After yesterday's post – Repair networks – This presentation has XOXO Festival 2025By Ed Yong tells how the pandemic defeated him. Yong has written many articles focused on the meaning of the pandemic for The Atlantic From 2020. In 2021, Yong won the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reports. His first premise is that succeeding or not to face a pandemic is a choice.
For me, just the fact that Yong has a N95 breathing mask during the presentation, it is worth watching. It is a real leadership by example. Without previous journalistic experience, Yong has established a few rules, especially after winning the Pulitzer. These are good rules for any writer.
No argument with foreigners online
Do not become an expert
Cultivate readers, not fans
No Savior complex
Recognize and raise the community
Act the game, even if you don't feel it
Use power well
A fundamental overview that Yong shares is the power to testify to the suffering of others – “These kinds of pieces (for the Atlantic) was to testify to suffering, which, I think, is one of the deepest things that we can do as people. These pieces have taught me a lot. First of all, they taught me that we can really change the minds of people. – It reminds me of the power to Sense through ironyHonesty and humility during the confrontation of broken systems.
Yong continues by explaining, “It reminded me that the public of my work does not consist of people who have read stories for the first time. I have always thought of readers this way, in this model in a step. But of course, it is a nonsense. We exist in a society.
Yong's professional practices to give voice to many people suffering from the impacts of the virus are another example of help make the network smarter. Its major conclusion is that this pandemic continues due to an overly technocratic approach to resolve it and a total lack of understanding or wanting to solve the social problems that contribute to it – the inequalities of power, wealth, education and social ties.
In the end, these types of forces, such as disinformation and disinformation on the pandemic in the consumer media, led Yong to leave his job. He could not publish an article on Long Cavid while the same magazine would have a room which was a poorly studied hyperbole expressing the opposite perspective.
Yong then took the birds (as I did at the start of the pandemic). Birds and photography helped Yong recover his life while spending more time outside and offline. I wonder if we will lose most of the best and most brilliant writers and journalists when they are beaten by the powers behind the social inequalities that permeate our society. It is something for me to think during the observation of birds.
