Zeynep Tufekci helps us navigate a way out of the "fog of pandemic."
Many lives have likely been saved because Zeynep Tufekci performed her specialty — analyzing the connection between evidence and policy. |
Near the start of the Covid pandemic, in March 2020, federal health officials were telling Americans that they didn't need to wear masks. Zeynep wrote in a guest essay for Times Opinion what others suspected but didn't have the nerve to say: Masks prevented the spread of the virus, and if officials were saying otherwise so they could ensure that frontline workers had a sufficient supply, that was unwise. |
A few weeks later the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reversed itself and recommended that Americans wear masks to stop transmission of the virus. One senior scientist at the agency later told The Times that Zeynep's writing was key to that decision. |
It was just one example of how, as the Times media columnist Ben Smith wrote last summer, Zeynep has "quietly made a habit of being right on the big things." |
That's just one reason I am excited that Zeynep has joined Times Opinion as a columnist. |
While experts turn to her for sound thinking and solid reporting on the pandemic — she is "as levelheaded and cleareyed as they come," said Eric Topol of Scripps Research — she is not an epidemiologist or virologist. She is a sociologist, with a special interest in the intersection of science, technology and society, and sees her field of study as crucial to understanding how government officials and citizens have responded to this outbreak. |
Zeynep's expertise reaches far deeper than the pandemic. She is masterful at connecting dots, seeing the patterns within networks and exploring how ideas all add up to explain the current moment, as she did with her incisive analysis of the 2020 election process and data points that put the lie to voting fraud and offered a path for reform. She has managed to see a bit farther than many others in her dozens of essays over the past decade for Times Opinion, The Atlantic and elsewhere. |
Her reporting, research and experience with protest movements in Cairo, Hong Kong, her native Turkey, and among Indigenous people in Mexico — as well as her Ph.D. from the University of Texas, where she studied the social impact of technology — have made her a student of how we communicate and work with and against each other in the digital age. It's the basis for her book, "Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest." |
Early on she saw the dangers of data mining by politicians and corporations. She understood the power and limitations of social media for social protests. When the pandemic shook the world, she gave early warning of how the government and the media were falling short. |
Today, Zeynep, a visiting professor at the new Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at Columbia Journalism School and an associate professor at the University of North Carolina's School of Information and Library Science, considers what she calls "the fog of pandemic, in which inadequate data hinders a clear understanding of how to fight a stealthy enemy." |
"While the pandemic has produced many fine examples of research and meticulous data collection," she writes, "we are still lacking in detailed and systematic data on cases, contact-tracing, breakthrough infections and vaccine efficacy over time, as well as randomized trials of interventions like boosters. This has left us playing catch-up with emerging threats like the Delta variant and has left policymakers struggling to make timely decisions in a manner that inspires confidence." |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
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