‘The Interview’: Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World

Magazine|Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World

The science journalist and author Ed Yong likes to joke that during the first wave of Covid-19 in 2020, the impact and reach of his reporting for The Atlantic turned him into “a character in the season of ‘Pandemic.’” Indeed, his Covid journalism — which documented the earliest stages of the pandemic and made him one of the first chroniclers of long Covid — established Yong as a key and trusted public interpreter of the illness and its many ripples. It also won him a Pulitzer Prize. (Additionally, Yong’s 2022 book about animal perception, “An Immense World,” became a best seller. A young reader’s edition will be published on May 13.)

But despite having achieved a level of success and attention that most writers can only dream of, Yong’s immersion in Covid left him feeling as utterly depleted as many of the health care professionals and patients he was covering. So much so that in 2023, he decided to leave his prestigious perch at The Atlantic. Since then, in addition to working on a new book, he has found a measure of salvation, even transcendence, in birding, a pastime that he, like so many others, took up in the wake of those grim days of social distancing and time stuck inside.

So as we approach the fifth anniversary of the U.S. pandemic lockdowns, I wanted to talk with Yong about his Covid lows, his hopeful response to those struggles and his perspective on the lessons we learned — or maybe more accurate, didn’t learn — from that strange and troubling time.

I want to start with a subject that a lot of people can relate to: burnout. How did you realize that you had given all that you had to give? I remember talking to public-health experts for a story and hearing people say that they were feeling depressed, anxious, they couldn’t sleep, and thinking, Man, that feels very familiar. That was in June of 2020. By the middle of 2023, I realized that I was doing my best work at severe cost to all of the other parts of myself. I actually dislike the word “burnout.” It creates this image that the person in question did their job, the job was really hard and after a while they couldn’t stand how hard it was and they stopped doing it. Which I don’t think is correct. A lot of the health care workers I spoke to said that it wasn’t that they couldn’t handle doing their job. It was that they couldn’t handle not being able to do their job. They saw all of the institutional and systemic factors that prevented them from providing the care that they wanted to provide. For them, it was more about this idea of moral injury, this massive gulf between what you want the world to be and what you see happening around you. At some point that becomes intolerable. I think that’s much closer to my experience of pandemic journalism too.

Do you have any answers for how to contextualize your feelings in a world where people are struggling for subsistence or with the threat of violence? I often think, when I’ll be low, What right do I have to complain? I’m sure you must have had similar thoughts. This is a great point because you don’t even have to go to that extreme of folks who are struggling to get by, folks who are in the middle of war zones. Let’s just talk about the people whose stories I’m trying to tell. What right do I have to say, “I have listened to your stories, and I’m trying to write about them, and that, for me, is too hard”? Doesn’t that sound a little bit pathetic?