Welcome back to the 10 Blocks podcast.

This is John Tierney.

I'm a contributing editor to the City Journal

where I've been writing frequently about the disastrous response to the COVID pandemic.

Today I'm joined by the author of a terrific new book on this subject, Jonah Sarah, a journalist

whose work I've admired for decades in magazines and books. Joe is a long-time op-ed columnist for the New York

Times. He's now a columnist for the free press, and he's the co-author of the new book,

The Big Fail, What the Pandemic Revealed about who America Protects and who it leaves behind.

Joe and his co-author, Bethany McLean, are both veteran financial journalists and the co-authors

of a previous bestseller, a history of the 2008 financial crisis titled All the Devils

are Here.

Now they have applied their impressive reporting skills to provide an insider's view of how

things went so wrong during the pandemic.

Many of these mistakes will be familiar to readers of City Journal.

We've been criticizing the lockdowns and school closures and mask mandates for three years now.

But these mistakes are not so familiar to people who've been getting their news from left-leaning media.

And that's one reason I think this book is so valuable.

So you and Bethany can hardly be accused of being conservatives.

You both write for liberal publications you have written for them, and you share some of the

perspective.

Yeah, absolutely.

That's true.

...