Best writing on the COVID-19 pandemic?

January 6, 2022 2:12 PM

I'm looking for non-fiction articles or books about the COVID-19 pandemic that people have found particularly insightful. Ideally, this should be as big-picture as possible: What does the pandemic mean for society, history, science, and the world?

Examples of the kind of writing I'm looking for would be these works of Mike Davis, Alex De Waal, and Ed Yong.

I'm not looking for: fiction, writing about other pandemics that does not include the COVID-19 pandemic, or resources about particular specific COVID-19 issues (e.g., how effective is X treatment).

posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles to Society & Culture (10 answers total)

Michael Lewis's 'The Prediction: A Pandemic Story' is a very Michael Lewis book, if that's something you're into.

I liked Adam Tooze's 'Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy.'

I haven't read it, but, based on the people you name, Niall Ferguson's 'Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe' seems like something you might enjoy.
posted by box at 2:35 PM on January 6, 2022 [4 favorites]

From my bookmarks. Some of these might be a bit more personal essay/memoir than you're precisely looking for, but I do recommend all of them (if I had to pick one, it would be first on this list, despite what might seem like an unpromising title).

• My Restaurant Was My Life for 20 Years. Does the World Need It Anymore? by Gabrielle Hamilton (NYT)
• The Great Pause Was an Economic Revolution
 by Bruno Maçães (Foreign Policy)
• No game days. No bars. The pandemic is forcing some men to realize they need deeper friendships by Samantha Schmidt (Washington Post)
• L.A.’s Disorganized Vaccination Rollout and the Dream of Universal Health Care by Emily Witt (New Yorker)
• The Coming Nostalgia for Hyper-Nesting by Devon Powers (Atlantic)
• Why Children of Men haunts the present moment by Gavin Jacobson (New Statesmen)
• An Oral History of the Day Everything Changed by Garrett M. Graff (Wired)
• Insane After Coronavirus? by Patricia Lockwood (LRB)
• The Mysterious “Sweating Sickness” in Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” Trilogy and the Private Country of Illness by Jia Tolentino (New Yorker)
• The Coronavirus Is Rewriting Our Imaginations by Kim Stanley Robinson (New Yorker)
• The Dismantled State Takes on a Pandemic by Alex Pareene (TNR)
• The Long-Term Safety Argument over COVID-19 Vaccines by Andrew L. Croxford (Boston Review)
• What Will My Son Remember of This Horrible Year? by Alejandro Zambra (NYT)

posted by caek at 2:58 PM on January 6, 2022 [8 favorites]

"The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid" by Lawrence Wright.
posted by John Borrowman at 2:58 PM on January 6, 2022 [5 favorites]

Ed Yong was the editor for The Best Science and Nature Writing for 2021 and the first section are all COVID-19 essays. There is one long one about a nursing home slow motion disaster (looking into the hows and the whys not just the tawdry aspects), Zeynep Tufeki writing about k COVID dispersion, a lot of others that I haven't read yet. You can use the "look inside" option on this page and see what the others are, many are available online, most have been written by women which I appreciate, and all are readable, interesting and not the usual OMG news reporting.
posted by jessamyn at 3:09 PM on January 6, 2022 [4 favorites]

This website, run by Steven Taylor, the guy who wrote The Psychology of Pandemics, has some interesting stuff as well as a curated list of articles.
posted by rpfields at 5:17 PM on January 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

This podcast episode of Peter Attias fairly insightful. YMMV obviously, but I think they take a balanced approach.
posted by pyro979 at 5:33 PM on January 6, 2022

I think of this early-pandemic essay by Luke O'Neil pretty regularly. His writing style is, to me, amazing, but to some it's very much an acquired taste.
posted by General Malaise at 5:38 PM on January 6, 2022

Fang Fang's Wuhan Diary.
posted by matkline at 12:27 AM on January 7, 2022

Everything by Zeynep Tufekci has been rock-solid.
posted by nouvelle-personne at 3:28 PM on January 7, 2022

John Lanchester has a long review article in December’s London Review of Books where he takes stock of 5 quite different covid books (Adam Tooze’s Shutdown, entioned above, is among them). It’s a good read. Here.
posted by Joeruckus at 3:48 PM on January 7, 2022