The Atlantic’s Sarah Zhang on covering the science and emotion of being human
In recent years I have come to accept the idea that I am in fact little more than a bag of flesh and bones, a fallible body propelled by a fallible brain.
Sometimes I deal with my existential malaise by turning to the pages of The Atlantic, whose health and science team seems to have an uncanny ability to take me down deeply satisfying yet infinitely varied rabbit holes. For example, the work of Sarah Zhang, who joined the magazine in 2016, for example, ranges from a feature on why so many kids to Covid drugs for cats and how medical breakthroughs are transforming the lives of patients whose diseases were once thought to be incurable.
This week, The Atlantic launched Being Human, a new site section and newsletter that will showcase its health coverage. It’s part of a larger expansion into health and science coverage at the magazine, which recently hired three new staff writers and two contributing writers to the team.
“A lot of the motivation behind this expansion is that health coverage is the most personal and human journalism that exists,” Paul Bisceglio, editor of The Atlantic’s health, science, and technology sections, told me. “These are, at their core, stories about people’s lives and the things that affect us day to day. I want to know what it is like to be a person, a creature, living on this earth and encumbered by a body with a brain.”
The section was planned long before the election took place, and Bisceglio imagines that even though there will likely be coverage of how the new administration changes the face of healthcare in America, there will also be plenty of room for stories big and small, newsy and non-newsy — things that, he says, will have “deep emotional contours.”
Many of us at Nieman Lab think Zhang is a master of capturing those deep emotional contours, and I decided to call her up to talk about how she thinks about her work. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Over time, my own interests have evolved a little bit. Maybe it’s because I spend less time in science and more time outside of academia, in the real world around humans. [For me] it’s not necessarily wonder that sparks every story, but there’s always some sort of emotional pull to any [successful] story — whether it’s an “oh” or “oh God” or “oh my god, I can’t believe that.” Sometimes, before I understand intellectually why a story is interesting or good, if I feel myself emotionally gravitate to a story, it probably means there’s something there. I still have to do the reporting and the research to figure out how to put it into words. But I think I have to have that feeling for it to be a good story.
Just thinking about pure emotion is, of course, not how you should go about writing about science. Like, “vaccines cause autism” is a story that would have a really strong emotional pull. But [the idea that vaccines cause autism] is not true. You can’t write about things that aren’t true just because they would be emotional or people would click on them and want to read them for that reason.
I don’t think [emotion] is the only factor in any way, but it’s often a starting seed for stories.
You feel like a really different person when you’re healthy versus when you’re sick. That influenced how I thought about [the cystic fibrosis] story.
The starting piece, though, was the news that the Make-A-Wish Foundation had decided to no longer automatically qualify kids with cystic fibrosis. That was the little bit of news that really grabbed me.
If you go from being sick your entire life and being told you’re probably going to die young, and then that goes away, obviously, that’s amazing. That’s a miracle. But it’s also destabilizing to your sense of self. Having experienced a little bit of that in my life, and seeing how that changed other people, I have been so interested in the nexus of health and one’s own identity, and how we construct our identity based on what our physical bodies are. There’s all this stuff that we have zero conscious control over. Our brains can’t control our immune systems, at least not in any sort of direct, connected way.
The inspiration for that story was a little unusual: I’d written a story a few months before that about over-the-counter decongestants that don’t work, and how they should be pulled. In the course of that, I called up a few experts to get quotes. And this one guy just happened to be the expert on the nasal cycle and how we have two noses.
That interview was fascinating, but it couldn’t go into the story about decongestants. I talked to my editor and said I thought we needed to write about it at some point, and she agreed. Then a few months went by and it was the fall, sickness season, so it was a good time to go back to it.
Most people aren’t dying of nasal congestion, but it’s something we all have experience with. I’m getting over a cold right now, so speaking from very recent experience, it really sucks. It’s still viscerally important to your life even if it’s not a life or death situation. Everyone has a body, so they can relate.
I’ve been writing a lot about autoimmune allergic diseases lately. [That’s an area where] there has been a lot of progress — a lot of it is incremental, but progress in understanding specific parts of the immune system so we can treat things like food allergies or eczema or lupus. These allergic autoimmune diseases are rising for reasons we can’t exactly answer, but also, we are understanding the immune system enough to actually do something about it. I think the progress medicine has made in that area is somewhat underappreciated.
Related to our conversation about wonder, I feel like there’s been a real shift since when I started almost 15 years ago. It was a very social media– — especially Facebook- — driven world, and everyone was trying to get as many readers as possible. Now, it’s a fairly different subscription-based model. I think the things that make someone share a story are actually quite different from what makes someone pull out their wallet and subscribe.
I remember talking to an editor early in my career, many years ago, who said people like to share things that make them look smart. Science [journalism] probably benefited, somewhat, from that. But to get someone to subscribe, you have to maybe be more viscerally relevant to their life — whether it’s about a rare disease they have, or congestion.
I think health is viscerally relevant to people’s lives, so I think that sort of always connects to the audience. But I try not to get too in my head about who’s reading my stories, and just try to write the best version of the story I can.
I think individual experiences are the most powerful way to show how a system is broken. It can be hard, in the abstract, to understand that. There are other reporters who are more policy-oriented who can think about what to do about that. But what I want to make clear is how things are. How they should change is a different story. I sometimes write those stories, too, but it doesn’t have to be in every story.
The world of health is so large. People are going to get sick, and get healthy, and people are going to die, and there are going to be new drugs. So many things are going to be happening that are not directly touched by national politics. We still have to report on those.