The Interview - Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World

Episode Date: February 22, 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.

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 best-seller. 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 see what the world was like when I was a kid, and I wanted to see what the world was like when I was a kid, and I wanted to see what the world was like when I was a kid, and I wanted to see with a subject that I think a lot of people can relate to, which is burnout.

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. That was in June of 2020. Oh, that early. Okay. So, I want to talk about the word burnout in a little bit more depth, but just to answer

your question about how it manifests. By the middle of 2023, I was certainly struggling with anxiety and depression. I remember not sleeping very well. So 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 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. 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? I often think I'll be low or complaining about something,

and then, you know, in the back of my head, I think, like, is this, I'm just being the most pampered person in the world. Like, what right do I have to complain about anything? 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 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 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. Doesn't that sound a little bit pathetic? 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. 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 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, 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. 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'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, that idea that you've laid out of how journalists think about objectivity. Often is just a hopskipper jump away from license to be an asshole. I think much more important are concepts like fairness and honesty and accuracy. And I think that what the pandemic reporting has taught me, and especially the reporting on long 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.

You know, I think you've been very clear in saying that, you know, 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. When I do events, I wear a mask for all of those reasons. And also because I know that every time I do a talk, while the vast majority of people in the audience have probably moved on, there are going to be other people who haven't. And I think it makes a huge difference to them to have the person at the front of the stage wear a mask. It tells them it's fine, it's not weird. So I do it for that reason too. In terms of holding this line at a point when a large swath of society has moved on,

I have written a lot about the panic-neglect cycle. What is that? The idea is a crisis happens, let's say a new epidemic. Attention and resources flow towards that. People take it seriously. People freak out. And then once the problem is over, once it abates, so too does everything else. So the resources dwindle, the attention goes away, and we lapse into the same level of

unpreparedness that led to the panic in the first place. So round and round in circles we go. This is very real, right? I've seen it through my reporting, I've seen it here, I've seen it for Ebola, for COVID, you name it. Bird flu? Sure. Why not? To take a topical example?

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 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 one 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. It's a long brewing threat.

In all likelihood, the next pandemic will be a flu one, whether it's H5N1 or something else. So, the specifics of my level of worry about this particular pathogen are subsumed in this ambiancy of worry about everything. We just 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 US fare so badly? You know, there's all of these things that I think people very rarely think of in terms of 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 one to 10, how worried you are that like 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, you were dealing with the feelings we've talked about and 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. 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. I would go for walks and just hear bird song 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, it 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 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 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. That was honestly a life-changing moment. Birding is now my main hobby. It's an endless source of joy and wonder. I think all of these little moments arrived at a time in my life when I wanted more connection to the space

around me. Can you put me back in that life-changing moment? Like do you remember the day or what? Yeah, I do. I went to a place called Arrowhead Marsh. It's this relatively small stretch of wetland that has a little boardwalk sticking out into this little chunk of bay. And on that day I saw all these creatures.

I am a science writer, right? At the time I had already published my second book, An Immense World, which is about how animals perceive the world around them. I've been writing about animals since I've been writing about anything and I've been in love with them and fascinated by them since I've been in love with anything. But a lot of my knowledge of the natural world, if you want to be like maximally reductive and ungenerous about it, like it's just a lot of trivia, right? It's knowledge about facts, right? It's knowledge about

facts, right? Like fun facts. Whereas the knowledge I gained from birding and that started on that boardwalk feels very rooted in the lives of the birds themselves in time and in space. And the thing that I felt very palpably at that place on that day that I still do now every time I go birding is this incredible sense of being present. It's centering, it's meditative in a way that actual meditation is not for me. I struggle to achieve that when I try and meditate.

I achieve it without any effort when I'm birding. And I think that I've come to see it as an act of respect and of care. It comes back to everything we've talked about, about empathy and caretaking. How is it an act of care? Yeah. 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, there just is so much about what's going

on that is basically beyond our comprehension. 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 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 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 electric and magnetic fields. 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. 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. I have a curmudgeonly question to ask about this. Sure, yeah.

Sort of developing an awareness of the magic that's happening all around us at any given moment and understanding that there's this vast cosmic dance playing out around us. You know, sort of in the abstract, you can see how kind of internalizing those perspectives might change one's perspective on their own life. 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 balloon.

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 backing 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 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. 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. 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 congenial question that you asked.

Like, 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 do? Yeah, is it like a dropout solution to the world? Totally, right? Like, because often like a dropout solution to the world? Totally, right? Because often people talk about birding as escapism.

And I think there's something about the word escapism that has a slight negative connotation. I think it's almost definitionally. Yeah. Yes, absolutely. And I had a conversation with a really good friend about this. And what she said was, I think it's more important than ever to be out in the world right now. And I agree with that.

I think that thesely and I know that I am more useful to my community if I myself am whole. And yeah, being out in nature gives me that. After the break, I call Ed back and we talk about how hummingbirds aren't as sweet as they seem. They are frankly, tiny assholes. They are small bundles of sass and fury and I love them for that. Ed. Hello. Hi, thank you for taking the time to speak with me again. Yeah, of course.

You know, the, the, as I'm sure you're well aware, we're obviously in an era of increased skepticism toward scientific authority. And does the reality of that affect how you think about communicating scientific information with the public? To be honest, it hasn't because I think it is often very reasonable to be skeptical of scientific authority. I've seen plenty of work that I've reported on be refuted later. So to a degree, skepticism is warranted and I don't really find it useful or accurate to be talking about skepticism of science as if it were a single, coherent entity. Yes, you have the very obvious and commonly discussed ones like climate change denial

and vaccine misinformation. But to me, this bracket also includes things like the dismissal of long term chronic illnesses like long COVID. It includes the massive attacks on trans rights and healthcare right now, attacks which are completely against our current understanding of the fluidity and non-binary nature of sex and gender. To me, all of this, it's part of the same thing, but we don't, we often don't think about the latter when we talk about science skepticism. So these things are better characterized not as being anti-science, but being pro-power

and pro-profit. And I think that to me is a more useful frame for it because it more correctly describes the actual problem and who the opponents are. Yeah. Do you think there's any way in which writing or doing journalism from almost what you could say is an explicitly moral place has any drawbacks? Do you think it's harder to be persuasive for those who might disagree with your ideas if your ideas are presented as sort of like a morally correct or other ideas are morally

incorrect? So to me, it's not like I'm trying to pummel a reader with the idea that my views are necessarily correct, but I am trying to espouse a kind of moral stance in the work. And I am trying to use the work to expand our moral imagination. I think that's the heart of it. It's to show the full scope of what is possible. I think readers might certainly recoil if they feel that a writer is moralizing at them. Or implicating them somehow. Or implicating them somehow.

But I think that you especially run the risk if it seems like you are hitting people with a message. If you are going moral first. What I tried to do in my pandemic pieces was to walk people through a line of argument, right? To show my working, to say, here is why I think the things that I do and why the people I talk to think the things that they do. And I think that that approach, you know, surely is also going to put some, a fraction of readers off, but I think is just inherently more persuasive than just saying, do this because.

Yeah. So putting work aside, I think one could very reasonably feel a sense of moral injury just as a result of living in the world right now. We can change our work situation or at least try to, but changing the bigger problems is kind of beyond our scope. So how do we, got any advice for how to get through that? Right. A nice softball question. There are three ideas that come to mind when I think of this question. One is a quote from the amazing ablust not this sort of nebulous, airy thing that we sometimes think of it as.

It is a practice that you cultivate through active effort and day in, day out practice. I think of a line by the great and late global health advocate Paul Farmer, who spent his whole life advocating for the world's poorest, who said that he fought the long defeat, by which he meant that he was often swimming against the current, against forces that were extremely powerful, and in his efforts to allay himself with the most vulnerable and least powerful people, he knew that he was going to suffer defeats and setbacks, and that he was going to fight nonetheless. And then the third one is an idea called the Stockdale Paradox, which was named after Vice Admiral James Stockdale, who was a prisoner of war after Vietnam.

When he was finally released after a long time in captivity, he was asked how he managed to survive, what he endured, and he talked about how he made it because he was able to hold two seemingly contradictory ideas in his head at the same time. One was the full and brutal realization of his situation, combined with the indomitable hope that things could get better. I think all of these ideas anchor me in these moments when it feels like the gulf between what we hope the difficult to bear. But, you know, I think we bear it nonetheless.

Yeah. Now I would like to sort of wrench the conversation away from heavier topics. I just want you to tell me a really cool scientific fact that you learned about life on Earth while you were researching your next book. Something that gave you some delight. God, what am I going to pick? I'm writing a section of the book that is about hummingbirds and the fact that hummingbirds have iridescent colors, so colors that are especially vivid at certain angles. The anise hummingbirds that lives in my neighborhood is a great example of that. In some angles, it looks like this vivid capital M magenta jewel.

It just gleams in the bright sunlight and then it might turn its head and look black and dark. Those colors are not inherent to the feathers themselves. If you took those feathers and ground them up, the dust would not look magenta. Those colors are structural. They occur because the feathers have rows of tiny disc-shaped structures

that are arranged perfectly at the nanoscale. The light they reflect interferes with and amplifies each other specifically in red wavelengths and specifically at certain angles. In some ways, just staring at that hummingbird, you're staring into the nanometer world and seeing the effects that just a tiny bit of structure and organization can have on this entire beautiful animal.

Every time I look at a hummingbird, I think about stuff like that. I think about how when the Anna's hummingbird dies for its courtship flight, it sustains more G-forces than a fighter jet pilot. I think about how every time it flicks its tongue into a flower, the tip of that tongue splits open and small finger-like flanges unfurl from the tips, only to close again as the tongue retracts. So the hummingbird is literally grabbing a small bolus of nectar with two hand-like projections at the tip of its tongue. I think about all of that I've learned through scientific papers, but I also know all the things I've learned from watching hummingbirds as a birder.

The fact that they are, frankly, tiny assholes. They will challenge and intimidate crows, hawks, even humans on occasion. They are small bundles of sass and fury, and I love them for that. I love that if I see two of them next to each other, I'm pretty much guaranteed to watch a fight within the next few seconds. This is sort of what I meant when I said that my world now is this wonderful mix of the academic and the experiential. It's all these sides of nature colliding in every single experience and I think it's wonderful. That's Ed Yong. His most recent book is An Immense World. A version of that book for young readers will be published on May 13th. And he also has a newsletter called The Ed's

Up, which features a lot of his photos of birds. This conversation was produced by Wyatt Orm with help from Seth Kelly. It was edited by Annabelle Bacon, mixing by Sophia Landman. Original music by Diane Wong and Marian Lozano. Photography by Devin Yalkin. Our senior booker is Priya Matthew and our executive producer is Allison Benedict.

Special thanks to Rory Walsh, Renan Borelli, Jeffrey Miranda, Nick Pittman, Matty Masiello, Jake Silverstein, Paula Schuman, and Sam Dolnick. If you like what you're hearing, follow or subscribe to The Interview wherever you get your podcasts. To read or listen to any of our conversations, you can always go to nytimes.com slash The Interview. And you can email us anytime at theinterview at nytimes.com.

Next week, Lulu talks with Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey. I'm David Marchese and this is The Interview from New York Times.