defeated by the pandemic

Following up from yesterday’s post — fix the networks — this presentation at XOXO Festival 2024, by Ed Yong tells the story about how the pandemic defeated him. Yong wrote many articles focused on making sense of the pandemic for The Atlantic from 2020. In 2021 Yong won the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting. His first premise is that succeeding or failing to deal with a pandemic is a choice.

For me, just the fact that Yong wears a N95 respirator mask while presenting, makes this worth watching. It’s real leadership by example. With no previous journalistic experience, Yong set some rules for himself, especially after winning the Pulitzer. These are good rules for any writer.

No arguing with strangers online
Do not become a pundit
Cultivate readers, not fans
No savior complex
Acknowledge and uplift community
Act the part, even if you don’t feel it
Use power well

A core insight that Yong shares is the power of bearing witness to the suffering of others — “This genre of pieces [for The Atlantic] was about bearing witness to suffering, which I think is one of the most profound things we can do as people. These pieces taught me a lot. First, they taught me that we can actually still change people’s minds. At a time when it felt like everyone was polarizing and hunkering down, many people told me that this piece about grief completely changed how they thought about how to extend grace to those who were still suffering.” — This reminds me of the power of sensemaking through irony, honesty, and humility when confronting broken systems.

Yong goes on to explain, “It reminded me that the audience for my work does not simply consist of the people who first read the stories. I just always thought about readers in that way, in that one-step model. But of course, that’s nonsense. We exist in a society. We live in networks. And so many [Covid] long haulers used these pieces to open conversations with their employers, their family members, their friends, their loved ones, their colleagues, to say, this is what I’m going through.”

Yong’s professional practices of giving voice to many people suffering from the impacts of virus are another example of helping make the network smarter. His major conclusion is that this pandemic is continuing because of an overly technocratic approach to solving it and a total lack of understanding or wanting to address the social issues that are contributing to it — inequities in power, wealth, education, and social connections.

In the end, these types of forces, like misinformation and disinformation about the pandemic in mainstream media, led Yong to quit his job. He could not publish an article on long Covid while the same magazine would have a piece that was poorly researched hyperbole expressing the opposite perspective.

Yong then took up birding [as I did at the beginning of the pandemic]. Birding and photography have helped Yong get his life back as he spends more time outdoors and off-line. I wonder if we will lose many of the best and brightest non-fiction writers and journalists as they get beaten down by the powers behind the social inequities that pervade our society. It’s something for me to think about while birding.

Feeding sunflower seeds to a black-capped chickadee at the Amherst Bird Sanctuary in Nova Scotia