Last week's New Yorker did a scary deep dive. She's on the hook for $1 million in legal fees, leaving her little for her reelection campaign. #unrigthesystem www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

“agents told hospital staff that Castaneda Mondragon was “laying down in handcuffs when he attempted to flee, and then, for unknown reasons, purposefully ran headfirst into a brick wall.’” sahanjournal.com/health/ice-d...

Scoop: Federal agents were told this week that they have broader power to arrest people without a warrant, according to an internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo reviewed by The New York Times. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/30/u...

A second journalist was arrested by federal agents because she covered the anti-ICE church protest in St. Paul. Georgia Fort is an independent journalist and three-time Midwest Emmy Award winner.

Former CNN anchor Don Lemon has been arrested, a Justice Department official said. Lemon livestreamed a demonstration that interrupted a church service in St. Paul, Minnesota, earlier this month that protested Trump's immigration crackdown in the area reut.rs/4q3X1FL

FBI searching Fulton County elections office, per Reuters www.reuters.com/world/us/fbi...

Peer review science relies, more than we care to admit, on what @zey.bsky.social calls "load bearing frictions" that make it difficult to fake good science, and on trust that most ppl also value science itself & won't cheat just for personal gain. This creates the wrong environment for that to hold.

New: Amid the escalating situation in Minneapolis, ICE posted in the Federal Register asking companies to provide info about “commercial Big Data and Ad Tech” products that would “directly support investigations activities” www.wired.com/story/ice-as...

Incredible headline.

Wrote a summary of a great keynote by @zey.bsky.social at NeurIPS, arguing that we’re having the wrong nightmares about AI: not AGI or superhuman benchmarks, but good-enough genAI at scale threatens "load bearing frictions" society relies on to signal effort, authenticity, sincerity, credibility.

I think this is likely to require a wholesale change in the peer review system. The signals of authenticity and effort are no longer useful. Zeynep Tufekci gave a great talk related to this at #NeurIPS2025

BREAKING: Hong Kong court convicts Jimmy Lai, founder of former pro-democracy newspaper, in landmark national security trial.

Invited talk by Zeynep @zey.bsky.social Tufekci at @neuripsconf.bsky.social was really very good! Title: Are We Having the Wrong Nightmares About AI? Spoiler: yep! 😉 Very thoughtful! Thanks!🙏

„Making things easy breaks systems that use difficulty as signaling“ @zey.bsky.social @neuripsconf.bsky.social

Tomorrow's frontpage

AI and the Future of Work (10/7/25). It's a wrap! Thanks to our expert panelists: @dacemoglumit.bsky.social, @pkrugman.bsky.social, Danielle Li, @zey.bsky.social & @sgreenhouse.bsky.social. #AI. Who will win and who will lose? How worried should we be? Stay tuned for the video, coming soon.

The picture we've all been waiting for: #AlaaIsFree h/t: Mohamed Elbaqer

Egyptian authorities announced the presidential pardon of prominent activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah after six years in prison, according to his lawyer Khaled Ali and an announcement by state TV.

Social Media Reduced Two Horrific Killings to Cheap Snuff Films By Zeynep Tufekci www.nytimes.com/2025/09/13/o...

Egypt's president Sisi has ordered authorities to study the possible pardon of Egyptian-British activist and blogger, Alaa Abd el-Fattah, who has already served an unjust 5 year sentence www.reuters.com/world/uk/egy...

Pssst ... @zey.bsky.social let me know when that other moment approaches! Highlighted part in your last graf is what we do at Starling Lab, an academic research program based jointly at Stanford + USC. So happy you're casting a light on this emerging field of authenticity. We share your concerns!

AI video is almost there: no amount of post-hoc squinting can tell fake from real. Losing our last bastion of verification is no joke. Trusted news can help with high-profile events, but what about everyday life? Recipe for chaos. Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/11/o...

This is very important. From the start ChatGPT- the name, the interface- was designed to make us view it as 'like us' & capable of thought, not just a collection of numbers for text prediction. Creating a social role for an LLM is more imp. than the LLM itself, and it's where any profit comes from.

Plausibility engine is such a great way to think of LLM's

This is a great essay: L.L.M.s are what they eat

Nice piece on the dangers of LLMs. I liked the description as “plausibility engines” and not “truth seekers” or “reasoning machines”

I wrote about Grok going "MechaHitler" over at X, and the need to view LLMs correctly: as remarkably powerful plausibility engines. Their AGI marketing and the strong inclination to project human qualities to anything that can speak is misleading us. NYT gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/07/11/o...

After trying to sift thru the AI-generated crap in #WNBA, I found this www.nytimes.com/2025/07/11/o... "AI-generated content — true and otherwise — is taking over the internet, providing training material for the next generation of LLMs, a sludge-generating machine feeding on its own sludge."

“the Weather Service employee whose job it was to make sure those warnings got traction — Paul Yura, the long-serving meteorologist in charge of “warning coordination” — had recently taken an unplanned early retirement amid cuts pushed by DOGE. He was not replaced.”

“To a Washington bean counter, his loss might have looked like one tiny but welcome subtraction in a giant spreadsheet, but not in a region so prone to these perilous events that it’s known as Flash Flood Alley.” @zey.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/2025/07/09/o...

"The National Weather Service’s San Angelo office, which is responsible for some of the areas hit hardest by Friday’s flooding, was missing a senior hydrologist, staff forecaster and meteorologist in charge," according to its union's legislative director. 🎁 🔗 www.nytimes.com/2025/07/05/u...

Here's the original KXAN article from April reporting on Paul Yura's early retirement "as the Trump Administration works to slash the budget at NWS and the larger NOAA organization" www.kxan.com/weather/weat...

Key Texas floods @nws.noaa.gov vacancies: San Angelo office is missing * meteorologist in charge * senior hydrologist * staff forecaster San Antonio office is missing * warning coordination meteorologist * science officer

Breaking News: President Trump said that the U.S. had bombed Fordo, Iran’s heavily fortified nuclear facility, as well as two other sites.

Paging the approximately ten million PhD students working on AI & society

We’re hiring at Princeton on AI and society, working with Arvind Narayanan or me depending on fit. I think current AI developments are all a huge deal but am very unexcited by current state of the AGI and/or AI safety discourse. Please share as you see fit. puwebp.princeton.edu/AcadHire/app...

My latest article with New Lines magazine is about Alaa Abdel Fattah and Laila Soueif's hunger strike. I apologize for the harsh language, but Soueif's life is in danger and at risk of death. #FreeAlaa #SaveLaila #FreeThemAll

I read Twitter and Tear Gas by @zey.bsky.social in 2017 and it looks like it’s going to be extremely relevant this year too She has a Creative Commons pdf version online www.twitterandteargas.org

THE GUARDIAN: Starmer and Lammy's empty promises: The race against time to save Alaa Abd el-Fattah from Egypt’s prisons and his mother’s relentless hunger strike must spur action from a Britain failing to hold Sisi accountable.

‘Laila had given ten years of her life to fighting for her son, and now, in what she decided would be the final act of the fight, she put her life on the line.’ Ahdaf Soueif on her sister Laila’s struggle for the release of her son, Alaa Abd el-Fattah: www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/ju...

250 days on hunger strike: Can Laila Soueif secure her son’s freedom? – podcast

The Data are Insufficient to Confidently Root the SARS-CoV-2 Phylogenetic Tree https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40488365/

Remember when RFK Jr. promised Sen. Bill Cassidy that he would not fire the CDC vaccine advisory panel? Guess what: www.statnews.com/2025/06/09/r...

Deeply powerful words from Ahdaf Soueif on the ongoing hunger strike of her sister, Dr Laila Soueif, on the possibilities of hope, and on why we must all call for #FreeAlaa www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/ju...

We are deeply concerned for Laila Soueif's life as she continues her hunger strike to free her son, writer Alaa Abd El-Fattah. We join @peninternational.bsky.social and @englishpen.bsky.social in urging Egypt to #FreeAlaa and the UK to do all it can to secure his release www.bbc.com/news/article...

"Our hearts are breaking to see our dear friend Laila Soueif on the edge of life and death". Richard Ratcliffe and Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe in the Independent today. www.independent.co.uk/voices/laila...

Laila Soueif 69-year-old mother of imprisoned Egyptian-British activist Alaa Abdel Fattah is feared to be near death after a long hunger strike. She is risking her life for her son's freedom.