Ed Yong

During a year of pain and confusion, Ed Yong made the unintelligible, intelligible. The Atlantic science writer decoded the pandemic for a mass audience, explaining what we knew, how we knew it, and where we could go from here. His work spanned nearly every angle of the crisis, from his seminal piece “How the Pandemic Will End,” to his reporting on the U.S. failures in the face of COVID-19, to his more recent coverage of the Delta variant. The power of his journalism became irrefutable in 2021 when Yong won the Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting, the first ever for The Atlantic. As the pandemic rages on, Yong remains a critical voice of measured, informed reason.