From the New York Times, this is the interview.

I'm David Marquesie.

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 Emense 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 Yong.

I wanted to start 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.

And that was in June of 2020.

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