Stop Saying Journalists Shouldn’t Save Their Scoops For Their Books

Do you want to find out what happened? You have to wait. Sorry, that’s how it works.

One of the best books I’ve read in the last year is Carol Leonnig’s and Philip Rucker’s I Alone Can Fix It, a detailed, intimate, absolutely terrifying look at the Trump administration’s disastrous response to the Covid-19 pandemic. We all lived through it, of course, but the book has incredible details of just how incompetent — and even, strangely, hostile — the response was. Reading it made me honestly surprised that there are as many of us alive as there are right now … and infinitely grateful that Covid-19 itself was not worse.

But the greatest benefit of reading the book in 2022? The fact that it’s a book. Reading it now, in a longform piece of literary journalism, allows perspective on everything that happened, gives us the opportunity to look back on it from our current perch. It actually provides the illusion, in fact, that it happened a long time ago. Reading about how moronic, and vengeful, Trump and his cronies’ reactions were to a once-in-a-century pandemic from the distance of a book made me feel like it had happened a lot longer ago than it really had. It let me know what was going on back then, so I could process it now. If its revelations would have…