Across his reporting on COVID-19 and the animal world, Ed Yong has played the role of societal sense maker during deeply uncertain times.
—inhabitants of an ecosystem, in a way, who’ve also fallen out of most ranges of notice in the past two years, whose experiences Yong has also tried to return to focus.and Yong’s pandemic coverage alike seek to make clear the fact of human limitations.
But even that’s a pretty anthropocentric approach, as Yong gently repositions my question. “I see it less about our limitations as the things that we don’t see,” he says. “Whether those things are like, smells and colors that we don’t perceive, whether it’s like broken systems that screw us over.” There’s a classic 1974 essay by the American philosophertitled “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” that Yong likes to think about in terms of writing about experiences via a form of “journalism of evidence-based imagination,” as he says someone once described his work. “Obviously we’ll never know what it’s like to be a bat—that’s the Thomas Nagel thing,” Yong explains. “But we can try. And it’s glorious and worthy to make the effort to do so.” Confined to our limited human umwelt, I pose one last question about how he interprets his job as a journalist, parsing reams of stimuli in order to make sense of it for a larger body. Kind of like…a sensory organ? Or an alligator pore? Yong indulges me in this metaphor, and we joke about how, most days, absorbing 2022-levels of information can leave anyone feeling as helpless as a, equipped with shockingly complex eyes yet still unable to process the full picture in front of them. As a result, being able to play the role of sense maker at a societal scale is the part Yong finds most rewarding about his work, whether he’s covering nature’s horrors or delighting in its wonders. “The feedback that I’ve always most appreciated—more than the prizes or the fun stuff—is just people saying, ‘These pieces have helped me understand what’s going on. I was drowning in information, and this just feels like someone just sat me down and laid it all out and helped me breathe and make decisions.’” Yong pauses. “That feels good.”are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.
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