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Marlene Manoff

@mmanoff.bsky.social
675 followers 1.4K following 29 posts

Independent researcher and writer focused on digital culture, archives and libraries, former librarian @MIT, builder of collages

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Marlene Manoff @mmanoff.bsky.social · 10h
Isn't the more serious problem the lack of affordable healthcare performed by actual humans?
nytimes.com
ChatGPT Led to a Man’s Near-Fatal Health Crisis, Lawsuit Claims
The case appears to be the first to argue that a chatbot’s advice harmed someone seeking guidance about a medical condition.
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Marlene Manoff @mmanoff.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Interesting piece on “invisible source skew.” Librarians have been making some version of this argument for decades. We depend on increasingly abstract and opaque digital/computational tools and we need to find ways to both acknowledge and make visible their hidden logics. More so than ever with AI
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Reposted by Marlene Manoff
Alex DiBranco @alexdibranco.bsky.social · 21/05/2026
Grateful to @msmagazine.com for cross-posting my piece on misogynist ideology in the San Diego mosque shooting. The intersection of male supremacism with antisemitism, white supremacism, and Islamophobia is deeply important to understanding this and other attacks. msmagazine.com/2026/05/21/m...
msmagazine.com
Male Supremacism and Misogyny Was Central to the San Diego Mosque Shooting. Why Did So Much Coverage Miss It?
Male Supremacism and Misogyny Was Central to the San Diego Mosque Shooting. Why Did So Much Coverage Miss It?
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Marlene Manoff @mmanoff.bsky.social · 11/02/2026
Reasoning and abstract thinking as ongoing challenges to building intelligent machines garymarcus.substack.com/p/breaking-l...
garymarcus.substack.com
BREAKING: LLM “reasoning” continues to be deeply flawed
A new review underscores the breadth of the problem, and shows that close to a trillion dollars hasn’t changed that
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Marlene Manoff @mmanoff.bsky.social · 11/02/2026
An eloquent case for book reviews from a former nonfiction book critic at the Washington Post www.newyorker.com/books/page-t...
newyorker.com
The End of Books Coverage at the Washington Post
Becca Rothfeld, a former critic at the Washington Post, on the death of the paper’s books section.
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Marlene Manoff @mmanoff.bsky.social · 22/12/2025
As AI training data has been largely limited to digital materials, this piece also reinforces the notion that claims about large language models encompassing anything like the entirety of human knowledge are vastly overblown
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Reposted by Marlene Manoff
Hetan Shah @hetanshah.bsky.social · 18/11/2025
I’ve written a piece on the curious lack of media and political interest in the issues faced by our national @britishlibrary.bsky.social. This is strange given we live in a world where ideas, knowledge and research are a long-term source of innovation and insight www.cityam.com/the-british-...
cityam.com
The British library is in crisis: why does nobody care?
The widespread indifference to the British Library's crippling cyberattack demonstrates a perilous failure to value the knowledge infrastructure vital for national prosperity
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Marlene Manoff @mmanoff.bsky.social · 07/11/2025
How new AI library "tools" serve "the political project to devalue" or erase the work of librarians, teachers, and scientists: www.404media.co/ai-is-superc...
404media.co
AI Is Supercharging the War on Libraries, Education, and Human Knowledge
"Fascism and AI, whether or not they have the same goals, they sure are working to accelerate one another."
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Marlene Manoff @mmanoff.bsky.social · 22/10/2025
History Has Left The Building www.meidasplus.com/p/history-ha...
meidasplus.com
History Has Left The Building
Trump isn’t preserving America; he’s rebranding it, one gold-plated illusion at a time. History erased, monuments renamed, and a nation rebuilt in the image of its showman-in-chief.
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Marlene Manoff @mmanoff.bsky.social · 10/10/2025
www.404media.co/libraries-ca...
404media.co
Libraries Can’t Get Their Loaned Books Back Because of Trump’s Tariffs
Libraries have shared their collections internationally for decades. Trump’s tariffs are throwing that system into chaos and can ‘hinder academic progress.’
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Marlene Manoff @mmanoff.bsky.social · 08/10/2025
As if....
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Reposted by Marlene Manoff
Jason Koebler @jasonkoebler.bsky.social · 08/10/2025
very interesting what is not allowed these days. in this case, basic archiving of real videos www.404media.co/apple-banned...
404media.co
Apple Banned an App That Simply Archived Videos of ICE Abuses
Eyes Up's purpose is to "preserve evidence until it can be used in court." But it has been swept up in Apple's crackdown on ICE-spotting apps.
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Marlene Manoff @mmanoff.bsky.social · 05/10/2025
acrlog.org/2025/06/11/a...
acrlog.org
AI Refusal in Libraries: A Starter Guide - ACRLog
This week I was on a panel at the Generative AI in Libraries (GAIL) virtual conference. Along with my fellow panelists Andrea Baer and Emily Zerrenner, I joined moderator Sarah Appedu to discuss the c...
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Marlene Manoff @mmanoff.bsky.social · 24/09/2025
More on the failures/erasures that ai chatbots introduce into library search tools aarontay.substack.com/p/the-ai-pow...
aarontay.substack.com
The AI powered Library Search That Refused to Search
From Clarivate's Summon to Primo Research Assistant, content‑moderation layers meant mostly for chatbots are "quietly" blocking controversial topics from being searched
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Marlene Manoff @mmanoff.bsky.social · 18/09/2025
www.404media.co/librarians-a...
404media.co
Librarians Are Being Asked to Find AI-Hallucinated Books
It’s a trippy time to have a library card.
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Marlene Manoff @mmanoff.bsky.social · 31/07/2025
When a president gets to decide what counts as American history www.washingtonpost.com/entertainmen...
washingtonpost.com
Smithsonian removes Trump from impeachment exhibit in American History Museum
A temporary placard, on display since 2021, described the president's historic impeachments. Officials said the exhibit was restored to an earlier version following a review of legacy content.
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Marlene Manoff @mmanoff.bsky.social · 24/07/2025
Librarians are finding that their AI assisted commercially produced search tools are providing no search results for topics like Tulsa race riot, Covid, January 6, Gaza War, lynching and history of genocides acrlog.org/2025/07/21/w...
acrlog.org
“We Couldn’t Generate an Answer for your Question” - ACRLog
Editor’s note: We welcome a guest blog post from Jay Singley, Document Delivery and Circulation Desk Manager at North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics. In March 2025, Ex Libris unveiled thei...
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Marlene Manoff @mmanoff.bsky.social · 16/03/2025
"Determined not to let this stage of American history become “lost culture”, the publishers believe that old-fashioned print is still the best way to preserve for the future" www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/culture/6952...
prospectmagazine.co.uk
The book publisher prepping for Trump censorship
Indie publisher Melville House is racing to preserve history, before the US government buries the evidence
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Reposted by Marlene Manoff
Kat Tenbarge @kattenbarge.bsky.social · 07/03/2025
It’s so devastating to watch Depp v. Heard happen over and over again, pushing more women into conservatism and damaging the cultural narratives around sexual harassment, violence, and abuse each time open.substack.com/pub/taylorlo...
open.substack.com
Right wing creators are dominating Lively-Baldoni coverage
Conservative commentators are leveraging the case to dismantle support for #MeToo and amass unprecedented audience growth.
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Marlene Manoff @mmanoff.bsky.social · 05/03/2025
Historical context? In 2003 the editor of a chapter I contributed to a volume on bibliography in literature informed me that I could not use the phrase “feminist literary bibliography” in the title as such a thing did not exist.
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Marlene Manoff @mmanoff.bsky.social · 28/02/2025
The People Carrying Out Musk’s Plans at DOGE www.nytimes.com/interactive/...
nytimes.com
Who Is in DOGE? Tracking Its Staffers and Allies in the Federal Government
The Times identified 49 people within the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, a group formed by Elon Musk that in a short few weeks has radically upended federal agencies.
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Marlene Manoff @mmanoff.bsky.social · 01/02/2025
My 2017 essay on the disappearance of government information (and attempts to save it) under the first Trump administration is creepily relevant: works.hcommons.org/records/aytt...
works.hcommons.org
Archival Silence in the Age of Trump
The Trump presidency has fueled growing apprehension about a media landscape rife with lies, bogus news, and conspiracy theories. These concerns can be situated within a discourse of archival silence ...
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Marlene Manoff @mmanoff.bsky.social · 16/01/2025
Like I was saying, we are losing control over the film, music, books, games, etc that we can now only rent
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Marlene Manoff @mmanoff.bsky.social · 03/01/2025
"just as the arts are more than mere nutrients, the medium is more than a delivery system: it has an aesthetic and a psychology of its own" www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...
newyorker.com
What We Lose When Streaming Companies Choose What We Watch
Maybe don’t throw away all your DVDs just yet.
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Marlene Manoff @mmanoff.bsky.social · 02/01/2025
Defying the Algorithm #25
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Marlene Manoff @mmanoff.bsky.social · 28/12/2024
If ever there were an opportune moment to make the case for the value of higher education and for the Dept of Education this would seem to be it
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Marlene Manoff @mmanoff.bsky.social · 26/12/2024
When neither my room key nor my partner's could get us back into our hotel room it took a security guard then a maintenance guy & finally someone who could reprogram the lock to get us back in. Sometimes analog is just simpler
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Marlene Manoff @mmanoff.bsky.social · 15/12/2024
The relentless contraction of our ability to own and maintain control over the music, films, books, games and other media that we now merely rent arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024...
arstechnica.com
The optical disc onslaught continues, with LG quitting Blu-ray players
Streaming uncertainty has some people clinging to their discs.
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Marlene Manoff @mmanoff.bsky.social · 10/12/2024
The importance of national archives: www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2...
koreatimes.co.kr
Nat'l archives agency requests preservation of martial law documents
The state-run archives agency on Friday requested the presidential office and the defense ministry to preserve all documents related to this week's botched martial law declaration.
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Reposted by Marlene Manoff
Matthew Kirschenbaum @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social · 08/12/2024
THIS is why we wrote this. archive.is/2024.10.31-1...
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Marlene Manoff @mmanoff.bsky.social · 05/12/2024
Fortunately (or perhaps sadly), recent preparations to protect scientific and other information from potential erasure or manipulation by the incoming Trump administration are benefitting from the experience and infrastructure created during his last administration. www.forbes.com/sites/dougla...
forbes.com
Safeguarding Against a Trump Data Dump
Various organizations race to preserve invaluable scientific, educational, and economic data at potential risk during another Trump administration.
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