melanie ehrenkranz

Creative strategist and writer at the crossroads of tech, power, and community, helping entrepreneurs build things that matter — and are cool as hell.

Melanie leads content and community for Sophia Amoruso’s Business Class, a membership-based entrepreneurship community and course for founders, freelancers, solopreneurs, creators, and side hustlers. She also works on creative campaigns for early-stage startups.

She has written for places like Gizmodo, Medium, Mozilla, The Outline, Vice, Mic, NBC News, National Geographic, SHAPE, Killscreen, INVERSE, and San Diego Citybeat. She’s built newsletters from the ground up, grown audiences into the tens of thousands, and knows how to make people care enough to stick around.

In 2024, she founded Laid Off, the coolest place on the internet to talk about being laid off. It’s been featured in CNBC, Slate, and Popsugar. Laid Off is a Substack bestseller.

Melanie is based in Los Angeles.

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2020

New technology is helping fire-struck communities predict air quality better (National Geographic)

Vital Coronavirus Information Is Failing the Blind and Visually Impaired (Motherboard)

Hundreds of Volunteers Are Working to Create Open-Source Ventilators to Fight Coronavirus (OneZero)

Classic iPod Hackers Say There’s No Better Way to Listen to Music (OneZero)

How blockchain technology reached Christie’s and changed the art world along the way (NBC News)

Profile of Emilie Baltz (Killscreen)

Profile of Jessica Shamash (Killscreen)

Tracking Diaries with Melanie Ehrenkranz (Mozilla)

The Tamagotchi Hacking Community’s Quest to Cheat Death (OneZero)

These Stanford undergrads revived campus life in a completely virtual world (Inverse)

Students around the world are giving young people a home for peer-reviewed science (Inverse)

Have you read something written by GPT-3? Probably not, but it’s hard to be sure (NBC News)

2019

Kindle Hackers Are Disabling Tracking and Ads (OneZero)

How the all-hands meeting became a way for bosses to give you the finger (The Outline)

The Catholic rosary got a digital upgrade — but it’s a mixed blessing (NBC News)

How to train artificial intelligence that won’t destroy the environment (The Outline)

I Made My Friends Play a Board Game Preparing Them for Death (Vice)

Domino’s Could Fuck Up the Internet for People With Disabilities Because They Won’t Just Fix Their Website (Gizmodo)

What If I Don’t Want to Be a Hologram After I Die? (Gizmodo)

Google Workers’ Fight to End Forced Arbitration Heads to D.C. (Gizmodo)

You Won’t Believe All the Stupid Ways Cops Are Using Face Recognition Tech (Gizmodo)

Is CES Afraid Of Sex or Women or Both? (Gizmodo)

Alexa’s Sneaky Fine Print Could Prevent You From Suing Amazon for Anything (Gizmodo)

On the Early Web, People With Disabilities Found Community and Autonomy (Gizmodo)

The Plan to Use Fitbit Data to Stop Mass Shootings Is One of the Scariest Proposals Yet (Gizmodo)

Producers of Nazi Romance Movie Appear to Be Using DMCA Takedowns to Silence Critics (Gizmodo)

How Ancient Religious Texts Went Digital (Gizmodo)

2018

How Archivists Could Stop Deepfakes From Rewriting History (Gizmodo)

Inside Cambridge Analytica, Few Knew How Soon the End Would Come (Gizmodo)

Facebook’s War on Bullshit Is Not Going Well—We Talked to the Fact Checkers on the Front Lines (Gizmodo)

When You Can Make ‘JFK’ Say Anything, What’s Stopping Him From Selling Doritos? (Gizmodo)

Tumblr’s Porn Ban Further Stigmatizes and Alienates Sex Workers Online (Gizmodo)

Google Contractors Say Reporting Process for Sexual Misconduct Remains Flawed (Gizmodo)

The Vigilantes On Facebook Who Stream To Catch a Predator-Style Ambushes of Alleged Pedophiles (Gizmodo)

We Need to Study the Effects of Revenge Porn on Mental Health (Gizmodo)

After Google’s Historic Walkout, One of Tech’s Big Problems Is Still Being Ignored (Gizmodo)

Meet Furry Boi, the Squirrel Who Won a UC Berkeley Senate Seat Thanks to a Facebook Meme Page (Gizmodo)

Sex Workers Fight Back Against a Dangerous Law by Stepping Into the Spotlight (Gizmodo)

Let’s Be Very Clear About What Happened to James Damore (Gizmodo)

Why Abortion Access Organizations Are Suing Anti-Choice Internet Trolls (Gizmodo)

This Game Imagines a Bleak Future in Which Tech Companies Win and Gig Workers Just Try to Survive (Gizmodo)

Meet the Oregon Middle Schoolers Fighting for Net Neutrality (Gizmodo)

Men Try to ‘Redefine’ Sexual Consent With Blockchain (Gizmodo)

Silicon Valley Needs to Ban Forced-Arbitration Agreements. We Asked 10 Tech Companies If They Will (Gizmodo)

How Facebook Groups Turned the Killing of a Small-Town Mom Into a Lurid Whodunit (Gizmodo)

What’s Slack Doing With Your Data? (Gizmodo)

2017

Major Hacker Conference Organizers Accused of Ignoring Harassment, Enabling Abusers (Gizmodo)

Silicon Valley’s Worst Apologies of 2017 (Gizmodo)

Gifts for Your Soon-to-Be Ex (Gizmodo)

I Tried Deepak Chopra’s $350 ‘Meditation Glasses’ and They Are Unbearable (Gizmodo)

Arianna Huffington Ignored Sexual Misconduct at The Huffington Post (Gizmodo)

Fired Google Memo Writer Took Part in Controversial, ‘Sexist’ Skit While at Harvard for Which Administration Issued Formal Apology (Gizmodo)

Leaked Uber email reveals how a female engineer pleaded with executives for change (Mic)

Birth control apps are helping women circumvent the conservative war on reproductive rights (Mic)

2016

Apple responds to diversity criticism: “We had a Canadian” onstage at iPhone 7 event (Mic)

Inside Facebook’s abuse department, where humans and machine team up to curb harassment (Mic)

Apple employees say their mental health issues came from alleged hostile work environment (Mic)