UNLOCKED: How the Pandemic Changed Everything (w/ David Wallace-Wells)

Know Your Enemy

Matthew Sitman

Right Wing, National Review, History, Socialists, Reactionaries, Conservative Movement, Conservatism, News, Society & Culture, Ronald Reagan, Leftists Look At Conservatism, William F Buckley, Politics

4.7 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 8 April 2025

⏱️ 110 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We're unlocking our conversation about how COVID changed America (five years later) with David Wallace-Wells of the New York Times.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm All right, welcome listeners to this very special episode of Know Your Enemy.
0:28.4	I'm Matt Sittman, your podcast co-host, and I'm here with two friends, Sam O'Lear Bell, my great friend, and David Wallace Wells, a New York Times writer.
0:37.0	Hello, Sam, and welcome David. Hello.
0:39.2	Really good to be here, guys. Two hyphenates. Yes. Well, David, we're having you on because you've written a couple
0:45.3	truly excellent pieces around the fifth anniversary of the pandemic. It's kind of funny to call it an
0:51.6	anniversary. Like we're celebrating it? Yes.
0:55.7	The novel coronavirus turns five.
0:59.3	And so that's what we're going to talk about, the pandemic five years later.
1:04.0	But before we do, I'm sure many of our listeners are familiar with your work, David. I mean, in addition to the two recent New York Times COVID-related pieces, Preparing for this episode meant going back and reading
1:12.4	a lot of your work in recent years. But for those listeners who aren't familiar with your work,
1:17.7	but should be, can you tell them a little bit about who you are? Yeah, I'm kind of an opinion writer
1:23.2	at the times. I write both for the opinion section where I do a column like newsletter,
1:26.7	and I write for the magazine. I'mist there too and do occasionally bigger things, mostly writing about the near
1:35.1	future and how we're making sense of it or failing to. And I come to that from a recent past
1:42.3	writing an awful lot about climate and a fair amount about the pandemic
1:45.5	and wrote a book that came out in 2019 about climate change called the Uninhabitable Earth,
1:52.3	which has been probably to the extent that listeners know of me will know of that project.
1:58.1	Well, your reporting on climate change is totally indispensable,
2:01.8	in my opinion. As you know, every once in a while, I'll DM you when I'm, like, checking my,
2:07.8	like, level of panic about the state of the climate and go, like, David, I'm talking to my friend
2:13.9	who's freaking out. Is he right about this or that? At the moment, just to say,
2:18.4	my panic is climbing again after a few years of going in the other direction. I got the impression
	...

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