Free Republic

Zeynep Tufekci and Jeremy Howard played a decisive role in shifting CDC guidance and ushering in mask mandates across America. Zeynep’s role in the COVID story goes far deeper than most realize. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeynep_Tufekci But alas, the pro-mask establishment responded with a trump card of their own: a New York Times op-ed by sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, Here’s Why the Science Is Clear That Masks Work, highlighting a statement of clarification from Cochrane’s editor-in-chief, Karla Soares-Weiser, that the review’s conclusion had been “open to misinterpretation, for which we apologize.” This new trump card was a disaster for mask opponents—the proverbial queen of...

HONG KONG—For months now, I’ve been told that Hong Kong’s protests would end soon. They’ll end when school starts, I heard during the summer. School did start, but the protests wore on, only now I saw high-school students in crisp school uniforms joining the protesters’ ranks. Next, the mask ban of early October was supposed to slow protesters down, but the very first day after that ban, I watched streams of protesters in masks and helmets make their way to their usual haunts on Hong Kong Island. The government shut down many of the subway lines that day, a practice...

Vernon Unsworth, the caver accused by Elon Musk of being a pedophile, filed a defamation lawsuit against the Tesla CEO on Monday.

When Apple released its iPhone XS line, with screens that range from 5.8 inches to 6.5 inches, they became the company’s largest phones yet. But the big screens have triggered a backlash from women who say the device is too large for the average female hand. “Women like me with small hands who need the most secure phone for safety reasons are stuck with something they can’t hold and constantly risk dropping,” tweeted sociology professor Zeynep Tufekci, who teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Some people like the bigger phones. Fine. Keep an alternative for the...

Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Twitter this morning accused British diver Vern Unsworth of being a pedophile, after Unsworth criticized Musk’s proposal to use a small submarine to rescue a trapped soccer team in Thailand. Unsworth was instrumental in the rescue of the boy’s soccer team, but lambasted Musk’s submarine plan in an interview published by CNN Friday. Among other comments, Unsworth said the submarine “wouldn’t have made the first 50 meters into the cave” and was “just a PR stunt.” Musk, responding to further criticism from professor and New York Times columnist Zeynep Tufekci, wrote this morning that he...