Know Your Enemy

How the Pandemic Changed Everything (w/ David Wallace-Wells) [TEASER]

Mar 31, 2025

The conversation delves into the profound effects of the pandemic on everyday life. It revisits the fear and solidarity experienced during its early days. The discussion reveals how Covid altered our perceptions and behaviors, sparking a reluctance to acknowledge its true toll. Learning loss and the challenges of school closures are examined, shedding light on the long-term academic implications. Together, these reflections highlight how deeply the pandemic has transformed our society.

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Quick takeaways

The pandemic profoundly altered our lives, yet there is a collective reluctance to acknowledge its ongoing impact and costs.

Examining educational disruptions reveals missed opportunities and a more complex narrative regarding learning loss and academic performance that predates Covid.

Deep dives

The Justification and Consequences of School Closures

School closures during the pandemic were considered justified at the time, yet there have been numerous missed opportunities to mitigate their impact, such as enhancing ventilation systems and implementing outdoor classrooms. Although schools were only partially open by fall 2020, the disruptions resulted in significant interruptions to students' education for up to one and a half years. A notable point of contention is the public perception of these closures and the retrospective critiques that emerged post-pandemic, which often do not account for the fears and concerns parents had regarding safety. This oversimplification of the debate fails to acknowledge the complex realities faced during a time of unprecedented uncertainty and limited information.

Navigating School Closures and Learning Loss in a Pandemic

5min

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This month marked five years since the formal start of the pandemic in the United States in March 2020, when the federal government declared the arrival and spread of the novel coronavirus to be a national emergency. The official Covid death toll in the United States now stands at over 1.2 million; globally it surpasses 20 million people. Tens of millions of others were hospitalized, and many who survived infection are facing long Covid or related health complications. Our lives were upended, whether by sheltering-in-place, working from home, and barely leaving our home or apartment, or, for others, by endangering themselves by continuing to show up to work in hospitals, making deliveries, or staffing essential businesses. And yet, as David Wallace-Wells recently argued in the New York Times, "We tell ourselves we’ve moved on and hardly talk about the disease or all the people who died or the way the trauma and tumult have transformed us. But Covid changed everything around us."

We wanted to have a conversation with David about that reality: why, collectively, we resist acknowledging what Covid really cost us, and the ways it continues to shape our lives. The discussion begins by revisiting the first weeks and months of the pandemic, the fear we felt, and the remarkable displays of solidarity that occurred in blue states as well as red states. From there we explore the different "phases" of the pandemic, how public-health measures became culture-war fodder, the impact of the vaccine on how both the public and elected officials perceived the risks of Covid, the pandemic's profound influence on our politics, the fallout from school closures, the Lab Leak Theory, and more.

Listen again: "How to Survive a Pandemic" (w/ Peter Staley), Feb 21, 2021

Sources:

David Wallace-Wells, "How Covid Remade America," New York Times, Mar 4, 2025

— "The Covid Alarmists Were Closer to the Truth Than Anyone Else," New York Times, Feb 26, 2025

— "We’ve Been Talking About the Lab-Leak Hypothesis All Wrong," New York Times, Feb 28, 2023

— "Dr. Fauci Looks Back: ‘Something Clearly Went Wrong'," New York Times, April 24, 2023

David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth (2019)

Nicholson Baker, "The Lab-Leak Hypothesis," New York Magazine, Jan 4, 2021

Zeynep Tufekci, "We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives," NYTimes, Mar 16, 2025.

Sam Adler-Bell, "Doctor Do-Little: The Case Against Anthony Fauci," The Drift, Jan 24, 2021

— "David Leonhardt: The Pandemic Interpreter," NYMag, Feb 24, 2022.

Jacqueline Rose, "To Die One’s Own Death," LRB, Nov 19, 2020.