Ed Yong and The Spoonbill Club

Ed Yong’s writing about the pandemic in Atlantic Magazine was read by millions of Americans. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 2021 for his coverage.

But behind the scenes, he was struggling with burnout, anxiety and depression.

Host Nate Hegyi sits down with Ed for a conversation about how he decided to step back from pandemic reporting, the benefits (and possible drawbacks) of birdwatching for mental health, and the unexpected club that’s bringing two halves of his life together.

Featuring Ed Yong.

LINKS

Ed wrote an eerily predictive story about how America was not prepared for a pandemic in 2018.

You can find a link to all of Ed’s reporting for Atlantic Magazine here.

A description of “spoon theory” in Psychology Today.

For more information about the Spoonbill Club, check out Ed’s newsletter.

CREDITS

Host: Nate Hegyi

Reported and produced by Nate Hegyi

Mixed by Taylor Quimby, with help from our intern, Catherine Hurley

Editing by Taylor Quimby

Our staff includes Justine Paradise and Felix Poon
Executive producer: Taylor Quimby

Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR’s Director of On-Demand Audio

Music by Blue Dot Sessions

Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio

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Audio Transcript

Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.

For years, science writer Ed Yong was the guy who covered quirky animal stories.

Headlines include:

“The Sharks that live to 400.”

“A new origin story for dogs.”

“The life, times and departure of Bao Bao the panda.”

But then, a couple of years before COVID-19 upended the world, Ed wrote a longform feature:

Called, “The Next Plague is coming. Is America Ready? so it was about the inevitability of a big pandemic and the fact that this country, much like the rest of the world, was not prepared for it.

At the time, he was a staff writer for Atlantic magazine. They made a video to go along with a story, and when I watched it I had to do a double-take … because it was eerily predictive.

Ed Yong, from video: “Natural disasters bring communities together, but outbreaks tear them apart. They make people frightened of their neighbors. To counter that, communities need clear-headed leaders, reliable information, and a unifying spirit.”

This story? It was from 2018. And it argued that in a theoretical pandemic, hospitals would be overwhelmed – that we’d run out of ventilators and critical care beds – that the Trump administration would be unprepared to stop the spread.

So when Covid-19 did arrive, Ed, unlike a lot of us, was ready.

Ed Yong: It is a rare thing to. Being exactly the right time and place and have the right skills to help out in a moment of global catastrophe, and to do work that helps millions of people. I never really imagined being in that position or having that kind of responsibility, but it was also just… Uh, crushing.

[mux]

This is Outside/In, I’m Nate Hegyi. And today on the show, a conversation with writer Ed Yong. He was one of America’s most prominent pandemic journalists until that reporting burned him out.

Ed Yong: Physically, emotionally, things were getting, un intolerable.

He took a big step back and as part of his healing… discovered a very unexpected hobby.

[Bird SFX]

Stay tuned.

[mux fades]

I remember during the pandemic, going through several phases. At first, I couldn’t get enough news… even though there wasn’t a lot to read. Later, when the partisan divide started to widen, COVID stories just started to stress me out.

So imagine what it felt like for the people writing them.

Ed was working from home in Washington D.C. His office window stared out to a brick wall. Every day, he was on the phone or doing Zoom calls.

Ed Yong: I spent a lot of those years talking to health care workers who were, like, crying down the phone or long haulers who were crying down the phone, like public health workers who were just completely crushed by the weight of what they were doing. I think the pandemic was this sort of pervasive force in many of our lives. But, you know,I never got to not think about it. And that's a huge amount of grief and trauma to sort of hold in your head all the time.

Nate Hegyi: How did you cope as you were writing?

Ed Yong: Um, not well, is the real answer.

My wife and I would go for walks every morning and every evening and just try and work out what was going on.

[mux]

I remember doing a piece in the summer of 2020 where I interviewed public health workers about burnout. I think the piece was called something like, “The Pandemic Experts are not okay.” And I remember hearing them talking and just thinking, man, like… this is me. And I kept doing it for three years.

[mux]

Nate Hegyi: What was the moment that you realized you wanted to take a big step back from reporting on the pandemic?

Ed Yong: I think, in the summer of 2022 was when it just became untenable. You know, at that point I was, uh, very anxious, very depressed. And I mean those in the formal way, not just, you know, I'm feeling antsy and sad, right? Like, I had multiple mental health problems and, you know, I was not sleeping on a majority of nights. Things – like physically, emotionally – things were getting intolerable. I'd always said, I've been saying for a while that, aside from my duties as a journalist, I also have duties as a friend and as a partner. And if I feel like I'm just becoming a worse person because of all the costs of doing this kind of reporting, then I will just stop.

And stop is what he did. After three years, Ed felt like he had said everything there was to say. With each new variant, the story seemed to be going in circles.

Ed Yong: You can only say “this is what we should be doing” so many times and then watch us not do that thing, before sort of losing hope in the power of just saying it.

So he negotiated a six month sabbatical from his reporting with The Atlantic.

Nate Hegyi: It's one thing to say. All right, I'm going to take a step back. It's another thing to actually take that step back. And I imagine those first few weeks must have been hard, right, to change your routine that drastically? From reading about the pandemic every morning to calling sources and everything, how did you actually take that step back and change your routine?

Ed Yong: So one was just no writing, no writing at all. I completely logged off social media, I was capital “O” offline. I think when I told people that I was taking a sabbatical, a lot of people's initial feeling was, oh, you should like, get some hobbies, right? And actually, I think I just knew that I needed to not do anything.

For as long as I've been a writer, which is the past 20 years, I've always sort of prided myself on how much I could produce. You know, I was a good writer, and I was also a very fast writer. You know, over the course of those three pandemic years, I wrote 55, 65, maybe, feature length – like 3000, 5000 word stories. I was just popping one of those out every couple of weeks, and, it felt good. But, you know, taking a step back from that was difficult. I found that, like, when I started reading as a way of like, you know, I lost the ability to read for fun over the course of the pandemic. So regaining that was important to me. And then, you know, there was just a moment when I felt, “Oh, this is great. Like, I read, like, ten books in the last week.” But that just felt like a manifestation of exactly the same mindset, right? it's just grind culture, but transported into your free time, which just felt like… ludicrous. So, a lot of that sabbatical was also really about just trying to establish a healthier attitude to work and play.

And it did work… it did work.

MUX

Nate Hegyi: Ed came back to the Atlantic after that six month break. Did a few more stories and then… he quit.

He moved across the country, got back to working on quirky animal stories. He was in the middle of writing a book called “An Immense World,” all about how creatures sense the world around us. And during this time… Ed discovered a new hobby that would… in a very roundabout way… bring him right back to COVID-19.

That’s next after the break.

BREAK

For all the terrible things that happened during the pandemic – it was also a really good time for hobbies. I mean, how many people on Instagram were baking sourdough…

YouTube clip: “Hi, I’m Mary and I’m going to show you how to make a loaf of sourdough bread from scratch in winter, it’s really easy…”

Living in camper vans…

YouTube clip: “Four super annoying things about living in our van. #1. We have to dump our pee tank every 48 hours…”

And birdwatching…

YouTube clip: “Birdwatching. It’s an interesting hobby. A lot of people have been getting into it recently…”

By all accounts, birding saw a boom during the pandemic. The number of people using birdwatching apps like Merlin increased five-fold. But at first, Ed Yong wasn’t one of them. It wasn’t until about a year ago, when after he moved to California from D.C. that he actually discovered it.

Ed Yong: Immediately, like birds just felt like a more omnipresent part of the world.

[bird SFX]

So there were more of them, they were more interesting. Um, they are more audible…

[bird SFX]

We walked into this house that I now live in for the first time, and there's an Anna's hummingbird perched on a tree in the yard..

[bird SFX]

[laughs] And, uh, things have progressed, uh, uh, ludicrously since then.

[bird SFX]

Nate Hegyi: What do you like about birding? Like, what is it that really drew you in?

Ed Yong: Well, the birds themselves. I've always loved animals for as long as I've loved anything, but I think observing them closely, finding them in the field makes me feel so much more connected to nature than decades of nature writing had ever done. It felt like being let in on a secret of the universe.

But after years of pandemic reporting – staring at a Zoom screen as health care workers tell him how burned out they are while his neighbors toss their masks and say ‘screw it’ and have a beer indoors…

Birding became a salve for Ed.

Ed Yong: It is very meditative in a way that I don't think I predicted. To me, birding is actually more meditative than meditation, which I've tried and like had some success with. But, you know, when I'm out in the field and trying to find something It's like all of my attention is focused on another being, all of the anxiety and, you know, guilt and all the negative self-talk that often circulates in my head just disappears. I

[mux]

It's just me at that moment. I'm completely in the present, and that feels wonderful. I notice when I, when my mental health is struggling, like my body changes, I spend a lot more time hunched over when I walk. I'm staring at the pavement like I look sad because I am sad. And I think the sort of reverse can also be true. Like there is something truly uplifting about just spending a lot of your time looking up. Scanning the world makes me feel more a part of it than just walking along, being lost in my own thoughts.

Nate Hegyi: It's it's funny, Ed, you're talking about bird watching and. Well, when you first took a break from pandemic reporting, you were like, “I need to take a step back from grind culture, even when I'm reading books.”

But then it strikes me that bird watching is kind of like grind culture. I mean, you're cataloging the birds… it almost strikes me as an almost healthier version of grind culture. And I wonder if you've thought about that at all.

Ed Yong: I'm glad you asked this because truly, like, birding is incredible for my mental health until it isn't. Um, and it can easily not be, you know. There is a style of birding, I think that people call “listing” where you just, you know, it's really about just checking stuff off and, you know, to an extent, I've done this too. Like, it's mainly motivated by my desire to just see as much as I can see.

Nate Hegyi: Yeah.

Ed Yong: And I think finding lots of species that I've never seen before feels like a way of expanding that skill set. We talked about, you know, my knowledge of them and my sort of field skills. Um, but I think at its worst, it just becomes this sort of empty exercise, which just turns birds like these wondrous living things into just another box on a list that you then check off. So at the same time, I took a birding, I also took up photography… And I think that does also help me to snap out of, out of that listing mentality a bit.

Mux

Even as Ed was taking long walks, snapping photos, cataloging birds… COVID-19 wasn’t far from his mind. During his last spurt of reporting for the Atlantic, he had written a series of articles about long covid.

An estimated 17 million people in the U.S. currently suffer from the disease. Technically, it’s defined as having lingering symptoms more than six months after an initial COVID infection.

But in reality, Long COVID is a lot more complicated… and like other chronic illnesses, it can be totally invisible.

Ed Yong: It can be an incredibly debilitating condition. Even on the milder end of the spectrum, people often struggle to do a lot of things that they used to be able to do. Um, if they manage to do active daily life activities, they will sometimes be wiped out from something as simple as like, you know, walking up stairs carrying a load of laundry, in its most severe forms, this is a condition that leaves people housebound or even bed bound.

In 2020, Ed was one of the first journalists to write extensively about long COVID. He’s since followed up that work with a half-dozen other features.

Ed Yong: This is the pandemic work that I think I am proudest of, and this is a community that remains very dear to my heart. And to to be clear, I do not have long Covid. Um, I know many people who do. And I, I care a lot for, for this community of people.

Nate Hegyi: And so, as you said, you've written a lot about long Covid, but you also recently created a birding club for people with long Covid called the Spoonbill Club. What is that and why is it called the Spoonbill Club?

Ed Yong: People with these kinds of chronic illnesses often refer to this idea called “spoon theory,” which is just a way of conceptualizing how much energy they have. Like a person is a certain number of spoons in a given day, certain things like taking out the laundry or like loading a dishwasher or just doing some, some work, uses up a certain number of spoons and it's about… it's just a way of thinking about the amount of energy you have in a way that most of us healthy, abled people just never have to worry or stress about. And the spoonbill is a bird, that is found, uh, not in California but, you know, throughout the South. And so I thought it was a nice nod to, to the sort of union of both of these worlds.

Because so many of the things we do for fun outdoors involve aerobic activity… hiking is the obvious example. That’s out of the question for people with long covid, and so many of them just aren’t getting outdoor time. So I thought, okay, maybe there's a there there, maybe I can teach long haulers how to bird and give them a way of experiencing the outdoors. Learn something, add something new to their lives, and also find community with each other.

Ed ran the idea past a couple of long haulers he knew and they liked it. They’ve since done about four outings in the bay area. During the last one, about 18 long haulers showed up.

Ed Yong: We go slow… like we do two hours, during which time we might walk for half a mile. Less than a mile. Um, very slowly.

I bring a lot of folding stools in case people need to sit down. It's just so refreshing for a lot of them to be able to talk to other people who just get it and who who share their lives, their concerns. Um, it's also a sign of solidarity that people with long Covid, people with these kinds of chronic illnesses, people in the disabled community aren't in this alone.

Nate Hegyi: You said earlier, when you were in the midst of your pandemic reporting that, it felt. Often like banging your head against the wall. And it strikes me with the Spoonbill Club. That you are doing this one thing that you have control over.

And I'm just wondering if that's something you think about when you're doing this.

Ed Yong: I have had enough feedback from enough people with long Covid, to know that the pieces that I wrote had a huge impact on their lives. It's sort of funny to think back about that. Like that long period just spent in my living room staring at that brick wall and, and, you know, then to sort of visualize the rippling effects of these pieces going out into the world. But I have come to understand that I am worth more to the world and to my community than just this endless stream of pieces that I can write, than just the production that I am capable of. Going on sabbatical, taking up birding, starting this club have all been different facets of me trying to do something different.

MUX

Ed Yong is a birder and science writer who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the pandemic.

We’ll have a link to his stories for the Atlantic in our show notes.

You can hear more about the Spoonbill Club in Ed’s newsletter, The Ed’s Up.

Check out some of his really good bird photography on our Instagram page, @outsideinradio

This episode of Outside/In was produced, reported by me, Nate Hegyi. It was edited and mixed by Taylor Quimby, who leads our little flock of podcast producers, with mixing help from our intern - Catherine Hurley. Our staff also includes Felix Poon and Justine Paradis.

Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR’s Director of On-Demand audio. Fun fact… she once had these teenage owls that lived outside her house and would dive bomb her. Typical teens.

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio