Life Under A Microscope

If the name Actually Pro Life is deliberate, then so is the logo. Because like I said in our intro post, we’re reclaiming "pro-life" from the same people who blame kindergartners for getting shot at school, and we’re grounding it in evidence. Evidence ...

250 years after a group of slaveowners wrote that "all men are created equal", we're done letting hypocrites own the language of life.Introducing Actually Pro Life: a reframe, a research platform, and a direct challenge to anyone willing to be held acc...

Last Christmas we teamed up with about 40 other big podcasts to support our dear friends at Give Directly with a very special campaign called Pods Fight Poverty. The goal was to raise $1 million to send to families in extreme poverty in Bwakira, Rwanda...

Your kids are hearing about the news whether you are ready or they're ready or not. One study said two-thirds of kids aged 8 to 14 are absorbing current events at least every few days, and almost none of it was made for them. They're getting the fear w...

Whoever said this country can't come together about anything anymore in the year of our Lord twenty twenty-six was wrong because PFAS, or forever chemicals, are in the blood of ninety-seven percent of Americans right now. They're in our water, our cook...

Since the dawn of recorded history, our living earth has been changed by everyone who spends time on it or in it from the smallest bacteria to the largest animals. But like the brain-gut axis inside of us that we still barely understand, we've really n...

The CDC issued six health alerts in all of 2025, down from dozens in a normal year, whatever that means anymore. Measles, a disease we basically eliminated 26 years ago, is closing in on 1000 cases, with children hospitalized for brain swelling. And the people now running our top health agencies are the same people who spent years questioning the science those agencies existed to defend.But the good news is people are building new things. States are forming their own health alliances. Scientists are organizing to fight misinformation where it lives. And one epidemiologist in Texas turned a six-week email experiment in March, 2020 into one of the most trusted public health resources on the planet.So what can I do about the collapse of trusted public health communication? Today's guest is Dr. Katelyn Jetelina. Katelyn is an epidemiologist, a mom, a wife, a data scientist, and the founder of the incredibly popular Your Local Epidemiologist newsletter. It is free. She started it from our kitchen table, and it now reaches something like 310,000 subscribers in 130 plus countries. She's one of the Time 100 most influential people in health, former advisor to the White House and the CDC, and she now leads Project Stethoscope as well.We're gonna talk about how Katelyn built YLE, why the old model of top-down public health communication was always broken and is now definitely broken, and what Project Stethoscope and Phoenix are actually doing about it.-----------Have feedback? Tweet us, or send a message to [email protected] here? Get started with our fan favorite episodes at podcast.importantnotimportant.com.Find every action recommended in The Most Important Question here: www.whatcanido.earth-----------INI Book Club:All The Shah's Men by Stephen KinzerFind all of our guest recommendations at the INI Book Club: https://bookshop.org/lists/important-not-important-book-clubLinks:Subscribe to Your Local Epidemiologist https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/Follow us:Subscribe to our newsletters at importantnotimportant.comJoin us at importantnotimportant.com/upgradeGet our merch!Follow us on Threads: www.threads.net/@importantnotimportantSubscribe to our YouTube channelFollow Quinn: on Twitter - twitter.com/quinnemmett; Bluesky - bsky.app/profile/quinnemmett.bsky.social; Threads - www.threads.net/@quinnemmettProduced by Willow BeckIntro/outro by Tim Blane: timblane.comAdvertise with us: importantnotimportant.com/c/sponsors Mentioned in this episode:What Can I Do?Get beehiivGet Reader

The CDC issued six health alerts in all of 2025, down from dozens in a normal year (whatever that means anymore). Measles, a disease we basically eliminated 26 years ago, is closing in on 1000 cases, with children hospitalized for brain swelling. And t...

This week, we're dropping an episode from our other show, Not Right Now, in the feed, where Quinn and Claire have community organizer and dad, Garrett Bucks, on the show to chat about parenting, of course, but also how he answered the most important question by building community locally and across the nation, and how you can make it easier for parents (and kids, why not) to engage civically as well.Garrett runs The Barnraisers Project, writes The White Pages newsletter, and is the author of the memoir The Right Kind of White. He also has a son who is very mad that his sister thinks they live in a suburb.The gang gets into why your son talks differently to his sister than to his friends, kids not knowing what the Epstein files are, growing up in rural Montana, how to get work done in between school drop off and soccer practice, and why protests are important AND performative AND boring and worth doing anyway, and how to actually get your kids to come.-----------Have feedback? Tweet us, or send a message to [email protected] here? Get started with our fan favorite episodes at podcast.importantnotimportant.com.Find every action recommended in The Most Important Question here: www.whatcanido.earth-----------INI Book Club:Find all of our guest recommendations at the INI Book Club: https://bookshop.org/lists/important-not-important-book-clubLinks:Get all of our Not Right Now episodes at notrightnow.showFind Garrett's work at garretbucks.comSubscribe to The White Pages at thewhitepages.netCheck out The Barnraisers Project at barnraisersproject.orgRead Garrett's memoir, The Right Kind of White https://bookshop.org/a/8952/9781982197209Join The Interdependence Relay at jointherelay.orgFollow us:Subscribe to our newsletters at importantnotimportant.comJoin us at importantnotimportant.com/upgradeGet our merch!Follow us on Threads: www.threads.net/@importantnotimportantSubscribe to our YouTube channelFollow Quinn: on Twitter - twitter.com/quinnemmett; Bluesky - bsky.app/profile/quinnemmett.bsky.social; Threads - www.threads.net/@quinnemmettProduced by Willow BeckIntro/outro by Tim Blane: timblane.comAdvertise with us: importantnotimportant.com/c/sponsors

This week, we're dropping an episode from our other show, Not Right Now, in the feed, where Quinn and Claire have community organizer and dad, Garrett Bucks, on the show to chat about parenting, of course, but also how he answered the most important qu...