeated without censure on the Senate floor. Millions of Americans who watched all or part of the trial* would have a…
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Activism
Melanie MallonFebruary 3, 2020
796

Quickies: Racist Attacks on Black Businesses, ERA Lawsuit, and Trump’s Itch to Kill Civilians

More Georgia Racism: Snellville Business Owners Find ‘No More N***er Businesses’ Letters Pinned to Their Stores, the Root: The headline really says it all, and I don’t want to give the letter itself any more views, but check out the link for details. White racists continue to get more and more emboldened. Democratic AGs Sue to Force US to Ratify…
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