'Will you write letters with me, back and forth, for the duration of this virus?' When Covid-19 isolated us all in March 2020, C and R — old friends, parents of young children, academics, and writers — turned to each other. In 100 intensely vulnerable letters, C and R found their way through family estrangement, tense racial dynamics, gender transitions, chronic pain, dramatic career changes, and activist campaigns. Though both continued to mask and take precautions long after the world returned to 'normal', they were often pained by each other's choices. Nonetheless, they always returned to the page, enacting what R calls durational performance art. The resulting book is a deeply personal, fiercely political roller coaster that plunges from the lockdowns, into social ambivalence, and finally through the long, politically manufactured 'end' of the pandemic. The End Doesn't Happen All at Once is an unusual kind of Covid book: it recasts the pandemic, in the words of Arundhati Roy, as a possible 'portal' into a different world. Conscious of their privileged status as vaccinated Americans, the writers examine global political realities: from Narendra Modi's announcement of the March 2020 lockdown in India and the ensuing chaos; to the Trumpists' attack on the US Capitol Building in 2021; from the systemic collapse in India, to the US government's failures around racism, healthcare, gun violence, abortion laws, and the climate crisis. These letters serve as both historical document and activist call, and above all, an inspiring testament to the power of friendship to give us the courage to change.

Recommended on 1 episode:

MAHA Is a Bad Answer to a Good Question

“Make America Healthy Again” is a great idea — somebody should try it. A lot of the concerns animating the MAHA movement — chronic disease, the unhealthiness of the American diet, how profits warp our health care system — are serious issues. But Robert F. Kennedy Jr. hasn’t taken major actions to address them. Instead he’s gutted funding for scientific research, including nearly $500 million dedicated to mRNA vaccine development, throwing a huge amount of possibly lifesaving research in limbo. How did we get here? What are the politics that allowed Donald Trump to preside over Operation Warp Speed, the single most successful pandemic mitigation policy, and then turn around a few years later to appoint Kennedy to undo it all? My colleague David Wallace-Wells has done incredible reporting on how pandemic policies have shaped our politics, culture and society. Rachael Bedard is a physician and a writer who has been thinking deeply about what MAHA represents and where the movement could find common ground with its critics.

Books recommended:

• 📕  The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition by Richard Rhodes
• 📘  Doppelganger by Naomi Klein
• 📗  The End Doesn't Happen All at Once : A Pandemic Memoir by Chi Rainer Bornfree, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan
• 📙  Plagues Upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) by Kyle Harper
• 📕  Calling the Shots: Why Parents Reject Vaccines by Jennifer A. Reich
• 📘  Wave: A Memoir by Sonali Deraniyagala

David Wallace-Wells , Rachael Bedard Aug. 22, 2025 6 books recommended

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