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'The Interview': Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
Sat, 22 Feb 2025
The Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer talks about burnout from covering the pandemic and how bird-watching gave him a new sense of hope.Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: Who is Ed Yong and why is he featured in this episode?
From The New York Times, this is The Interview. I'm David Marchese. Even now, five years after it started, it's not an easy thing to understand all the lasting effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. That's the case even, and maybe especially, for people whose job it was to help the rest of us understand it. The award-winning science journalist and author Ed Yong was one of those people.
His reporting for The Atlantic magazine on the pandemic, from its earliest stages to the plight of those suffering from long COVID, earned him a Pulitzer Prize. During that same period, his book, An Immense World, about animal perception, became a bestseller.
But despite having achieved a level of success that most writers could only dream of, Yang's COVID reporting had left him emotionally drained. In 2023, he quit his day job at the Atlantic. Since then, one of the things that helped him recover is birding, a pastime that boomed in popularity during those years of social distancing and too much time stuck at home.
It was Yang's experience with those two subjects, burnout and getting back to nature, that I wanted to discuss, as well as his perspective on the lessons we learned, or maybe more accurately, didn't learn, from COVID-19. Here's my conversation with Ed Yang. I wanted to start with a subject that I think a lot of people can relate to, which is burnout.
Chapter 2: How did the COVID-19 pandemic affect Ed Yong personally?
How did you realize that you'd hit that point that you'd given what you had to give?
Yeah. So I spent a lot of the last four years reporting on the COVID-19 pandemic. And I remember talking to public health experts for a story about how they are not okay. And hearing people say that they were feeling depressed, anxious, they couldn't sleep, and thinking, man, that feels very familiar. I sympathize extremely with this. And that was in
june of 2020 oh that early okay so um you know i want to talk about the the word burnout in a little bit more depth but just to answer your question about how it manifests um you know by the middle of 2023 um i was certainly struggling with anxiety and depression i remember not sleeping very well so most nights um most nights i couldn't sleep
And I was getting irascible and difficult with people I care about. And I think 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. I use it because it's convenient shorthand, but it conjures up quite the wrong impression, I think.
It creates this image that the person in question did their job, the job was really hard, and And they couldn't stand how hard it was, which I don't think is actually correct. What a lot of the healthcare workers I spoke to said was 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.
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Chapter 3: What does Ed Yong think about the concept of burnout?
You know, they saw around them 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. And I think that's much closer to my experience of pandemic journalism, too. Like,
It's shouting about the kinds of things we need to do and watch us again and again fail to do any of that. It's all of those conflicts between what you hope will happen and what actually happens that just crushes you.
Do you feel like you have any good answers for how to contextualize your own feelings in a larger world where people are struggling for subsistence or struggling with the threat of violence on a daily level? Yeah. I often think, well, I'll be low or complaining about something. And then, you know, in the back of my head, I'm just being the most pampered person in the world.
What right do I have to complain about anything? You know, no right, really. 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, you know, 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 and who I'm interviewing on a day-in, day-out basis.
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? Like, doesn't that sound a little bit pathetic? Yeah.
I don't mean to laugh, but there is something kind of absurd about it. There's a ridiculousness to it.
100% there is. And yet it's real. The feelings are real. And yet it's real. Right. I've had this conversation with friends and with my therapist a lot. And I think that if we, as journalists... do our job correctly, what we end up doing is extending as much empathy we can to the people we are writing about so that we can correctly characterize and convey their experiences to the world at large.
And empathy really does mean, for me, spending days listening to the worst moments of the dozens of people's lives, having them run through my head again and again so that I can make sense of them and turn them into something that might shift the needle in the head of someone who has never thought about those experiences. And I'm sitting here now answering this question because
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Chapter 4: How does empathy play a role in journalism according to Ed Yong?
Still questioning myself about whether it's ridiculous to say that that's hard. But what I can tell you is that I know it's hard because I felt it. And I think that that's enough, you know?
The necessity for empathy that you just described, in some ways, it can be easy to think of empathy as in tension with the idea of objectivity. How do you think about... empathy and objectivity in the context of journalism. Because there could be a way of thinking about it where maybe the idea is, you know, you're not supposed to put yourself in the shoes of the person you're writing about.
You're supposed to be like a camera's eye and keep a distance a little bit.
Yeah, I think that objectivity is one of the most oversold concepts in journalism. I think it allows a lot of people to pretend that they have no biases, when they absolutely do. You know, that idea that you've laid out of how journalists think about objectivity often is just a hot skip and a jump away from
licensed to be an asshole you know it's like I think much more important are concepts like fairness and honesty and accuracy and I think that what the pandemic reporting has taught me is and especially the reporting on COVID, is that journalism can very much act as a caretaking profession. We usually think of it in terms that are antagonistic. We hold people to account. We speak truth to power.
And we absolutely should do all those things, But the mindset that accompanies those doesn't work if the people you're writing about are not the powerful ones. In that instance, empathy becomes my touchstone. It's how I do a good job. It's that softer, emotional, empathy-driven side of the craft that I think, as you've correctly noted, is often...
denigrated or seen as antithetical to what journalism should be. I think that if you think that that's antithetical to journalism, you're in the wrong business here.
I think you've been very clear in saying that COVID has not gone away. You still ask people to wear masks at your events. But I think it's fair to say that that attitude is Not necessarily where the rest of the world is at the moment. So how do you think about continuing to take precautions and advising others to take precautions when society kind of feels like it's moved on?
Yeah, I do it for a bunch of reasons. Firstly, I have learned that I enjoy not being sick. I know that the cost of long COVID is real and substantial and that I don't want to run that risk lightly. I also know that I have many friends and people I'm close to who are immunocompromised. So for the sake of the people around me, I also don't want to get sick.
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Chapter 5: Why does Ed Yong still take COVID-19 precautions?
Sure. Why not, to take a topical example? Sure. All of which is to say, for all of those reasons, I don't feel self-conscious about still being cautious at a time when most people aren't. I personally don't want to lapse into the neglect phase because I don't think it's warranted.
You know, I just have to ask this because it's been blaring in the back of my mind. How worried are you about a bird flu pandemic happening?
You know, I try not to answer questions like this on things that I haven't specifically reported on, right? Because it is hard to make sense of all this. I didn't come to these views on COVID lightly. I came to them through talking to hundreds of people online. with a wide range of expertise over the course of many years. So, you know, specifically, how worried am I about bird flu?
Like, right, on a scale of 1 to 10, I don't know.
Did you say very or not much? I'll rephrase the question. How worried should I be about bird flu?
That's an even harder question, right? Because how worried I am is something that I can actually reasonably answer. What I will say is, It is a threat that we should absolutely take seriously, right? It's a long brewing threat. In all likelihood, the next pandemic will be a flu one, whether it's H5N1 or something else. And so the specifics of my level of worry about this particular pathogen...
are kind of subsumed in this ambiency of worry about everything, right? Like we just sort of live in an era of heightened pandemic risk because it's intertwined with all the other great existential problems we have. We live in a world and at a time where new viruses will have an ever easier time of jumping into us.
and where I think that the infrastructure of our societies continue to be poorly suited to handling those threats. So if you think about what happened with COVID, why did the U.S. fare so badly? You know, there's all of these things that I think people very rarely think of in terms of pandemic preparedness.
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Chapter 6: What are Ed Yong's thoughts on pandemic preparedness?
You think of, like, vaccine-making infrastructure or, you know, our capacity to create new antivirals. But it's all that social stuff, and crucially, a lack of trust in government and each other, that turns... a pandemic into a true disaster. And all of those problems are still with us, and I would argue are worse than they were in early 2020.
So I say all that because I think that we sometimes frame the problem in not quite the wrong way, but not the important way, right? The way that it's often framed is like... Tell me on a scale of 1 to 10 how worried you are that H5N1 is going to go pandemic. I think the more important question is, if it does, how screwed are we?
And the answer is really, like very, very, because of all of those fundamental frailties that I just listed.
So, you know, you were dealing with the feelings we've talked about and, you know, you sort of got to a point where you decided your life had to change. And as I understand it, one of the things that changed your life was discovering birding. Yes. How did you find birding?
Okay, so in the spring of 2023, just before I left the Atlantic, I moved to Oakland from D.C. And one thing that immediately happened was I started paying attention to the birds around me because they were just omnipresent in a way that they weren't before. So my first day in my new house, there was an Anna's hummingbird in the garden, and I
I would go for walks and just hear birdsong everywhere, the melodious sound of a Pacific wren in our nearby redwood forest. And I downloaded the Merlin app, which allows you to identify the songs of birds that are singing around you. And I started noticing how much exists in my neighborhood that I would previously have overlooked. And so all this happened very slowly.
I bought a pair of binoculars and would take it with me on like neighborhood walks or hikes. And, you know, I would have Merlin running while I was working and just look up occasionally and go, oh, that's interesting. It's an oak titmouse. I've never seen one before. And after I left my job, I fell hard into that world. To me, the difference between just being like
I guess, casually bird curious and being an actual birder is making specific effort to go and look at birds. Right. It goes from passive to kind of active. Exactly. Yep. So, you know, early September of 2023 was when I made my first trip to a local wetland to specifically look at birds and nothing else. And that was honestly a life-changing moment. Birding is now my main hobby.
It's an endless source of joy and wonder. And I think all of these little moments arrived at a time in my life when I wanted more connection to the space around me.
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Chapter 7: How did birding become a transformative hobby for Ed Yong?
Because at its core, what it says is, this little brown sparrow that I would normally ignore is worthy of attention. Under normal circumstances, it would be very easy to say, here's a little brown bird. It looks the same as all the other brown birds.
But no, I know through birding that it's subtly different to the other brown birds around it and that those differences matter and are rewarding to know about. That feels to me, to be an act of respect, everything is worth looking at.
When you're watching birds or being in their environment, and I imagine this could apply to awareness of the natural world writ large. Sure. There just is so much about what's going on that is basically beyond our comprehension. Yes. Just because of our sense capabilities as human beings, we're sort of condemned to only having an ankle deep understanding of what it is to be alive on Earth.
And to me, that's that's like such a humbling and kind of like mind blowing thing. It's almost hard for me to wrap my head around. But what do you think?
Yeah, I fully agree. I mean, I think that is a beautiful pricey of basically my entire body of work. Nailed it. Right. I can go home now, right? All of it, including work that doesn't
obviously fit into this bracket, like all the pandemic stuff we've talked about, is about the idea that much of the world is hidden from us, that we don't perceive it and we don't understand it, and that it is worth understanding and it is necessary to understand.
So, you know, I'm now working on book three, and I really see all three of them as part of a trilogy that all touch on this same theme. So, I Contain Multitudes, the first book, was about the microbes that live inside our bodies and those of other animals and the enormous influence that they play in our lives.
Book two, An Immense World, is about how other creatures perceive things that we miss, whether it's ultraviolet light or electrically magnetic fields. And it's about how each of us is only perceiving a thin sliver of the fullness of reality, which, as you say, I think is a wonderfully humbling concept that
It tells us that regardless of our technology or our intellect, we really are perceiving only a thin fraction of all there is to perceive. That our sense of the world, though it seems complete to us, is an illusion. But it is an illusion that we share with all other species.
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Chapter 8: Why does Ed Yong see birding as a form of meditation and care?
And I think sometimes I'm able to get in that place. You know, it's almost like the way I'm picturing it in my head now is like, you know, it's like I blow up a beautiful... I'm carrying that balloon around and looking up at the balloon. What an incredible, beautiful balloon that I'm carrying around with me every day.
And then I get to the office and the balloon pops on the halogen light and I'm just back in this shit again, you know? Like, did you find that your understanding of the bigger existential stuff you were writing about... was actually able to help you in the moments when you were really struggling?
This is a great question, right? And I think one that I can directly speak to because I had written half of An Immense World before the pandemic happened, and I took a small break after the first year to finish the second half of the book. But I can say that, personally, thinking about these ideas constantly really helped me.
It felt like a salve to all of that moral injury and to all of the despair that I was feeling. I don't see it as a kind of direct antidote, right? It doesn't cure it in that one-to-one way. But it fills my life with wonder and with joy. And I think that acts as a buffer against all the other existential dread and fear that we have to grapple with. And I mean, here's how I think about it.
For a lot of the time I've been a science writer, one thing I've said about science as a field is that it is one of the only areas of human endeavor that takes us out of ourselves. And I think we exist at a time when... We are being crunched ever inwards, whether it's through a novel virus or through frayed social connections or algorithms that feed us more of what we already were seeking out.
You know, there is a kind of implosive effect of the modern world. And I think the kind of science and nature writing that I'm prioritizing and the birding that I do in my spare time are all counters to that. They are a way of radiating your attention outwards. And yes, I'm still wrestling with the curmudgeonly question that you asked. Does any of that matter?
And sometimes when I go out and look at birds, there's a little voice in my head that says, is this really the best thing you could be doing with your time? Do you not have work to Yeah, is it like a dropout solution to the world? Totally, right? Like, because often people talk about birding as escapism.
And I think there's something about the word escapism that has a slight negative connotation, you know, right?
I think it's almost definitionally, yeah.
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