The Essential Ed Yong Reading List

In a series of definitive pieces that earned him the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting, The Atlantic’s Ed Yong anticipated the course of the coronavirus pandemic, clarified its dangers, and illuminated the American government’s disastrous failure to curb it.

Yong, who has been a staff writer at The Atlantic since 2015, began warning readers about the fragility of America’s pandemic preparedness long before COVID-19 emerged. In 2018, we published his prescient investigation, “When the Next Plague Hits.” He correctly predicted an interconnected set of dangers: breakdowns in international communication, chronic underfunding of public health, shortages of supplies and scientific expertise at the federal level, President Donald Trump’s inadequacies as a leader.

The coronavirus is coursing through different parts of the U.S. in different ways, making the crisis harder to predict, control, or understand.

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