Alondra Nelson
Scholar, author, policy advisor
alondranelson.com
Science, Technology, and Social Values Lab
ias.edu/stsv-lab
- The Post is now a right wing penny saver. Easily ignored. Even the least of fish will refuse to be wrapped in it.
- The morning after mass layoffs, The Washington Post publishes this as their lead editorial. The owner and publisher clearly have no idea why they are losing subscribers. Meanwhile they have destroyed a storied brand. Support independent media. hubs.ly/Q03M8rql0
- Fwiw 1, 3, 5, 7 and 8 are already required in law or policy and are not being followed so this is already half dead on arrival.
- “The interview also becomes an exercise in intellectual peacocking as they invoke Socrates, Isaac Newton and quantum physics but pay little attention to Epstein’s crimes. Epstein reveals himself to be a living museum of racial prejudice.”
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- I'm not sure what to make of it, but every Somali I represent in immigration court currently (8 of them) have today had their hearings cancelled and their judges reassigned. They're now all assigned to a video judge from Louisiana and scheduled for court hearing in one month. 🧵
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View full threadWithin a month of our President calling all Somalis "garbage," saying "they contribute nothing" that "they come from hell," "I don't want them in our country," the DOJ appears to be creating a separate process for deportation proceedings based on nationality just for Somalis.
- The Supreme Court settled this in 1954 (Accardi): immigration judges are supposed to be neutral. If they bend to the executive's whims instead of acting neutrally, deporting people bc the President dislikes them, the deportations are unlawful. supreme.justia.com/cases/federa...
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- FINNEAS defends sister Billie Eilish amid online backlash over her anti-ICE comments at GRAMMYs: “Seeing a lot of very powerful old white men outraged about what my 24 year old sister said during her acceptance speech. We can literally see your names in the Epstein files.”
- 😂😂😂😂
- Hearing him loud and clear.
- This is how Sen. Ron Wyden clues the public into activity that he finds extremely alarming. He does a press release about a letter he sent to the director of the CIA that basically says, 'I want to make sure you saw the classified letter I sent early today.' www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/do...
- I am calling for Congress to haul in every person who emailed Epstein about visiting his island. I will not rest until those who committed these crimes are held accountable.
- Thank you @khanna.house.gov for showing what it looks like to demand accountability from the halls of Congress, without fear or favor.
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- WSJ: SpaceX trying to push the bag onto index investors ASAP. Can’t describe how predatory this is and if index providers carve out an exception for them or other large IPOs it’ll be a huge hit to their credibility IMO.
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- Every Black woman everywhere, I hope that, if nothing else, tonight you know in your heart of hearts that you are not crazy.
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- NEW: Abigail Spanberger this afternoon ordered that all state agencies leave ICE's 287(g) program. This means that the state police (and some other agencies) will no longer be empowered to detain and arrest people for ICE. Big, big move by the governor within weeks of coming into office.
- Mazel tov to Phylisa Wisdom on being appointed to head the @mayor.nyc.gov Office to Combat Antisemitism. @phylisawisdom.bsky.social is the perfect person for the job. I’ve had the blessing to watch her lead @nyjewishagenda.bsky.social in many critical moments.
- 🚨 SCOOP🚨: NYC Mayor Mamdani appoints Phylisa Wisdom, progressive Jewish leader, to run the Mayor's Office to Combat Antisemitism. forward.com/fast-forward...
- Two new speech-to-text models (similar to Whisper) from Mistral today - one of them is API-only, the other is a 8.9GB Apache-2.0 licensed open weights model for "realtime" transcription. They're both very good! simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/4/v...
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- Bibliography cleanup is known to be harder than AGI. Same with successfully connecting a laptop with a projector. It's what we humans will be doing long after the robot takeover. 😇
- A publisher who lays off a reporter whose pen is freezing because she's covering a frigid war zone while dodging missiles is not an editor you want to work for, in a more perfect world
- I don't often wear political t-shirts, but I'm proudly sporting this one today. I'm an immigrant. I teach American (and international!) college students, research the U.S. economy, consult with policymakers, write books, raise my kids, pay taxes, and try to make this a better place.
- My story on Elon Musk cutting safeguards at xAI is on the front page of today's @washingtonpost.com. I’m also among 100’s of reporters laid off. I absolutely loved my job my brilliant coworkers & the thrill of reporting @ the center of forces upending the world: AI & Silicon Valley’s political power
- We gotta come up with a better system than “everything rests on whether these twelve billionnaires are nice”
- Last week the story was that TikTok censored anti-Trump/ICE/Pretti videos after the U.S. ownership change. We investigated with a large set of US TikTok data and found some interesting results, short thread...
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- Still, our position is that TikTok and other platforms should provide a way for third-party researchers to study their recommender systems and look for evidence of undue political influence. csmapnyu.org/impact/polic...
- I wanna keep doing this work, in any form (podcast! newsletter! movie? AI literacy class!). Pls msg me on Signal at nitasha.10 if you need someone who’s well-sourced in AI & SV, worked hard to understand the technology + ideas + players, cares about getting it right and informing the public
- ICE is running a “conveyor belt” of illegally detained Minnesota families. Agents are arresting entire families with legal status and immediately shipping them off to Texas to deny them legal representation and avoid the federal courts in Minnesota. The cruelty is endless.
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- More attention here, please.
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- Kudos to Mayor Mamdani. This is what economic justice looks like. And it's a reminder of how we can fight corporate greed at the state and local level. motherjones.com/politics/2026/01/ma…
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- Kinda wild that these people are just in charge of things isn’t it
- AOC on ICE: It’s our task to figure out how to claw back what has essentially supercharged this agency into becoming a relentless domestic paramilitary that is also a blank check to Palantir to create facial-recognition scans on U.S. citizens.
- My brain literally cannot accept the mathematics of 1996 being 30 years ago
- As Black History Month begins, we honor the generations of Black New Yorkers who built this city into the “gorgeous mosaic” we call home. Today, we reflect on the words of Mayor David Dinkins: our city’s first Black mayor (and a democratic socialist!).
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- For those commenting on the agents' surnames.
- “There is no conceivable degree of institutional incompetence sufficient to explain the scale, consistency, and persistence of the failures that occurred —particularly where the sole task ordered by the Court and repeatedly emphasized by DOJ was simple: redact known victim names before publication,”
- Honestly the biggest news out of this Texas special election is that Wambsganss is a real name. I'm reconsidering my priors.
- The Pitt got greenlit for a season 3, out next February, and the announcement has very funny comment from HBO chairman Casey Bloys that’s like “yeah, turns out if you just make a TV show like how we used to make TV shows you can have a 15+ episode season every year 🤷♂️”
- For those curious, I think this is what he's referring to.
- Nobody but sorry D-listers will play the Trumpified Kennedy Center and he’s going to shut it down rather than endure the humiliation.
- Since a lot of the coverage is omitting this detail: The Kennedy Center HAD a $250 million renovation and expansion just a few years ago, in 2019.
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- A reminder that the Kennedy Center is the literal and legal and congressional designated presidential memorial to JFK. This would be like Trump tearing down the Lincoln Memorial to build something “better.”
