Happy Hump Day, Shit Givers.

This week, we’re talking about animal welfare. And before we dive in: this isn’t about guilting you into going vegan. I know that people choose to eat meat for all kinds of reasons, and guilt trips aren’t effective anyway.

But whatever is on your plate, hopefully we can all agree that the animals we share this planet with, farmed or wild, deserve to be treated with dignity and respect. Because when we say “No life is worth more than another”, we mean animal lives too (and even if you don’t agree with that 100%, the way we farm animals and protect biodiversity is super important for human health as well!).

So this issue covers the fight to keep animals out of cages too small to turn around in, the antibiotic overuse fueling the next public health crisis, the species protections under attack in Congress right now, and a few things you can do in your own backyard.

Let’s go.

— Willow

APL Positions covered this week:

• 🐷 End extreme confinement in livestock production

• 🐙 Protect highly sentient species from exploitation

• 🦉 Restore keystone species and degraded ecosystems

• 🎣 Fishing within science-based sustainable limits

• 💊 Phase out routine antibiotic use in livestock

Photo by Kenneth Schipper on Unsplash

Crate expectations

Did you know that pregnant pigs in the US are still legally confined to gestation crates so small they can’t turn around? Fifteen states and the EU have already banned this, but industry-backed bills keep trying to nullify those state laws entirely, arguing that no state should be allowed to have higher animal welfare standards than the lowest common denominator.

Here’s what you can do:

• Tell Congress to update the Animal Welfare Act and end gestation crate confinement with the PIGS Act of 2025 (go).

• While you’re at it, have them further strengthen the Animal Welfare Act with the Better CARE for Animals Act of 2025 (go).

• And tell them to oppose the Food Security and Farm Protection Act which would nullify state animal welfare laws like California’s Prop 12, already upheld by the Supreme Court (go).

• Support the fight against factory farming with the Humane Farming Association (go).

• Back humane farming and safer food resources with Food Animal Concerns Trust (go).

Photo by mahmut ...... on Unsplash

Resistance training

Two-thirds of all antibiotics considered medically important for humans are given to livestock, not people — mostly to compensate for crowded, stressful conditions instead of treating actual illness.

Denmark cut its livestock antibiotic use by 60% with no drop in productivity. The US can and should do the same, especially because antibiotic-resistant infections already kill an estimated 35,000 Americans a year.

Here’s what you can do:

• Hold McDonald’s accountable for antibiotic use in its beef supply chain (go).

• Learn when antibiotics actually help, and when overuse causes harm, with this guide from the CDC (go).

• Support fair food systems research with the IATP (go).

• Back food policy and antibiotic resistance research with CSPI (go).

Photo by Isabel Galvez on Unsplash

Where the wild things aren’t

Octopuses are intelligent enough that over 100 scientists have called for banning commercial octopus farming before it starts in the US.

The Endangered Species Act, which has a 99% success rate at preventing extinction, faces defunding riders almost every year, buried in unrelated appropriations bills where they’re easy to miss.

Here’s what you can do:

• Tell lawmakers to support the OCTOPUS Act of 2025 and prevent commercial octopus farming before it starts (go).

• Tell Congress to fully fund Endangered Species Act enforcement and reject this year’s defunding riders (go).

• Tell your Senator to support the National Biodiversity Strategy (go).

• See which species are at risk in your county with this interactive map (go).

• Support species protection directly with the Endangered Species Coalition (go).

Photo by Julie Blake Edison on Unsplash

Wild at home

Not everything here requires a phone call. Your yard, your grocery list, and your dinner plans are all places you can make a difference for animal welfare and biodiversity.

Here’s what you can do:

• Restore your yard’s ecosystem and attract pollinators with the Native Plant Finder (go).

• Turn your lawn into a wildlife-friendly garden with this guide from NPR (go).

• Find vegan and vegetarian-friendly spots near you with Happy Cow (go).

• Read the case for lab-grown meat as an actual end to factory farming, from the New York Times (go).

That’s it for this week.

Thank you — as always — for giving a shit.

— Willow

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Credit: Penguin Random House

Welcome back.

It’s that time of summer when folks are headed to the shore, the mountains, or a music festival in the desert somewhere to escape their regular routines for a bit. Earlier in the month I offered a shortlist of science fiction, fantasy, and horror books to pack in your vacation bag, along with a promise to report back after reading one—The Jellyfish Problem. I finished it earlier this week and am officially doubling down on my recommendation: If you are into any combination of paranormal fiction, marine biology, and sea monster lore, this is the book for you.

Still, as I was reading, I found I had many questions about cnidarians, cave diving, and rural Maine, some of which author Tessa Yang graciously agreed to answer. I hope you enjoy our conversation! 

— Maddie

A sea monster story that celebrates ocean life

Tessa Yang grew up loving Jaws, but there’s one thing that bothers her about the quintessential shark attack movie: It thoroughly villainized its subject. 

To Yang, Jaws is a fun monster flick. But for many viewers, it became a reason to hate and fear a group of animals that humans long considered harmless, and that play essential roles in Earth’s ocean ecosystems. (Our ancestors’ instincts were correct: You’re far more likely to die on the toilet than in the maw of a hungry shark.)

So Yang set about writing a different kind of sea monster story, one where the protagonist is not a harpoon-toting police chief, but a scientist who has spent her life studying the creatures at the center of the drama—in this case, jellyfish. When locals on the remote Maine island of Shattering Point turn to marine biologist Jo Ness for help killing the mega medusa that skulks local shorelines, the jellyfish expert decides to find another solution, by learning everything she can about the creature.

The result is a very different sort of monster tale, one that plays with the tension between human needs and the natural world without asserting that one is dominant over the other. Also in tension are the novel’s paranormal elements—at times The Jellyfish Problem gives off vibes of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy—and the scientific content about jellyfish, of which there is no shortage. Yang wasn’t always a jellyfish fan, but when she decided to place one at the center of her story, she researched the creatures thoroughly in order to do them justice. Ness, she says, would have been disappointed otherwise.

As the mystery of Shattering Point’s giant jelly unspools, it is hard not to become concerned with the animal’s welfare, and the well-being of jellyfish worldwide. If you’ve only ever thought of jellyfish as beach pests, this book will give you a deeper appreciation of their alien beauty and thalassic mystery. And, perhaps, a healthy fear of cave diving.

The Science of Fiction caught up with Yang recently to discuss jellies, Jaws, our shared phobia of deep dark water, and how to write an ecologically responsible sea monster story. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Maddie Stone:  What made you decide you wanted your first novel to focus on jellyfish? 

Tessa Yang: Prior to writing this book, I had probably not thought about jellyfish for ten consecutive seconds in my whole life. I really set out wanting to write a sea monster story that was inspired by my love of the movie Jaws. But I knew I couldn't do sharks, because they've been done a lot. Also, I love sharks and I didn't want to turn sharks into work. So then I was casting about for what I wanted my monster to be, and that's where research came into play. In the beginning I was more or less googling weird ocean animals, because I wanted something real to base my monster off. And I found my way to a cool video posted by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute on YouTube of these animals called giant siphonophores, which I'd never heard of before, and are technically not jellyfish, but are jellyfish-like. I was very enchanted by these animals, wanted to learn a lot about them, and that led me down a jelly fish-shaped rabbit hole.

Maddie:  And as you went down that jellyfish-shaped rabbit hole, did you speak to experts or read papers? What did your research process look like? 

Tessa : It was pretty broad in the beginning. I read books. Probably one of the most influential was Spineless by Juli Berwald. That was a great book.  I also watched lectures posted online—one through the New England Aquarium that was a bioengineer talking about her study of jellyfish swimming mechanics and the potential to bioengineer products that are based on that type of propulsion mechanics. There is an engineer [in The Jellyfish Problem] who I kind of modeled off of that research. And there were podcasts. There were articles. There were op-eds. There were headlines about jellyfish because jellyfish are kind of a problem right now. There's some evidence that they're growing in numbers. So it was a type of research where I was just casting a wide net, seeing what I could find, but then filtering it through what I think is interesting and entertaining or contradictory or weird.

A blue and red siphonophore. Credit: NOAA/Flickr

Maddie: The book’s protagonist is this sort of loner, outcast scientist who's fascinated by jellyfish. Through her, we get a sense of how these creatures are so much more than we think. Were you trying to make jellyfish more relatable, or make people think about them in different ways? 

Tessa: Not initially, but I arrived at that pretty quickly once I realized that I was going to be writing about jellyfish. I mentioned the inspiration for this book originally was Jaws. And my quibble with Jaws—which I think is a perfect movie and also a really good book—is it completely demonizes this shark and has perpetuated a lot of misunderstandings about those animals. So I knew from the very beginning that whatever my monster was going to be, the main character was going to have to be motivated by something other than this desire to destroy it. And so instead of the desire to destroy, Jo has this desire to understand that's born of this expertise, this fascination, this kind of academic love for those animals. 

Maddie: Jo’s also grieving the loss of her friend and scientific partner Aldo. How is that backstory important for understanding this story?

Tessa: People respond to grief in unique ways. Jo's coping mechanism is to self-isolate and to bury herself in her work. But what happens when she gets to Shattering Point, again trying to escape, is that the work of trying to figure out Clementine [the giant jellyfish] actually drives her closer to a reckoning with this grief. So suddenly her coping mechanism isn't working anymore. And it actually is tearing open this wound that she was working very hard to cover up. 

Maddie: We learn in the book that Aldo died in a cave diving accident. That was bone chilling to read about because I am mildly claustrophobic, but also fascinated by caves.

Tessa: I like you, have a fear and fascination, but it's really with deep water.

Maddie: There's a specific name for that fear. Thalassophobia. It involves persistent — this is Google — ‘persistent and intense dread of deep bodies of water like oceans, seas or large lakes.’

A moon jelly. Credit: Monterey Bay Aquarium

Tessa: Yeah, even lakes. I've spent very little time in or on the water in my life. And Jo loves the water, but because of this trauma she's experienced, she develops this phobia of being in and near water, which was actually very easy for me to write. It was harder for me to write the scenes where it's like, ‘this is what she loved about the ocean and scuba diving.’ Needless to say, I've never gone scuba diving, so another form of research I had to do was into scuba-diving. But cave diving is in my imagination the most extreme form of scuba diving. It's this combination of two very scary things. I think it just captures my fear and my imagination as something that's really extreme and frightening. And seems relatively dangerous.

Maddie: What made you decide to set the novel on a remote Maine island?

Tessa: Prior to drafting this book, I had never been to Maine, but I kind of always wanted to go. Again, the inspiration being Jaws, I wanted to keep that New England climate of the colder, choppier waters. But I didn't want to set it on or near Martha's Vineyard, which is the Jaws setting. I think I pulled up a map and was like, ‘hmm, where can I set the story?’ There's a lot of coastline in Maine, and there's over 4,000 islands. I think it wasn't initially even an island, but as I zeroed in on one of the themes of the book, which is isolation, it evolved naturally for the environment to itself be very isolated, very small, very removed. The island got smaller and smaller in subsequent drafts, more claustrophobic. And had less and less infrastructure. So there was more of the sense that these are people who have to figure out how to survive on their own without a lot of the infrastructure or support systems that most of us are used to. 

After I decided it was going to be set there, I went to Maine and did a lot of walking around and cataloging different sensory observations. I carried around this little notebook and I just wrote all kinds of things, absurd things, small things, not all of which ended up in the book, but a lot did.

Maddie: I've spoken to a lot of marine biologists over the years who don't like Jaws because it created so much fear about sharks. Having written a very different type of monster story, I'm curious how you think we can tell monster stories that are both thrilling but don't create unnecessary fear about nature or animals?

Tessa: I think point of view is the way out of that conundrum. If Jo wasn't in that book, if there was a different protagonist, it would be Jaws again. And no spoilers, but there are characters in The Jellyfish Problem who are definitely driven by the impulse to destroy a scary thing that's hurting them or that they don't understand. This is a drive that I think a lot of us can recognize: ‘I'm being threatened by this thing so what should I do? I should destroy it.’ And we see that everywhere in big ways and small ways in how we are currently interacting with our environment and with other species.

So absent Jo as the point-of-view character it is Jaws with a giant jellyfish, and it would be people taking turns trying to figure out how to hunt and blow up this giant scary animal. But it's not their story, it's Jo's. That's what drives it and allows it to feel different. I guess if you want to write a somewhat ecologically responsible sea monster story, you’ve  got to think about who's telling this story and what motivates them.

Maddie: Something I've always found interesting about jellyfish as a science writer is how they're survivors. As you mention in the book, they’ve lived through mass extinctions. They're also considered these canaries in the coal mine for environmental degradation. I've read articles about how, as the oceans continue to get warmer and more acidic, scientists expect to see more and more of these massive blooms of jellyfish. I'm curious whether that's part of what drew you to them?

Tessa: Not initially. Initially, my imagination was captivated by this video that I saw, and I wanted to learn a lot about them. But quickly, I ran into exactly the phenomenon you're describing, that there is some evidence— that's disputed by other people in the research community— that their numbers are growing as a direct result of human-induced climate change, because jellyfish are, somewhat surprisingly, really resilient to the kinds of like environmental degradation that are destroying other marine animals. So yeah, canary in the coal mine. But I think that was something that I leaned into more as I was writing and revising the book. Because we have a jellyfish here that is invented. Clementine's not a real jellyfish. But she's behaving in an unusual way, right? And later in the book, Jo says, when animals behave in ways they have not behaved before, you have to look at their environment and you have to say, ‘What are the triggers? What's driving this?’ Jo thinks about warming seas. What can that do to the kinds of pathogens that are in the ocean? What can that do to natural habitats and the food sources of these different animals? And the book doesn't necessarily single out one of those things because I think Clementine is still mysterious. Even at the book's end, there are some unanswered questions, which I think is true to the way that science works. You answer some questions, but you also develop new ones. But those are all things that she thinks about and you have to think about if you're trying to understand why an animal is behaving the way that it is, especially in the 21st century. 

Maddie: What do you hope readers take away from the book about the ocean, or our relationship to the environment?  

Tessa: I think a healthy respect for the unknown, because there's so much that is unknown for Jo, both about herself in the emotional sense of it, but also in terms of what she encounters scientifically through her adventure on Shattering Point. I think that respect for the unknown is a good way to circumvent that fear response of 'I don't know what this is, so it's bad and I have to destroy it.' That's definitely a type of response that The Jellyfish Problem is pulling away from. I would also like readers to take away a sense of expanded possibility, which goes along with our respect for the unknown, because Jo, as much as she's a scientist, she's little bit too constricted in what she thinks is possible. That's something that we could all probably stand to work on.

Maddie: Any really cool jellyfish facts you learned along the way? 

Tessa: A fact that did not make it into the book is that jellyfish have been to outer space. They have a structure called rhopalia that helps them know which way they're facing in the water, so if you flip a jellyfish upside down, it knows it's upside down and it can right itself. And it is supposedly similar to how our inner ears work. So some scientists in the nineties decided to breed jellyfish in outer space to try and study what would happen if humans had children in outer space and how that inner ear structure would be impacted. So they raised jellyfish in orbit, brought them back to Earth, and the jellyfish were basically dizzy for the rest of their lives. They never adjusted. So I don't know where that experiment went from there, but I suppose the conclusion was, yeah, let's not have babies in outer space. 

I also learned, this is something that's in the book, that jellyfish have delightful names. You've got the purple people eater, and the sea walnut, and the sea tomato. They're these whimsical entertaining names, and I love that little dose of personality from whatever researcher got to discover and name these animals. 

Maddie: Have you gotten any feedback on the book from any jellyfish experts? 

Tessa: I've had a few different readers reach out who have a background in marine biology or are just really into the ocean. No jellyfish experts as of yet. So I don't know if that means they didn't like it or they're not reading it or that they still need to reach out to me. I used to joke that I wanted to put a sticker on the cover of this book that said, 'Don't read this if you have a marine biology degree', because I was really insecure about writing a silly monster book that was going to depart in big ways from scientific fact. But now that the book is out, I'm kind of curious.  I would love for somebody who has that background to read this book and see what they think.

How can you learn more about the ocean—and do your part to protect it?

• Learn about ocean biodiversity and population dynamics using FishBase – the perfect tool whether you’re in fisheries management, conservation, or just an everyday fish nerd!

• Want to dive into ocean research? Frontiers in Marine Biology in one of the most cited marine and freshwater biology journals advancing our understanding of marine ecosystems.

• Check out Global Fishing Watch, which provides better data to increase the transparency of human activities on the ocean.

• The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch provides comprehensive information on which fish species and fisheries around the world are sustainable and which aren’t so you can make better choices at the grocery store.

• Check out the Sea Around Us research initiative. It assesses the impact of fisheries on marine ecosystems around the world, and offer mitigation solutions.

👉 NEW: Find every action recommended in The Science of Fiction right here.

By Maddie Stone Maddie is a prolific science journalist. She is the former science editor of Gizmodo, founding editor of Earther, and runs The Science of Fiction blog, which explores the real world science behind your favorite fictional monsters, alien planets, galaxies far far away, and more. @themadstone | maddiestonewriting.com

Happy Hump Day, Shit Givers.

This week, we’re covering the surveillance tech ICE is using and your digital rights at the border, the legal defense funds keeping people out of deportation proceedings, the groups holding families together, and the bigger policy fight underneath it all.

You don’t have to do it all on your own. You just have to do your part, and join the people all over the country already doing incredible work.

Let’s go.

— Willow

Photo by Michał Jakubowski on Unsplash

Face Off

Homeland Security has been expanding its use of facial recognition tech, scanning faces at the border, in courthouses, and increasingly in the interior of the country with little oversight or consent. And if you are crossing the border this summer, remember that your phone is fair game too.

Here’s what you can do:

• Tell Congress to curb Homeland Security’s use of facial recognition with the ICE Out of Our Faces Act (go).

• Know your digital rights before crossing the border with EFF’s Border Search Pocket Guide (go).

Photo by Saúl Bucio on Unsplash

Lawyer up

Behind every arrest stat is a person who needs a lawyer, and immigration court doesn’t guarantee you one the way criminal court does. People with legal representation are way more likely to win their case than people without.

Here’s what you can do:

• Support broad-spectrum immigration advocacy and legal defense with the American Immigration Council (go).

• Get legal tools to immigrants and communities supporting them through the Immigrant Legal Resource Center (go).

• Fund legal, social, and advocacy support for people facing deportation with the Florence Project (go).

Photo by CDC on Unsplash

Keep families together

Kids are showing up to immigration court alone. Families are being split apart. The ripple effects show up in ordinary ways: households suddenly unable to make rent because a breadwinner was detained, and so on.

Here’s what you can do:

• Fight family separation directly with RAICES (go).

• Protect kids who cross the border alone with Kids in Need of Defense (go).

• Support what “welcoming the stranger” looks like in practice with the Catholic Legal Immigration Network (go).

• Provide direct rent, food assistance, and mutual aid to immigrant households with CANDO (go).

Photo by Alex Radelich on Unsplash

The bigger picture

Underneath the individual cases is a policy fight over what immigration enforcement is supposed to look like, and a healthcare system that often fails immigrants and mobile populations entirely.

Here’s what you can do:

• Advance policy centered on human dignity with the National Immigration Law Center (go).

• Support the broader civil liberties fight, immigration rights included with the American Civil Liberties Union (go).

• Back healthcare justice for the mobile poor with the Migrant Clinicians Network (go).

That’s it for this week. Look out for your neighbors.

Thank you — as always — for giving a shit.

— Willow

We’re 100% independent and proudly supported by readers like you.

Members get a 30 day free trial to:

• Ad-free everything

• Your What Can I Do? profile: save & favorite your action steps, connect with other Shit Givers

• Vibe Check: Our news homepage, curated daily just for you. Never doomscroll again, thx

• Seriously?: The frameworks, models, history, and pop culture we use to understand what’s happening now and next

• Half Baked: Weekly briefs to help you think and act on specific, timely issues as they happen

• Not Important: My favorite books, art, movies, music, apps, and more that have nothing to do with the jet stream slowing down

• Lifetime thanks for directly supporting our work

Start 30 day free trial

⚡️ Climate change:

• A new study has found that the economic damage from wildfire smoke-related deaths alone outweighs every other estimated climate cost combined. (HEATMAP)

• 🌎️ Global offshore wind costs just crossed a threshold making it cheaper than new coal, and new mega-vessels are about to push costs down even further. (Clean Technica)

• 🌍️ Africa’s on-grid solar capacity additions have already topped last year’s total, driven by falling costs and a wave of new solar-plus-battery deals. (African Energy)

• 🌎️ Solar just became the EU’s top power source, hitting a record 25% of electricity in June. (Canary Media)

🦠 Health & Bio:

• Ten of Louisiana’s biggest air polluters have zero public air monitors within five miles, which is the result of industry-backed laws designed to keep residents in the dark. (Floodlight)

• 🌏️ The world’s first new TB vaccine in over 100 years just got a manufacturing partner, and if approved, the WHO estimates it could prevent 76 million cases and save 8.5 million lives. (Reuters)

• We finally know how to design an HIV vaccine using mRNA tech, but foreign aid cuts just yanked the funding out from under the trials that were supposed to prove it works. (Vox)

• 🌍️ Millions of women currently wait years for an endometriosis diagnosis, but new saliva- and gut-sensor-based tests just got greenlit that could cut that wait down dramatically. (The Guardian)

💦 Food & Water:

• 🌎️ In one of the driest places on Earth (Chile’s Atacama Desert), locals nicknamed “the crazy cloud people” are literally pulling drinking water out of fog, and researchers now want cities to build it into official water plans. (Mongabay)

• California farmers who once hated the idea of solar are now converting thousands of acres of dried-out farmland into massive solar fields because the water just isn’t coming back. (LA Times)

• 🌍️ Global hunger dropped for the third year in a row, but Africa now has more hungry people than Asia in absolute terms, and conflict and El Niño could reverse the progress. (World Food Programme)

👩‍💻 Beep Boop:

• New York just became the first state to hit pause on massive AI data centers, thanks to a grassroots campaign. (Food & Water Watch)

• Anthropic’s guardrails against AI-powered cyberattacks are so aggressive that security researchers say the models are now basically unusable for the defensive work they used to help with. (Politico)

• Google’s AI search mode is keeping people on Google instead of sending them to the rest of internet, and publishers like Wikipedia say their traffic is cratering. (The New York Times)

• Indigenous technologists built AI tools that never leave the community, running locally instead of shipping data off to Big Tech. (Betakit)

• 🌏️ Communities worldwide are banding together into data cooperatives so they can set the terms for how their information gets used instead of just letting AI companies scrape it for free. (Rest of World)

📣 Last week’s most popular Action Step was calling your reps to demand they Reverse the Foreign Aid Freeze.

👉 NEW: Find every action recommended in It’s Called Science. right here.

🌎️ = Global news/action steps

Take a wild guess

Who is the AI economy actually working for?

The boom is minting millionaires, cutting workers, and raising your electricity bill, all at once. Plus: the $9.99 economy and Chanel flats as financial assets.

Hanna Horvath

Run To Build The Future You Want

Today we're gonna talk about Florida and representation, and how Florida has very little of it, in even the loosest definition of the word.

We're gonna do that by introducing you to my new friend, May Thach. May is a candidate for state representative in Florida, and boy, is she an awesome human being.

Look, you folks across the country, across the world, told us you wanted more very specific, preferably living examples of fight and progress you can see and touch and feel and vote for.

And in the second batch of conversations with our best friends at Run For Something, we are giving you more and more of that, and that's really exactly who May is.

This is a great conversation. I'm really just such a fan. May, like everybody else in the series, is sourced from the Run For Something pipeline and graduating classes. She and all these other folks are the next generation of leaders, if we will have them, if we will support them, and recruit them and vote for them, and then hold their feet to the fire.

📖 Prefer to read? Get the transcript here.

▶️ Or watch the full episode on YouTube.

Listen now

Animal Intelligence > Artificial Intelligence

What does it mean to really make something?

Not generate it, but create it, with all the friction and uncertainty that entails.

This week, cognitive scientist and science writer, Sheetal Potdar, traces the evolutionary roots of creativity from monkey scams in India to walnut--cracking crows in Japan, and asks what we give up when we let AI do the hard part.

▶️ Watch Life Finds A Way on YouTube.

Read on

Fake crystals with awesome powers

For thousands of years, people have ascribed supernatural powers to shiny rocks pulled from the earth.

Even today, crystals—a wondrously diverse collection of minerals that take on beautiful, geometrical forms—ignite the human imagination like few other natural materials.

If you need any evidence, just type "properties of quartz" into your Google search bar, and alongside troves of geological information, you'll find sites extolling the gemstone's purifying energy; its ability to amplify creativity; its stabilizing effect in times of emotional turmoil.

It will come as no surprise to readers of this newsletter that the metaphysical properties of crystals are not backed up by science.

Read it

Happy Hump Day, Shit Givers.

You’ve seen the sky, smelled the air, or at least scrolled past the headlines about wildfire smoke from Canada that’s been drifting into the US for weeks.

This week is about what you can actually do with that information, and how to protect yourself from the next disaster.

First: communities in Canada are dealing with the fires themselves. If you just do one thing this week, support wildfire preparedness, relief and recovery across Canada with the Canadian Wildfire Fund (go).

Let’s go.

— Willow

Photo by Ahmer Kalam on Unsplash

Track the smoke

I think everyone is fully aware at this point that wildfire smoke doesn’t respect borders or forecasts — it can show up hundreds of miles from the nearest fire, and turn a clear morning hazy.

Use these tools to get real time information about what’s happening in the air around you, right now:

• Get real-time wildfire alerts from trusted local sources with Watch Duty (go).

• Check a daily-updated fire risk map with WIFIRE (go).

• Track wildfires and air quality near you in real time with the NYT’s live tracker (go).

• Check real-time air quality on Purple Air’s map, or buy a sensor to contribute your own data (go).

• Stock up on vetted, high-quality masks through Project N95 (go).

Photo by Marcus Kauffman on Unsplash

Be prepared

Don’t wait until it’s time to evacuate, or for the smoke to seep into your house. Protecting your indoor air and hardening your home against embers are both cheaper and more accessible than you might think.

• Learn about home-hardening standards that also lower your insurance costs with Wildfire Prepared Home (go).

• Build a custom wildfire safety plan with CAL FIRE’s Ready For Wildfire resources (go).

• Protect your indoor air during a smoke event, with the EPA’s Create a Clean Room guide (go).

• Support community-level wildfire risk reduction with Fire Adapted Communities (go).

Photo by Roger Starnes Sr on Unsplash

Rebuild in the aftermath

What does it actually mean for a home to be safe to return to? Right now, insurance companies get to answer that question themselves, instead of public health experts.

• If you’re in California, tell your legislator to support AB 1642, the Wildfire Environmental Safety and Testing Act. It would require science-based, health-first standards for testing and cleaning up lead and asbestos contamination after a wildfire (go).

• Join the fight for fair, transparent insurance in your state with the United Policyholders Forum (go).

• Lost property in a disaster? Apply for FEMA help (go).

Photo by Hendrik Cornelissen on Unsplash

Protect the wild

None of this happens in a vacuum. Healthy, well-managed wildlands are more resilient to fire in the first place.

• Protect Alberta’s wildlands, waters, and wildlife with the Alberta Wilderness Association (go).

• Protect New Mexico’s wildlands and clean air and water with New Mexico Wild (go).

• Get hands-on with conservation work across Colorado with Wildlands Restoration Volunteers (go).

📍 Don’t live in any of these places? Find a wildland conservation organization near you (go).

That’s it for this week.

Thank you — as always — for giving a shit.

— Willow

We’re 100% independent and proudly supported by readers like you.

Members get a 30 day free trial to:

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• Your What Can I Do? profile: save & favorite your action steps, connect with other Shit Givers

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• Half Baked: Weekly briefs to help you think and act on specific, timely issues as they happen

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Run to unite your community

There are a lot of folks in rural America that can say, "No candidate's ever come and knocked on my door."

So today, I'm going to introduce you to the one who knocks, my new best friend, Brittany Newton. You folks have said very clearly that you would like more examples of fight and progress you can actually see, touch, and feel, and talk to, and feel like someone is listening to you.

And so in these conversations, in partnership with our best friends at Run For Something, we're giving you the people you asked for. Because that's exactly who Brittany is. She's a vet, she's a mom, a future representative who will actually, and this might shock you, represent her constituents, her neighbors in North Carolina.

📖 Prefer to read? Get the transcript here.

▶️ Or watch the full episode on YouTube.

Listen now

⚡️ Climate change:

• 🌎️ Every major forecast model agrees that this year’s El Niño is going to be the strongest ever, by a huge margin. (The Climate Brink)

• 🌎️ Saudi Aramco is dropping millions on FIFA sponsorships and global sports, in an attempt to win goodwill while they plan to pump oil forever. (Climate Colored Goggles)

• Next time someone tells you Canada’s wildfires are really about “not raking the forests” or whatever, send them this. The data is clear: it’s temperature not tree management driving the burn. (The Climate Brink)

• 🌎️ France is trucking emergency AC units into hospitals right now, as drought, wildfire, and heat are hitting Europe all at once, and the grid is groaning under the weight of it. (Bloomberg)

🦠 Health & Bio:

• Turns out the fix for the boys’ mental health crisis isn’t some breakthrough app or curriculum, but a 150-year-old club that’s been nailing it the whole time by fostering real friendships and belonging. (STAT)

• 🌎️ Gutting USAID has already killed hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, and the real toll is headed into the millions. A heavy read, but important. (The New Yorker)

• Yeah so, child marriage is still legal in most of the US, but Congressional Democrats just introduced a bill giving states a playbook to end it. (The 19th)

• With wildfire smoke making air in the Midwest and Northeast some of the worst on the planet right now, and a lettuce-linked diarrhea outbreak still spreading, public health just can’t catch a break. (Your Local Epidemiologist)

💦 Food & Water:

• 🌎️ Nearly 400 coffee farmers in the Ecuadorian Amazon got ahead of the curve, using satellite monitoring and traceability to prove their beans are deforestation-free, and now they’re getting paid more for it. (Mongabay)

• The largest cyclospora outbreak in US history is still spreading, and a big part of the problem is that nobody in the federal government is coordinating a response fast enough. (Your Local Epidemiologist)

• Right in the middle of that same outbreak, the USDA is shutting down the exact lab that researches this parasite, and food-safety experts are, understandably, not thrilled with the timing. (Bloomberg)

• 🌎️ AI data centers are guzzling energy and water, and a lot of them are getting built on Indigenous land without anyone asking first, but Indigenous leaders are now demanding a seat at the table. (Mongabay)

👩‍💻 Beep Boop:

• 🌎️ When twin earthquakes killed thousands in Venezuela and the government response failed, ordinary developers stepped in by building missing-persons finders and aid-coordination sites with AI in a matter of hours. (Rest of World)

• 🌏️ Beijing is putting guardrails on AI companion apps, part mental health concern, part “please stop dating chatbots and start having kids.” (The Wall Street Journal)

• Meta pulled its Muse Image generator within 72 hours of launch, and for good reason, because while AI can flag content as “explicit”, it has no idea what consent is. (Rest of World)

• License plate cameras aren’t just reading plates. Police are using Flock’s AI to search for specific people by vague descriptions, like clothing or race. (404 Media)

Last week’s most popular Action Step was using Mozilla Monitor to remove your data from data broker websites.

👉 NEW: Find every action recommended in It’s Called Science. right here.

🌎️ = Global news/action steps

Some good but surprising news!

How dementia is being defeated

Incidence among the elderly is falling fast

www.economist.com/briefing/2026/07/09/how-dementia-is-being-defeated

Where the wild things are walled out

This week, Syris Valentine writes about what happens when you try to wall out migration, a biological imperative that species from salmon to jaguars to humans rely on for survival.

While border walls claim to stop human migration, they are devastatingly effective at blocking wildlife. And as climate change forces both animals and people to move further in search of resources, those walls will determine who survives and who doesn’t.

▶️ Watch Life Finds A Way on YouTube.

Read on

Loom holding the Sacred Timeline together goes nuclear in Season 2 of Loki. Credit: Marvel Studios.

Multiverse madness

Today, many popular science fiction and fantasy shows incorporate some concept of a multiverse. These include Netflix's The Witcher, which is based on a book series set in a world filled with monsters that arrived on the scene when a bunch of universes experienced a calamitous collision, HBO's His Dark Materials, also based on a book series featuring parallel universes, and Star Trek, which features a recurring "mirror universe" from which evil versions of the show's characters occasionally stumble into our reality.

In short, the multiverse is everywhere, and while that can make for some dizzying plotlines, modern audiences don't appear too put off by the many basic questions and logical conundrums raised by characters traveling from one universe to another or swapping places with their clones from a different dimension.

It would take an entire book to address all those issues, but there's one fundamental question I wanted to revisit today: Do scientists think we really could be living in a multiverse?

Read it

Happy Hump Day, Shit Givers.

Sooo we know that the oil industry has known for decades that plastic recycling doesn’t really work, and sold it to us anyway, because a public that believes in recycling keeps buying plastic without asking questions. And as the world moves off gasoline, Big Oil is leaning on plastic to keep the business alive.

So no, the current plastic crisis was never on you for leaving your reusable tote bag in the car at the grocery store. But, it’s Plastic Free July, and this issue is about where responsibility actually belongs — and what is still worth doing anyway.

Let’s go.

— Willow

APL Positions covered this week:

• 🍬 Extended producer responsibility for packaging

• 🚿 Replace all lead pipes

Photo by Sören Funk on Unsplash

Trust Your Tap

Microplastics and forever chemicals are already in your water: tap, bottled, and the runoff from your laundry.

Here’s what you can do:

• Millions of Americans are getting lead-pipe-replacement funds routed towards filters instead of single-use plastic, thanks to the Filtered, Not Bottled campaign. Contact your mayor to make sure your city does the same (go).

• Look up your community’s water quality, including microplastics and forever chemicals using EWG’s Tap Water Database (go)

• Stop microplastic fibers from washing into waterways with a Guppyfriend laundry bag (go).

Photo by Jonathan Chng on Unsplash

Follow the Plastic

Plastic pollution was never a littering problem. It’s a design and policy choice, made by the people who profit from you not looking too closely.

Here’s what you can do:

• Understand and shape local plastic policy using Reloop’s dashboard (go).

• Learn about extended producer responsibility and deposit return systems (the policy mechanisms that put the cost of cleanup back on the companies that created the mess, not taxpayers) with this explainer from Upstream (go).

• Track plastic packaging at your local store with Break Free From Plastic’s Supermarket Audit. Results feed directly into corporate accountability campaigns (go).

Photo by Naja Bertolt Jensen on Unsplash

Back the Fighters

Big Oil sold us the recycling myth. These orgs are holding them accountable and cleaning up the mess.

Here’s what you can do:

• Support policy and grassroots organizing to end plastic pollution with Beyond Plastics (go).

• Join Break Free From Plastic, the global movement behind dozens of plastic pollution campaigns (go).

• Protect oceans and beaches from plastic and other threats with Surfrider (go).

• Find you place in the circular economy movement with Upstream (go).

Photo by Anton Savinov on Unsplash

Borrow, Don’t Buy

This is the circular economy in practice, because owning less isn’t a moral failing, it’s opting out of a system built to sell you stuff you don’t need.

Here’s what you can do:

• Skip the hardware store with a tool library. Find one near you (go).

• Switch to plastic- and bleach-free bamboo toilet paper from TrueEarth Paper Corp (go).

• Trade in old tech and buy sustainably made replacements with Casetify (go) or Nimble (go).

That’s it for this week!

Thank you — as always — for giving a shit.

— Willow

We’re 100% independent and proudly supported by readers like you.

Members get a 30 day free trial to:

• Ad-free everything

• Your What Can I Do? profile: save & favorite your action steps, connect with other Shit Givers

• Vibe Check: Our news homepage, curated daily just for you. Never doomscroll again, thx

• Seriously?: The frameworks, models, history, and pop culture we use to understand what’s happening now and next

• Half Baked: Weekly briefs to help you think and act on specific, timely issues as they happen

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• Lifetime thanks for directly supporting our work

Start 30 day free trial

⚡️ Climate change:

• 71% of the world’s carbon emissions have no carbon price at all, and those that do exist fall far below the $100+ per ton that economists across the political spectrum agree would actually change behavior. (Our World in Data)

• 🌍️ Antarctica just shattered its winter heat record, with temperatures hitting 28 degrees Celsius above the seasonal average. (The Guardian)

• 🌎️ Climate models underestimated France’s June heatwave by decades, suggesting our worst-case scenarios aren’t worst-case enough. (The Climate Brink)

• 🌎️ Fashion brands are facing a supply chain reckoning as extreme heat threatens tens of millions of garment workers. (Bloomberg)

• A new satellite constellation called FireSat launched its first three satellites, designed to detect wildfires as small as a shipping container and image any point on Earth every 20 minutes. (HEATMAP)

🦠 Health & Bio:

• A $500 million initiative is betting that respiratory infections like colds and flu don’t have to be inevitable, drawing a parallel to how clean water infrastructure eliminated cholera a century ago. (Intercept)

• 🌏️ Strep A kills an estimated 639,000 people per year globally, rivaling HIV/AIDs and malaria, but receives dramatically less funding, prompting the launch of a new Strep A Vaccine Fund to accelerate vaccine development. (Coefficient Giving)

• 🌎️ Evidence synthesized from billions of COVID mRNA vaccine doses affirms it is sage, effective, and adaptable. (The Lancet)

• Cities like Philadelphia are looking to places like Vienna as models for social housing (publicly-owned, income-diverse rental properties with permanently affordable rents). (The Philadelphia Citizen)

• The federal government withheld federal homelessness data for months, and when they finally released 2025 numbers showing a 3.3% decrease, the gender data had been scrubbed entirely, erasing rising homelessness rates among women. (American Inequality)

💦 Food & Water:

• 🌎️ Economists are beginning to quantify how extreme weather events are showing up directly in grocery bills, water rates, and insurance premiums worldwide. (Bloomberg)

• More than 776,00 children are no longer receiving SNAP benefits following changes to the federal food program. (ProPublica)

• 🌎️ New Zealand is becoming a real-world laboratory for low-methane livestock farming, with the first generation of tools to reduce cow and sheep burps now approaching commercial scale. (Bloomberg)

• 🌎️ A major coffee trader is pushing to expand weather insurance for smallholder farmers in Vietnam fivefold this year, from 500 to 2500 farmers. (Bloomberg)

• A study in Santa Cruz, California found household water bills could nearly double by 2050, as drought intensifies and utilities face higher infrastructure and treatment costs. (Bloomberg)

👩‍💻 Beep Boop:

• A viral paper claimed that the iPhone caused 33-52% of the decline in US birth rates, but this demographer explains that big demographic shifts rarely have simple explanations, and a reminder that correlation doesn’t equal causation. (Data for Health)

• AI-powered cyberattacks have increased by four times from 2024 to 2025, and companies are being hacked every single day, but no one is adequately prepared. (The Atlantic)

• AI is generating $110 billion in real revenue annually, growing three times faster than the mobile or internet waves, but the question is whether that revenue can cover the enormous capital investment required to build AI infrastructure. (Exponential View)

• Decades of private data stored in the cloud are far more vulnerable than most people realize, as AI tools make hacking faster and easier. (NY Magazine)

• AI is already being used to improve embryo selection, sperm quality assessment, and ovarian stimulation protocols in IVF. (Scientific American)

🥇 Last week’s most popular Action Step was checking out Electricity Maps to explore the climate impact of electricity in your area, in real time.

👉 NEW: Find every action recommended in It’s Called Science. right here.

🌎️ = Global news/action steps

An excellent and important new ProPublica series!

How BP Execs Influenced a Climate Study That Shaped a Generation of Global Policy

BP sponsored an elite Princeton research center to address the climate problem without getting off fossil fuels. Its key work, a paper known as “Wedges,” guided climate discourse for a generation.

ProPublica • Maddie Stone, Amy Westervelt, and Katie Worth

America’s Next Top Model: A History of Beauty Standards

America's Next Top Model ran for 24 cycles, launching a generation of girls into a modelling fantasy world.

This week, we're digging into what ANTM was really selling: the makeover myth, the beauty-is-pain narrative, the contradictions of a show that claimed to expand beauty standards while simultaneously reinforcing them. We get into Tyra as a complicated figure, why Janice Dickinson on the judging panel was never going help, and how the Wild West of early reality TV meant nobody was protected.

From heroin chic to GLP-1 ads on every billboard, from girl boss hustle culture to trad wife soft-launching on your feed, the beauty standard didn't disappear. It just changed platforms, and the algorithm is still profiting off the same insecurities.

📖 Prefer to read? Get the transcript here.

▶️ Or watch the full episode on YouTube.

Listen now

Biodiversity Is A Relationship, Not A Place

This week, guest writer and science journalist, Pragathi Ravi, connects the fungi-farming behaviors of leaf cutter ants to the sustainable agriculture and land stewardship practices of indigenous peoples in India and beyond.

Perhaps, the best method to conserve biodiversity isn’t to set land aside untouched and removed from human beings, but to live in relationship with the land and other species — something leaf cutter ants have been doing for nearly 60 million years.

▶️ Watch Life Finds A Way on YouTube.

Read on

Ten science fiction, fantasy, and horror books to pack in your summer beach bag

All the best literary escapes worth packing for your summer vacation this year!

Read it

Happy Hump Day, Shit Givers.

Hot enough for you? Over the July 4th weekend, a heat dome parked over the eastern US and set at least 148 daily high-temperature records in less than a week, while pushing more than 20 states past 100 degrees.

Europe, too, is in the middle of what the WHO is calling its worst heat event on record, with at least 1300 confirmed excess deaths since June 21st, and early modeling suggests the real toll may run far higher, especially among people over 65 and those without AC.

Last week, Lauren stepped in to cover how communities are planning for heat. This week, we’re going to focus on who is most exposed, what’s fixable at the infrastructure level, and what you can do, today, not just when your city finishes its heat plan.

Let’s go.

— Willow

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Don’t Let Them Cook

These are the bills in Congress right now that would finally get workers a federal heat standard (or block it before it exists).

Here’s what you can do:

• The Asunción Valdivia Act would finally direct OSHA to issue a federal heat standard for workers (go).

• Protect farmworkers from heat by advocating for H.R.4844, which would add smoke and heat protections for the people growing your food (go).

• Tell Congress to fund heat-resilient schoolyards by passing H.R.8303/S.4258 (go).

• Protect families from climate change with funding for pregnant and postpartum people facing climate health risks (go).

• Oppose the Heat Workforce Standards Act, which would block the Secretary of Labor from finalizing or enforcing the OSHA heat injury/illness standard that’s been in the works since 2024 (go).

Photo by Kay Ingulli on Unsplash

Shade Is Infrastructure

Heat is a design problem as much as a weather problem. Tree canopy and reflective surfaces can drop neighborhood temperatures by several degrees.

Here’s what you can do:

• Mitigate Excess Urban Heat — H.R.3703 creates a HUD grant program for tree canopy and cool surfaces in underserved neighborhoods (go).

• The TREES Act of 2025 funds residential tree planting through the Department of Energy (go).

• See what this looks like on the ground with the Baltimore Tree Trust. They plant trees that cool streets and clean the city’s air (go).

• Check out the Cool Roof Rating Council’s directory of cool roof and wall materials if you’re renovating (go).

Photo by alpha innotec on Unsplash

Stay Cool Without Going Broke

Staying cool isn’t free. Here’s a range of ways to lower that cost.

Here’s what you can do:

• Household Water Assistance — H.R.4733 helps low-income households afford water bills (go).

• Energy Independence & Affordability — H.R.5862 restores clean energy tax credits (go).

• TECH Clean California provides training to become a certified heat pump installer (go).

• Finance energy-efficient home upgrades using Atmos Financial (go).

• Compare vetted solar and heat pump quotes using Energy Sage (go).

Photo by Immo Wegmann on Unsplash

Know Before It Hits 110

Knowledge is power! Learn about how heat is impacting where you live, and steps you can take to stay safe.

Here’s what you can do:

• Check out this NYT interactive How Much Hotter is Your Hometown? (go).

• Vox’s Be Ready For Extreme Weather is a community prep guide for heat, floods, and wildfires (go).

• Carbon Brief’s Extreme Weather and Crops article explains how heat and drought are reshaping food supply (go).

• Listos California has family disaster prep tools covering heat, wildfires, earthquakes, and floods (go).

That’s it for this week. Stay cool and check on your neighbors.

Thank you — as always — for giving a shit.

— Willow

We’re 100% independent and proudly supported by readers like you.

Members get a 30 day free trial to:

• Ad-free everything

• Your What Can I Do? profile: save & favorite your action steps, connect with other Shit Givers

• Vibe Check: Our news homepage, curated daily just for you. Never doomscroll again, thx

• Seriously?: The frameworks, models, history, and pop culture we use to understand what’s happening now and next

• Half Baked: Weekly briefs to help you think and act on specific, timely issues as they happen

• Not Important: My favorite books, art, movies, music, apps, and more that have nothing to do with the jet stream slowing down

• Lifetime thanks for directly supporting our work

Start 30 day free trial

Credit: ,

Welcome back!

I’m a bit late to you with this piece, because I’ve just come up for air after spending six months intensively reporting, and two months intensively editing, a new ProPublica and Drilled investigation into how an oil company shaped one of the most famous climate change papers ever written. It’s part of a larger series, “Carbon Captured”, that’s exploring how oil money has warped everything we think we know about addressing climate change.

Alongside my piece on the Princeton wedges paper last week, ProPublica and Drilled and ran a fantastic visual-heavy explainer on why carbon capture technology won’t save us.

There is a lot more in the series to come, and I hope you stay with us for what I promise will be a wild journey. But speaking of journeys—you’re probably thinking about summer vacation, and wondering what literary escapes are worth packing in your luggage this year. I know I am! Read on for recommendations.

— Maddie

Ten science fiction, fantasy and horror books to pack in your summer beach bag

Summer is officially here, which means it’s time to revisit my never-shortening reading list, cross off the books I’ve made it through, feel a twinge of guilt about those I haven’t opened yet, and stuff it full of new titles to take on vacation. 

As readers of this newsletter might have guessed, I spend a good chunk of my free time (such as that is) reading science fiction. However, for the past year and a half, I’ve also been working on a ProPublica and Drilled investigation into how fossil fuel money warps academic research on climate change. Through my reporting, I’ve become utterly fascinated with how corporate money has shaped research writ large, and how our dominant climate narratives came to be. I would be remiss if I didn’t give a brief shoutout to a few non-fiction titles I’ve revisited during the past year, including Naomi Oreskes’ and Eric Conway’s Merchants of Doubt, Genevieve Guenther’s The Language of Climate Politics, and Andreas Maln and Winn Carton’s Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown. 

All are worth your time. But if you’re looking for something a bit more removed from the horrors of modern existence, here are the new-ish sci-fi, fantasy, and horror books I’ve most enjoyed reading this year, plus a few I haven’t started yet.

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, by Stephen Graham Jones (2025)

Acclaimed horror writer Stephen Graham Jones’ latest work took home a 2026 Nebula Award. This, along with what I’ve read about the plot—which revolves around an undead member of the Blackfeet Tribe’s quest for revenge in the wake of a brutal massacre—placed it at the top of my summer reading list. As America’s 250th anniversary approaches, I’ve been encouraged to see Native writers offering fresh retellings our nation’s history that shed light on some of its uglier moments—moments we need to remember if we want to understand how we arrived at today.

Credit: Saga Press

The Death of Mountains, by Jordan Kurella (2025)

Another 2026 Nebula award winner, Jordan Kurella’s latest novella is about an Appalachian mountain that faces Death itself after being carved up by generations of coal miners. It’s a beautiful allegory for humankind’s exploitation of nature that has vibes of N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy, which also turns rocks into people. Magical realism meets geology is one of my favorite budding sub genres, and if you haven’t tried it out it yet, this short book is a great place to start.

The Faith of Beasts, by James SA Corey (2026)

I am still only halfway through The Faith of Beasts, because my attention keeps getting pulled in different directions. And yet, I find myself riveted by the latest installment of Corey’s new space opera series The Captive’s War. A far-future retelling of The Book of Daniel, the novels revolve around a group of human scientists who are taken from their homeworld to work for the Carryx, a race of sentient cockroaches who’ve built a galaxy-spanning empire out of alien slave labor. I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, who write together under the Corey pen name, about their new series and the science underpinning it. Check it out for a lot more context.

‘The Expanse’ authors explain how weird biology and academic politics inspired their latest novel

A conversation with James SA Corey.

Important, Not Important • Maddie Stone

Rose/House, by Arkady Martine (2023)

Over the past year, I’ve grown fascinated by the Silicon Valley discourse around AI, which seems increasingly steeped in tropes from 50-year-old science fiction. Thankfully, contemporary sci-fi writers like Arkady Martine are taking AI in new directions. The Hugo-winning author’s latest novella—a murder mystery that takes place inside a sentient piece of architecture—raises fresh questions about what artificial intelligence actually is, while showing how our (human) need to assign boundaries and bodies to dispersed algorithms can lead us to underestimate them. It’s twisty, haunting, and unexpected to the very end.

Automatic Noodle, by Annalee Newitz (2025)

For an even starker inversion of every AI trope Sam Altman wants you to believe, please read this novella about a ragtag group of droids who open a noodle shop in San Francisco. Set in a near-future California where robots have been granted basic rights but not full citizenship, Automatic Noodle asks big questions and small ones at the same time. Can robots who lack tastebuds make mouth-watering biangbiang noodles? Apparently, yes. Should they be accepted as masters of the craft? It depends on whether you are willing to see a blender on wheels as a person—and in Newitz’s future, the meatbags haven’t made up their minds yet. But Newitz challenges our conventional notions of personhood in a way that’s both thought-provoking and highly entertaining. Their latest work was a finalist for the 2026 Nebula awards, so this isn’t just Maddie’s robot bias talking.

Greenteeth, by Molly O’Neill (2025)

For cozy fantasy with a touch of grimdark, you can’t do much better than Molly O’Neill’s Greenteeth, which I will admit I purchased entirely based on the cover. The tale that followed did not disappoint: An ancient lake monster, a magical mom, and a goblin embark on an epic quest to defeat an evil power that’s taking over Britain. Steeped in Celtic folklore, it’s old-school fantasy with modernized characters whose struggles with identity, community, and parenthood will be relatable to many readers, especially the momma bears out there.

Credit: Hachette Book Group

Hungerstone, by Katt Dunn (2025)

As a sucker for all things vampire-related (sorry), I needed little convincing to read this modern retelling of the 1872 Gothic novella Carmilla, which Goodreads describes as a “thrillingly seductive sapphic romance.” In case you do, Dunn’s Hungerstone is a fast-paced, deeply satisfying read that takes the female rage simmering beneath so many Victorian-era novels and surfaces it like a tsunami. Katt Dunn’s re-imagining of Carmilla’s story is the best blend of Gothic horror, vampire romance, and revenge quest I’ve read in years, perhaps ever. If you’re in your feelings about a relationship gone sour, it’s the book for you.

Yours for the Taking, by Gabrielle Korn (2023)

I’ve wanted to write a more in-depth review of this book for over a year, and maybe I still will. But here’s the short plug: Yours for the Taking is an astonishing, underrated work of climate fiction that takes the genre in wild new directions. On a decaying and increasingly lawless future Earth, an all-female utopia beckons. But the climate-controlled biodome known as “Inside” is not what it seems. Rather than uprooting patriarchy, it replicates many of modern society’s oppressive power structures as the second-wave feminist billionaire behind it attempts to foist her vision of freedom upon its inhabitants. It’s a fast-paced, thrilling read that warns that ultra-rich mavericks aren’t going to save us.

The Jellyfish Problem, by Tessa Yang (2026)

A modern-day Loch Ness monster story steeped in marine biology? Hell yes.

A giant jellyfish terrorizes a small town off the coast of Maine. The only person who can solve the tentacled mystery? An introverted marine biologist greiving the recent death of her scientific partner. This book is hot off the press, but a recent NPR interview with the author—which hints at the misunderstood nature of an abyssal beast struggling to survive in a deteriorating environment—intrigued me enough to pick up a copy. I’ll report back.

Credit: Penguin Random House

A City Dreaming, by Maurice Broaddus (2026)

Also on my summer reading list is the third and final book in Maurice Broaddus’ Astra Black trilogy, which has drawn comparisons to both Black Panther and The Expanse but is truly a thing of its own. Set in a version of the 22nd century where the so-called Muungano empire has spread across the solar system, this afrofuturistic series envisions what it might look like for people of Africa and the African diaspora to escape the shackles of history and Earth’s gravity well. For more context on the series and the scientist-turned-middle school teacher behind it, check out my 2022 interview with Broaddus about Astra Black’s first installment, Sweep of Stars.

How can you help support speculative fiction writers?

• It’s going to sound obvious, but: BUY THEIR BOOKS. Ideally, directly from the author or an independent publisher. Or your local bookstore. Or bookshop.org, which supports independent bookstores.

• Buying a book used from thriftbooks or abebooks is another budget-friendly option for older titles. An even budget-friendlier option that still supports authors? Checking out a copy from your local library.

• Leave early reviews on popular platforms like Goodreads, StoryGraph, Fable, Amazon, whatever to help an author’s books gain algorithmic traction and attention.

• Attend local events, like readings and book signings, to show your support (and buy a book!) in-person.

• Donate to the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association, or one of the many other great nonprofits supporting this community.

👉 NEW: Find every action recommended in The Science of Fiction right here.

By Maddie Stone Maddie is a prolific science journalist. She is the former science editor of Gizmodo, founding editor of Earther, and runs The Science of Fiction blog, which explores the real world science behind your favorite fictional monsters, alien planets, galaxies far far away, and more. @themadstone | maddiestonewriting.com

Happy Hump Day, Shit Givers.

Wow, that’s fun. I can see why Willow opens her emails that way. 

My name is Lauren and I’m a researcher with Important, Not Important. I’ve spent the last few weeks exploring how communities can better prepare for extreme heat. The issue is more timely than ever, as Europe is in the midst of a deadly heat wave and a “heat dome” threatens triple-digit temperatures through the holiday weekend in the United States.

Heat has been in the news a lot, and you can expect to hear more about it each year as temperatures rise due to climate change. This type of heat carries serious health risks, especially for older adults, young children, outdoor workers and people with preexisting health conditions.

Heat illness and death are preventable. For example, the city of Phoenix has issued an annual Heat Response Plan since 2022. Preliminary 2025 data suggests a 30% drop in heat-related deaths in Maricopa County from the year prior, the second consecutive year of decline after a decade of climbing death rates. 

The plans we make now can help keep people safe and healthy for years to come. 
— Lauren

APL Positions covered this week:

• 🚨 Emergency alert systems modernized

• 💪 Pre-disaster mitigation funding increased to >+$1B/year

• 🌡️ CDC Climate-Health Program to all 50 states

Unsplash

Protect yourself — and others

Better heat planning can help us in the future, but heat-associated illness is a problem right now, too. Learn who’s at risk and how to stay safe.

HeatRisk — This new National Weather Service tool predicts when heat-related illness is more likely in your area based on typical local conditions and CDC data (go).

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Explore heat plans

Learn how your community is already preparing for rising heat and get inspired by policy solutions from the United States and beyond.

Heat Plan Database — Dive into a database of local, state and national heat policy compiled by Cornell University researchers (go).

Adaptation Clearinghouse — Explore heat plans and other climate adaptation programs from around the country, courtesy of the Georgetown Climate Center (go).

US Climate Resilience Toolkit — View case studies from other communities bracing for the effects of climate change, including extreme heat (go).

Global Heat Health Information Network — Get an international perspective on heat preparedness (go).

Together With 1440

Smart starts here.

You don't have to read everything — just the right thing. 1440's daily newsletter distills the day's biggest stories from 100+ sources into one quick, 5-minute read. It's the fastest way to stay sharp, sound informed, and actually understand what's happening in the world. Join 4.5 million readers who start their day the smart way.

Join for free today!

Want an ad-free experience? Become a Member!

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Push for local heat action

Copy (Don’t let a heat wave catch your community off guard. A proactive approach to heat preparedness can save lives.

🚨 NEW: Health-based heat alerts — Not all heat is created equal. Use our NEW 2-minute script to tell your local lawmakers to issue warnings based on when heat-related illness is most likely in your community (go).

Heat Action Platform — Direct your local leaders to heat planning guidance from the Center for Climate Resilience (go).

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Support heat resilient facilities

Many state prisons lack air conditioning, leaving inmates especially vulnerable to heat illness.

85 to Stay Alive Coalition — Sign the petition for safer temperatures in prisons nationwide (go).

If you live in California, two proposed laws would prepare public facilities for extreme temperatures. Both bills passed the state Assembly, and now it’s the Senate’s turn to act.

Make CA prisons climate resilient — Tell your state Senator to support AB-2499 (go).

Make CA schools climate resilient — Tell your state Senator to support AB-1822 (go).

Willow will return for the next What Can I Do? Weekly. In the meantime, take care of yourself and your loved ones, and thank you — as always — for giving a shit.

— Lauren

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Happy Hump Day, Shit Givers.

School is out for summer, but for roughly 30 million kids in the US, school isn’t just school: it’s a place to receive reliable breakfast and lunch five days a week.

When school lets out, that safety net disappears for a huge chunk of students, with only a fraction of kids who rely on free or reduced-price school meals during the school year actually getting connected to a summer meal program.

This week we’re looking at how we can solve that problem, both from a logistics point of view (where are the sites, when are they open, who qualifies) and a policy one (how much food is wasted instead of shared, and how meals get funded).

Let’s go.

— Willow

Photo by Clint Patterson on Unsplash

Free lunch is closer than you think

Free summer meals exist in every state, but many families have no idea where they are, or that they even qualify. No paperwork, no income requirements at the door — just show up.

• Summer Meals Site Finder — Plug in a ZIP code, find a free meal site for kids 18 and under, today. Know a family who could use this? Forward it now. Sites fill summer schedules fast, and this only helps if people actually see it (go).

Photo by Isabella Fischer on Unsplash

One signature away

Many of our “be heard” actions are about fighting cuts, but this one is the opposite: Illinois lawmakers passed a genuinely good, low-drama fix, and it’s now sitting on the Governor’s desk waiting for a signature.

HB4859 would let Illinois school districts officially set up “share tables,” a designated spot in the cafeteria where kids can put unopened, untouched food for any other kid to grab instead of it going straight to the trash.

This is technically a school-year policy, but it’s the same logic as summer meal sites: a lot of hunger isn’t about food not existing, but about food not reaching the kid who needs it.

• Tell Governor Pritzker to sign HB4859 — it’s a quick, easy ask while the bill is still on his desk (go).

If you’re not in Illinois: read this as a model! Share tables are simple, cheap, and another state legislator near you could copy this tomorrow if enough people ask.

Photo by Prasopchok on Unsplash

Congress is deciding who eats

There are a few more bills worth your two minutes, because school meal funding (and other funding squeezes that show up in classrooms too) is genuinely up for grabs right now at the federal level.

• Healthy Meals Help Kids Learn — Raises federal reimbursement rates per meal so schools aren’t serving worse food (or running deficits) just because costs went up and funding didn’t (go).

• Expanding Access to School Meals — Expands which schools can offer free meals to every student, no separate application required (go).

• Prevent Education Cuts — Tell lawmakers to stand up for education during the appropriations process (go).

• Protect Title I Funding — A House subcommittee just advanced a budget that would cut Title I (the program that sends extra funding to schools serving low-income kids) by 9%, alongside steep cuts to teacher training and English-language programs. It’s headed to full committee next, with a Senate version still to come (go).

Photo by Joel Muniz on Unsplash

Tonight’s dinner and beyond

Send resources to the organizations working on fixing the system that creates hunger in the first place through policy, food rescue logistics, and models that pair food with other things people need to get back on their feet. And then, donate or volunteer to feed people tonight.

• No Kid Hungry — Connects kids with meals year-round and helps schools/states stand up new meal programs (go).

• Food Research and Action Center — Join the fight to end hunger and improve nutrition through legislation (go).

• Feeding America — The food bank network that picks up where school and summer programs leave off (go).

• Find a food bank or other food security organization near you (go).

That’s it for this week.

Thank you — as always — for giving a shit.

— Willow

We’re 100% independent and proudly supported by readers like you.

Members get a 30 day free trial to:

• Ad-free everything

• Your What Can I Do? profile: save & favorite your action steps, connect with other Shit Givers

• Vibe Check: Our news homepage, curated daily just for you. Never doomscroll again, thx

• Seriously?: The frameworks, models, history, and pop culture we use to understand what’s happening now and next

• Half Baked: Weekly briefs to help you think and act on specific, timely issues as they happen

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• Lifetime thanks for directly supporting our work

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⚡️ Climate change:

• 🌏️ Pakistan just completed the fastest distributed-solar rollout in the world, but the unplanned boom is now triggering a “utility death spiral” that’s pushing costs onto the people who can’t afford to leave the grid. (Bright Spots)

• The world has never actually pulled off a real energy transition before, and current renewable plans aren’t nearly ambitious enough. It’s time to go bigger. (Bloomberg)

• 🌎️ Europe is bracing for extreme heat this week, with warning across the continent and temperatures that could hit records for this time of year. (The New York Times)

• FERC passed major bipartisan reforms requiring grid operators to prevent data centers from shifting infrastructure costs onto regular ratepayers, and pushing the wider use of grid-enhancing tech instead of just building more transmission lines. (HEATMAP)

🦠 Health & Bio:

• A landmark study identified a 14-protein blood test that can predict lung cancer more than five years before diagnosis. (Ground Truths)

• Scientists are finding that viral infections, including COVID, may reawaken dormant cancer cells in survivors, based on mouse studies and healthcare database analysis. (Los Angeles Times)

• The COVID vaccine cut major cardiovascular events by about 40% with the benefit persisting for years. (The Washington Post)

• Residents living near data centers are suing over relentless low-frequency noise that’s disrupting their sleep and health. (The New York Times)

🍃 Food & Water & Ecosystems:

• Researchers are vaccinating wild animals to protect both human health and endangered species (Works in Progress)

• Scientists mapped Earth’s underground fungal networks at global scale for the first time, finding they store four to six times as much carbon as all humans combined, and grasslands are the densest hotspots. (The New York Times)

• US tomato prices rose about 40% between January and April, driven by a Florida freeze and weather disruptions in Mexico. (Bloomberg)

👩‍💻 Beep Boop:

• 🌎️ The UK has launched a sweeping social media ban for under-16s, going further than Australia by including gaming and livestreaming platforms. (Reuters)

• AI “nudify” apps have made deepfake abuse a widespread new form of bullying among teens, and laws meant to address it are lagging badly behind the technology. (The Wall Street Journal)

• AI tools built to predict human behavior risk shaping the very behavior they’re forecasting, raising deep questions about free will and algorithmic feedback loops. (NPR)

• An experiment testing “AI councils” found that when multiple AI models deliberate together, consensus processes drop about three-quarters of genuinely good ideas raised by only one model, which is the same groupthink problem that plagues human committees. (Exponential View)

📈 Last week’s most popular Action Step was using the air quality sensors from Purple Air to monitor air quality in your community.

👉 NEW: Find every action recommended in It’s Called Science. right here.

🌎️ = Global news/action steps

Aging in place

America’s suburbs are growing old fast

Between 2000 and 2024, the number of elderly residents living in suburban U.S. counties more than doubled

www.economist.com/interactive/united-states/2026/06/11/americas-suburbs-are-growing-old-fast

Today we're gonna talk about Texas.

For a decade, maybe 100 years, we've heard over and over, this is the year we flip Texas. Sometimes we get closer, sometimes we get much further away.

But as much as I'm excited about a candidate like James Talarico, I am always more interested in the people standing up to run in their communities at the state and local level.

So today, I'm going to introduce you to Junior Ezeonu.

You all have asked for more examples of people fighting for progress you can actually see and touch and feel. And in this batch of conversations, another one in partnership with our best friends at Run For Something, we're giving you exactly what you asked for.

And my friends, that's exactly who Junior is. I can't wait for you to hear more about him.

📖 Prefer to read? Get the transcript here.

▶️ Or watch the full episode on YouTube.

Listen now

The biology of thinking differently

This week in Life Finds A Way, writer Kavin Senapathy explores how we think about neurodiversity when we take a step back and consider cognitive diversity in other species.

While the neurodiversity paradigm emerged in the 1900s as a human-centered concept rooted in social justice, the biological reality it describes isn’t uniquely human at all. From crows to bees, cognitive diversity is standard in social species.

At a time when deficit-based thinking about autism and neurodivergence is the norm, and where systems are designed for the neurotypical, understanding neurodiversity as a part of biodiversity reframes the entire conversation.

▶️ Watch Life Finds A Way on YouTube.

Read on

An exclusive interview with Star Trek science advisor Erin MacDonald

Season 2 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds goes boldly in many new directions for the series. But its most audacious moment isn't when Illyrian civil rights attorney Neera Ketoul calls out Starfleet's hypocrisy for discriminating against genetically modified people, or even when two lower deckers from the USS Cerritos stumble into the live-action universe of Strange New Worlds. It's when Uhura broadcasts a song into a fold of subspace, accidentally generating an "improbability field" that traps the ship in an alternative reality where everyone is forced to express themselves through music.

That is the surprisingly thought-out explanation for Subspace Rhapsody, Star Trek's very first musical episode, in which the crew of the USS Enterprise must figure out how to close the improbability field before disaster ensues. As Spock and Uhura attempt to analyze the phenomenon, they and other members of the crew begin spontaneously breaking into song, leading to embarrassing and character-revealing moments as the rules of the musical universe force them to divulge their innermost feelings. It could have gone off the rails quickly. But the episode manages to tell an entertaining, and very Trek-y, story about a crew trying to regain control of their ship after encountering an unexplained space anomaly. And the musical performances are pretty damn impressive, too.

The fact that this episode didn't feel like a gimmick is largely thanks to the input of Erin MacDonald, Star Trek's resident science advisor, who consults on every series currently in the works.

Read it

Happy Hump Day, Shit Givers.

In about a week, it’ll be 4 years since Dobbs overturned Roe and handed abortion access back to the states. In practice, that has meant 50 different answers to the question of whether you get to decide what happens to your own body. For some of you, the answer probably hasn’t changed much, but for others it definitely has.

And to be clear: this isn’t a “women’s issue” you get to opt out of it if doesn’t apply to you right now. Bodily autonomy is the principle that your own medical decisions belong to you. The same legal reasoning that strips abortion access has already been floated for contraception, IVF, and gender-affirming care (which is also much broader than many people initially assume).

Maybe today, it’s not your body on the line. That’s exactly why it’s worth defending now, while you still have the bandwidth to fight for someone else’s.

Bodily autonomy is whether the nearest clinic is down the street or a 12-hour drive away, whether contraception is covered or restricted, whether the data from your period-tracking app could someday be used against you.

So let’s get to the funding, advocacy, and education we need to fill that gap between “legal” and “accessible.”

Let’s go.

— Willow

Photo by Rob Scholten on Unsplash

Help carry the load

Positions: Abortion legal and accessible in all states, No abortion waiting periods

Since Dobbs, people in ban states have been traveling further for care than ever, often hundreds of miles, into neighboring states whose clinics and funds are now stretched thin covering out-of-state patients. Supporting these funds means supporting the receiving end of that pipeline. These five are among the highest-rated abortion funds out there.

Here’s what you can do:

• Chicago Abortion Fund — supporting abortion access across the Midwest with funding and real care (go).

• Wisconsin Abortion Fund — over 50 years of on-the-ground impact in Wisconsin (go).

• Abortion Fund of Maryland — Funding access for anyone traveling to or within Maryland (go).

• Blue Ridge Abortion Fund — Making abortion care affordable across Virginia (go).

• DC Abortion Fund — Mutual aid for abortion access in Washington, D.C. (go).

👉️ Don’t see your state? Find your local abortion fund here.

Photo by Joey Csunyo on Unsplash

The National Backbone

Positions: Abortion legal and accessible in all states, Medication abortion access preserved

If you’d rather your dollars go wherever the need is greatest, or you want to support the system behind the system, these national orgs have you covered.

Here’s what you can do:

• National Network of Abortion Funds — The umbrella org that channels support to local funds across the country (go).

• Keep Our Clinics — Defending independent abortion clinics nationwide, the physical infrastructure of access (go).

• The Brigid Alliance — Covers the travel logistics for people forced to leave their state for care (go).

• Plan C — Supporting access to abortion pills by mail in all 50 states, including where clinics no longer exist (go).

• Physicians for Reproductive Health — Backing the doctors defending abortion access through advocacy and policy work (go).

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Know the Landscape

Positions: Clinic buffer zones protected

Staying informed is its own kind of action. It’s how you know where the next fight is, and where your support matters most.

Here’s what you can do:

• Abortion State Policy Trends — Guttmacher’s full breakdown of how state abortion policy shifted in 2025 (go).

• Guttmacher Institute — The research backbone behind nearly every reproductive rights statistic you’ve seen (go).

• Become an Abortion-Clinic Escort — What it actually takes to safely walk patients into a clinic, and how to sign up (go).

• Abortion Positivity Project — Unlearning the stigmatizing language that shapes how we talk (and think) about abortion (go).

Photo by Swello on Unsplash

What’s next on the chopping block

Positions: Contraception access protected, IVF access protected

Bodily autonomy is bigger than one procedure. It’s also contraception access, the federal law that could lock these rights in for good, and the digital trail that can put people at risk simply for seeking care.

Here’s what you can do:

• Women’s Health Protection Act — Tell Congress to codify abortion rights into federal law (go).

• Protect Reproductive Health Data — Tell senators to support privacy protections so reproductive health data can’t be weaponized (go).

• Birth Control Center — Harvard’s tool for finding the contraception method that’s actually right for your body (go).

• adyn — Personalized, science-backed birth control recommendations (go).

That’s it for this week. Fund a clinic, call a senator, or just send this to someone who needs to see it.

Thank you — as always — for giving a shit.

— Willow

PS. Is there something in particular you want to take action on, but don’t know where to start? Reply to this email, and if it fits into our scope, we’ll build a newsletter issue around it.

We’re 100% independent and proudly supported by readers like you.

Members get a 30 day free trial to:

• Ad-free everything

• Your What Can I Do? profile: save & favorite your action steps, connect with other Shit Givers

• Vibe Check: Our news homepage, curated daily just for you. Never doomscroll again, thx

• Seriously?: The frameworks, models, history, and pop culture we use to understand what’s happening now and next

• Half Baked: Weekly briefs to help you think and act on specific, timely issues as they happen

• Not Important: My favorite books, art, movies, music, apps, and more that have nothing to do with the jet stream slowing down

• Lifetime thanks for directly supporting our work

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Become An AI Expert In Just 5 Minutes

If you’re a decision maker at your company, you need to be on the bleeding edge of, well, everything. But before you go signing up for seminars, conferences, lunch ‘n learns, and all that jazz, just know there’s a far better (and simpler) way: Subscribing to The Deep View.

This daily newsletter condenses everything you need to know about the latest and greatest AI developments into a 5-minute read. Squeeze it into your morning coffee break and before you know it, you’ll be an expert too.

Subscribe right here. It’s totally free, wildly informative, and trusted by 600,000+ readers at Google, Meta, Microsoft, and beyond.

⚡️ Climate change:

• More World Cup news: at least half of matches face performance-impairing heat conditions (The Athletic)

• And Seattle’s heat-dome preparedness exercise revealed serious gaps in emergency response capacity just weeks before 750,000 visitors arrive for the World Cup. (HEATMAP)

• 🌏️ Extreme heat is already cutting into India’s economic growth, with millions of informal workers bearing the worst of it. (Bloomberg)

• 🌎️ Declassified Pentagon and State Department documents show the US government war-gamed exactly this moment: El Niño disrupting food systems, heat destabilizing economies, and political fissures widening. Meanwhile, Trump is dismantling the monitoring infrastructure those same documents said we’d need. (National Security Archive)

🦠 Health & Bio:

• Southern California had its smoggiest first five months in over a decade, with 39 unhealthy air days driven by record early heat waves converting exhaust into ozone. (LA Times)

• Columbia scientists used base editing to precisely alter genes in human embryos, sparking an ethics debate about where medicine ends and designer babies begin. (The New York Times)

• New Mexico became the first state to offer no-cost child care to all families regardless of income, with a model other states are watching closely. (Governing)

• As tens of millions of people take GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic, real-world data is revealing unexpected effects like muscle loss in older adults, emotional flattening, and nutritional deficiencies. (The New York Times)

💦 Food & Water:

• The New World screwworm — a flesh-eating parasite that was eradicated from the US decades ago — has been detected in a Texas calf near the Mexican border 🙃 (LA Times)

• As climate change threatens coffee yields, researchers are racing to scale climate-resilient alternatives and hybrids (Mongabay)

• Data center water use is real but misunderstood. The actual threat is hyper-local, concentrated in drought-prone communities while Big Tech keeps consumption data private. (HEATMAP)

👩‍💻 Beep Boop:

• A software firm used by 95% of North American transmission operators is proposing AI-enhanced dynamic line ratings that could increase grid capacity 10-20% without building a single new power line. (Canary Media)

• States are losing billions subsidizing data center construction for facilities that create fewer than 150 permanent jobs each, while Big Tech lobbies to keep the tax breaks in place. (Popular Information)

• Google DeepMind is funding $10 million in research into what happens when millions of AI agents interact at scale, because nobody has studied this yet and the risks are unknown. (MIT Technology Review)

• Internal documents from across 1,400+ school district lawsuits reveal that Snapchat, Meta, TikTok, and YouTube deliberately targeted students during school hours, including killing safety features and paying teen ambassadors. (The New York Times)

Last week’s most popular Action Step was finding the best water filter for PFAS “forever chemicals.”

👉 NEW: Find every action recommended in It’s Called Science. right here.

🌎️ = Global news/action steps

How evidence shows what really works

Helen Pearson: What Constitutes Real Medical Evidence?

A conversation with Helen Pearson on her new book BEYOND BELIEF

Eric Topol

Run for Working People (And Not For Data Centers)

Today, we're gonna talk about data centers.

Now, I know these things are a hot topic amid everything else: the heat, water, prices, lack of homes, lack of childcare, you name it. But we do need to speak out about them.

So, who is the most qualified here to speak about them, and when necessary, against these just enormous data centers that are affecting the heat, the water, the prices, the lack of homes, and more?

In this second batch of conversations, in partnership with our best friends at Run For Something, we're gonna give you exactly what you asked for.

Today, we're gonna talk to an awesome candidate who is running for their town council, who is hellbent on attacking and helping people understand a huge issue in their own hometown.

You and I are gonna find out together what they're working on and where they've made progress, where they have struggled in their candidacy, and how their exact tactics and strategies might be transferable to other schools or towns or cities like yours around this fine country.

📖 Prefer to read? Get the transcript here.

▶️ Or watch the full episode on YouTube.

Listen now

Winter is coming (and your body knows it)

This week, guest writer Syris Valentine dives into why our circadian rhythms are at odds with our economy, and what beavers, vervet monkeys, and deciduous trees can teach us about honoring winter’s rhythms instead of fighting them.

While other species prepare for rest and social bonding, we keep plugging away at the same 9-5 schedule whether it’s June or January.

Turns out our bodies didn’t get the memo that we’re supposed to ignore the seasons, and artificial lighting just isn’t cutting it.

▶️ Watch Life Finds A Way on YouTube.

Read on

Screenshot from The Last of Us videogame, which inspired the now-airing HBO series. Credit: NaughtyDog

An epidemiologist explains how science fiction has taught us—and misled us—about pandemics

If you asked a random scientist a question about zombies, they're likely to brush the undead monsters off as pure fantasy.

Epidemiologist Tara Smith, however, will take your question seriously—and proceed to thoughtfully explain what the undead can teach us about infectious disease outbreaks and preparing for disasters. In fact, Smith recently taught an entire course on the subject at Kent State University, where she studies emerging infectious diseases.

Read it

Happy Pride! Let’s get back to basics.

I do fundamentally agree with Benji Franklin here. A huge catalyst for our 2025 pivot towards courting a much wider audience was AOC’s postmortem of the 2024 election: “We can’t just be right. We have to be effective.”

But at the same time, Benj, we have to also agree on the fundamentals — human rights — and that we won’t compromise on those.

And as discussed in my first APL post, from the very beginning, the founders left the door open for our fundamentals to be — at best! — up for discussion, at worst, blissfully ignored while their very own slave-children tended to their expansive gardens.

So while we’re definitely trying to reach way, way more people where they are in their every day lives, we’re simultaneously making it as clear as humanly possible that these eight basics — the *Actually* Pro Life Principles — are absolutely non-negotiable.

They are the ground-floor, and they start and end with our golden rule: that no life is worth more than another.

Here are the Principles, laid out”

1. A home

2. Clean water

3. Clean air

4. Healthy food

5. Quality healthcare

6. Quality education

7. Safety

8. Equal standing

Now, will we drag the *Actually* Pro Life Principles out, by name, in all of our content, all of the time? No.

But we’ll also never, ever negotiate on them.

Because, per AOC, we are still — more than ever — wholeheartedly dedicated to being righteously, obnoxiously “right”.

But we are also more aware than ever that reaching more people in ways that might otherwise not seem related to our foundation — again, that no life is worth more than another — and converting some small percentage of that much, much larger audience of parents or bird-nerds or sci-fi or reality TV fans, may be even more “effective” than force-feeding people their vegetables all of the time.

It’s why launching an (award-winning) parenting podcast and reality TV podcast in successive years does actually make sense alongside slapping *Actually* Pro Life on t-shirts and stickers (and just in time for Pride month, no less!).

Can you be someone who loves The Traitors but who doesn’t think everyone deserves clean air? Totally. But also — and this distinction is super important — go fuck yourself.

We’re looking for people who OBVIOUSLY believe everyone deserves clean air, and are actually willing to fight for it, who will gladly — effusively — bring receipts for both their actions and the measurable progress they’re working towards, and who ALSO remember playing Mafia IRL before they had kids, who are just so tired now, and who are thus living vicariously through Alan Cumming’s fabulous outfits on The Traitors.

Gif by peacock on Giphy

Maybe you’ve never even had to think about whether or not you, yourself, have access to these basics, or how you might be intentionally deprived of them, much less while you crushed Love Island.

That’s great for you, and I’m in the same boat, just swap out Love Island for GBBO.

On the other hand, do you know how many people get kicked off Medicaid simply for fucking up paperwork?

Or who are actively deciding between paying their rent or paying for AC?

Who live in a state where that state offers more for a private school voucher than they spend per student in their public schools?

Who live in a country unrecognized by most of the other countries, who’ve been the victims of a systematic genocide for going on three years?

Who have no hospitals, no schools, no food, no water? Who have no safety, or a home, or equal standing of any kind under international law?

The answer: a lot. A lot of people are currently deprived of any combination of these eight Principle requirements.

Fewer people than there used to be, but still — a lot. Please see the OWID chart that underpins so much of our work:

Of the eight Principles, “equal standing” can feel the least tangible.

But if “the housing theory of everything” applies, and we believe it does, then we have to agree that without equal standing under the law, no one can truly expect or enjoy freedom.

Take, for example, the X-Men.

Fox/Disney

Maybe you do not prefer to equate Alan Cumming in The Traitors to Alan Cumming’s genuinely heart-felt portrayal of Nightcrawler in X-2.

Maybe X-Men to the genocide in Palestine feels like a stretch, but that’s possibly only because you didn’t pay enough attention to the X-Men’s situation in the first place:

Societal “others”, most born that way, who faced a never-ending threat of state-sponsored extermination but who also struggled to simultaneously love and prove themselves, and who still showed up to save the day, for everyone.

How to achieve the equity mutants deserved was, of course, up for discussion — and many of the best discussions between Professor X and Magneto illustrated those struggles, however much their friendship was dwarfed and their debates acted out in real-time by the terrible mutant-on-mutant violence around them and by them.

But — and this is key — whether or not mutants fundamentally deserved equal standing and safety, a home, or a school, was never, ever up for negotiation by either school.

Likewise, our Principles are steadfast, but the actions we recommend, and the new Positions they take — much more on those soon — represent a myriad of ways to measurably show up for the issues of our time, whatever your resources.

Organize for candidates who know exactly what it feels like to be hungry, and who know that hunger is a policy choice. Donate to groups fighting to get lead pipes out of the ground, out of communities, and out of schools, or who fund pediatric cancer research, or disaster relief for American-funded wars all over the world.

You know how long we deprived women and Black people the right to vote, you know how long we enforced separate but equal, but do you know how long and until how recently gay men were deprived of the opportunity to donate blood in this country? To quite literally give a part of themselves for someone else’s benefit, despite how we’ve disadvantaged them?

2023.

This, despite perennial blood shortages and radical improvements to blood supply screening for everything from HIV antibodies to the West Nile virus.

If you didn’t know the answer to that, it’s probably because you didn’t have to know.

But now I’m telling you — you have to know.

Do you know how Wolverine got his claws? Have you heard of Henrietta Lacks or the Tuskegee study?

Without equal standing, permission — consent — is just some abstract concept, waved away by white supremacy and the power-hungry religious right.

The most affecting history and stories tend to blend heroes and victims who never asked to be either and somehow ended up both because some of us decided some lives are in fact worth much more than others, and not enough other people said no.

I’ve said on our parenting podcast, Not Right Now, that I categorically made my parenting a little easier by establishing a firm set of “no’s”, and everything else is (within reason) up for discussion. Similarly (lol), Bruce Springsteen wrote a song called Long Walk Home, where he described how a “flag flying over the courthouse means certain things are set in stone. Who we are, what we'll do and what we won’t.”

Like Meatloaf, though, Bruce didn’t — in particular that song — describe what we’ll do and what we won’t, so it’s easy to imagine a billionaire Boomer rock star doing a drive-by of the so-called inalienable rights Jefferson wrote with fingers crossed behind his back.

But then again, considering Bruce’s long history of calling America on our bullshit, even if the dumbest among us continually refuse to read the lyrics, I would encourage you to consider his actual take might be one of two alternatives:

1. Who we are, what we’ll do, and what we won’t, is crystal-clear and long documented, however much we/they constantly try to rewrite or simply erase that documentation

2. Who we are, what we’ll do, and what we don’t was originally written as being inalienable, and 250 years later we should, for once, try to completely live up to those words, even if — and maybe especially if — the authors never did

Obviously, as Hamilton, Wicked, Bohemian Rhapsody, and more recently, Michael, very selectively taught us, it really matters who lives, who dies, and who tells your story.

American history and literature are, at best, like the 1970’s more international X-Men and 1990’s Nightcrawler and Storm, a quilt-work of perspectives that help illustrate who we are and what we’re capable of, of how far we’ve come and how far we have to go.

They show plainly how inequitable so much of that progress has been, here at home and in all the countries around the world we have affected in so many ways. Their stories form a quilt woven by authors and writers and directors who are the descendants of people who left their homes and ancestral homelands and who specifically came here looking for a better life, or for religious freedom, or who were brought here against their will never having had any freedom at all.

No home, no equal standing, no provisions, much less guarantees, of healthcare, clean air, water, healthy food, safety, or an education.

Consider those authors and that history in full, and all of our resources, and it’s clear that if anyone is indebted to and capable of putting a very loud label on these eight Principles and fighting for them in every way we can, it should — theoretically — be us.

But the bad guys are real, and the call is coming from inside the house, and their methods, like in The Traitors — disinformation and group-think among them — are not trivial, or easily defeated.

We can never compromise on our Principles, but we don’t have to be heroes.

We do, though, have an obligation to continue fighting The Long Defeat, and it has to continue with all of us — it’s together, or nothing, of course — and whatever your flavor of podcast, it has to be explicitly (more explicitly than ever, it seems) be grounded in Principles that are inarguable, even inalienable, that are fundamentally and measurably *Actually* Pro Life.

Together or nothing,

— Quinn

Happy Pride, Shit Givers.

Last week’s issue was about survival: trans healthcare, mental health, the scaffolding that holds people up when their own government is trying to knock them down.

This week is about everything that comes after. The ability to not just survive, but thrive. The right to work without being fired for who you are or to marry the person you love or cross a border in search of safety and actually find it. To be counted, represented, and seen.

And, quick reminder, you still have the opportunity to get in the running for a free APL T-shirt or a full APL-merch swag bag. All you have to do is upgrade to an Important Membership before Friday! You even get to trial the Membership for 30 days!

If you don’t want to upgrade, but still want to rep the merch, that’s cool too. All of our *Actually* Pro Life merch is up on our store (among a bunch of other great stuff!).

Okay, let’s go.

— Willow

Photo by Amy Elting on Unsplash

Still legal to fire you for this

Positions: Federal Equality Act passed, Conversion therapy banned nationwide, Marriage equality protected by statute

In most US states, you can still be legally fired, evicted, or turned away from a business for being LGBTQ+. In the year 2026. Federal protections exist in patches, but not comprehensively. This is the bread-and-butter civil rights fight for the entire LGBTQ+ community.

Here’s what you can do:

• The Human Rights Campaign is the largest LGBTQ+ civil rights organization in the country. Canvassing, phone banking, legislative advocacy, electoral work — if you want to be plugged in at scale, this is where you start. (go)

• Lambda Legal is the litigation arm of this fight, taking cases to court on employment, housing, healthcare, and public accommodation discrimination. (go)

• The LGBTQ+ Victory Fund is changing who makes the laws by endorsing and supporting out LGBTQ+ candidates at every level of government. (go)

Photo by Antenna on Unsplash

The work on the ground

Positions: LGBTQ+ nondiscrimination in all states

Federal law moves slowly, and in the meantime LGBTQ+ people are living under whatever their state legislature decided this session. The groups on the ground are doing the work of showing up, building power, and refusing to disappear.

Here’s what you can do:

• PROMO is Missouri’s LGBTQ+ advocacy organization, doing electoral and legislative work . Canvas, phone bank, organize. (go)

• Freedom Oklahoma is building safety and community for LGBTQ+ Oklahomans through housing, employment, and health programs. (go)

• Add the Words Idaho is a campaign to add “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” to Idaho’s Human Rights Act. (go)

• Trans Ohio is advancing the rights of trans, nonbinary, and intersex people in Ohio through advocacy, education, and direct services. (go)

• Fairness West Virginia is building the case that everyone deserves to be treated fairly, regardless of who they are or who they love in West Virginia. (go)

• One Iowa is improving the lives of LGBTQ+ Iowans through healthcare access, policy advocacy, and community building. (go)

• Wyoming Equality is fighting for the dignity and equality of LGBTQ+ people Wyoming. (go)

• Georgia Equality is advancing fairness, safety, and opportunity for LGBTQ+ Georgians. (go)

• Equality Florida has been fighting back against anti-LGBTQ+ legislation for over 25 years. (go)

Photo by Sasun Bughdaryan on Unsplash

The double gauntlet

Positions: Right to counsel in immigration proceedings, Clear immigration court backlog (under 1 year wait)

If you’re LGBTQ+ and fleeing a country that criminalizes your existence, you face two gauntlets: the country you’re running from and the immigration system you’re running into. Many LGBTQ+ asylum seekers are detained, often in facilities where they face additional targeting and abuse. They are also almost invisible in mainstream immigration coverage.

Here’s what you can do:

• The Florence Project provides legal services for people detained in Arizona’s immigration system, one of the largest detention networks in the country. A significant share of their clients are LGBTQ+. (go)

• RAICES provides immigration legal services and advocacy, taking on over 10,000 cases a year. (go)

• The UN Refugee Agency is the agency responsible for the protection of LGBTQ+ people fleeing persecution. (go)

Photo by Raphael Renter | @raphi_rawr on Unsplash

And another thing!

Positions: Accurate identity documents accessible, Protect transgender healthcare access, Comprehensive sex education federally funded

This section is less about legislation and litigation, and more about the work of making sure LGBTQ+ people are visible, documented, and present in their communities. Data protects people. Representation protects people. Showing up protects people.

Here’s what you can do:

• Read the US Transgender Survey, the largest survey of trans experiences ever conducted in the US. Participation is how researchers, policymakers, and advocates know what trans people actually need. (go)

• interACT does legal advocacy, education, and ally outreach to advance legal protections for intersex people. (go)

• Run for School Board — school boards make decisions about what kids learn, what libraries stock, what bathrooms students can use, and whether LGBTQ+ students see themselves in their education. LGBTQ+ people and allies running for local office is one of the highest-leverage things happening right now. (go)

You belong here, and so does everyone else. Let’s make sure everyone has the same opportunities to fully participate in public life.

Thank you — as always — for giving a shit.

— Willow

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Hi friends,

You probably know by now that something we’ve really been mulling over and working on post-2024 is thinking about the ways in which our work can be most effective. Especially when our work is the hard stuff, the type of content that would make anyone want to tune out, because we get it, shit’s overwhelming.

How can we better reach more people who give a shit, who need a way in that doesn’t feel like homework? Who have been diligently eating their vegetables, but maybe just need some cheese slathered over them (the veggies, not the people)?

We decided that the answer wasn’t another newsletter about the intricacies of climate. It was meeting people where they actually are with subjects that resonate with them directly, whether they are birders, or parents, or sci-fi nerds. Or on their couch watching The Traitors (ahem, me).

And so — stay with me — we created a podcast about reality TV.

Introducing: It’s Called Reality. It’s the discourse for people who give a shit.

Look, I watch a lot of reality TV. Like, had a Survivor-themed wedding a lot.

And as a woman with two degrees who loves Serious™️subjects like science and journalism, for a while I was a little embarrassed about this “guilty pleasure” (although I’m pretty sure I brought up The Bachelor in my first interview with Quinn for this job, and at least once in a month in a work meeting since then, so clearly not that embarrassed).

I saw a Tweet once that said something along the lines of “watching Love Island is like micro-dosing ignorance for an hour a day” (the author of which has been lost to the cacophony of the internet, my apologies), and nothing has ever resonated so hard (side bar: imagine reading that sentence to someone in the 1800s).

Because I think like many people, I started watching reality TV as an escape from the aforementioned horrors of the world.

A little bubble full of bright lights, quick shots of abs and asses, conversations about where Europe is on a map, mascara-streaked faces, men in overalls with snake tattoos, finger pointing, hot people making out, scheming and strategy and game-playing, hot takes, love, betrayal, and (my personal favorite) female friendship.

But the more I watched, the more I noticed all the ways in which the reality I was trying to escape was being reflected back to me in these little microcosms and social experiments playing out onscreen.

And it started to dawn on me that if you look closely enough, all the same forces and systems that show up in our other newsletters and podcasts — bias, misinformation, who controls the narrative, who profits from insecurity — come through every week on these shows.

And I don’t just mean that in an abstract “culture is a mirror” kind of way. I mean it concretely.

As much as I hate to use this example…Donald Trump is the president of the United States in large part because he was a reality TV star first. Spencer Pratt was this close to becoming the Mayor of LA. Reality television reinforced for millions of people that confidence reads as competence, that a good villain can be more compelling than a good person, and that the edit can be more powerful than the truth.

The Kardashians essentially invented the influencer economy. The Bachelor has been reflecting and reinforcing ideals for women about what femininity and being “marriage material” look like since 2002.

These shows reflect, distribute, manufacture, and sometimes hand power to people who have no business having it (or have just always had it).

Something that other voices in this space have been saying for a long time is that reality TV is a sport.

There are approximately 75 ESPN channels dedicated to analyzing games that already happened, dissecting the strategy, the calls, the personalities, and the drama. And good for them! But nobody calls that a guilty pleasure, or thinks that hobby isn’t serious enough to merit analysis.

But reality TV — which requires the same investment, generates the same community, and if anything, in a world where we’re all constructing our own mini-reality TV shows online, has more of a direct social and cultural impact than whether your favorite sports team makes the playoffs — is often written off as trash.

I’d just like to lightly point out that sports are predominantly marketed towards men, while reality TV is predominantly marketed towards women, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence when considering who tends to be taken seriously and who doesn’t.

In a moment where finding joy, anywhere you can, feels more important than ever, and where media literacy is alarmingly scarce, taking a critical look at the messages reality TV is sending us, and the impacts it has on actual reality, feels less like a guilty pleasure and more like due diligence.

So. Welcome to It’s Called Reality. It’s the discourse for people who give a shit.

Every episode, my close friend, co-host, and fellow reality TV connoisseur, Briana Brown, and I hop on the mic to dig into a different reality TV franchise and pull the thread on all the ways these shows impact and reflect the larger culture.

From how the Taylor Frankie Paul/The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives/The Bachelorette drama (if you know, you know) demonstrates how we treat women in media to the game of The Traitors being the perfect case study for bias and how misinformation spreads, to how Survivor shows us the ways the edit is a form of power, to how America’s Next Top Model was a public health event for young women and girls watching in the early aughts, we’re getting into all the paradoxes and messy contradictions these shows reveal about society at large, and about us at home watching.

If anything I’ve said so far resonates with you, please check out our first episode. If you love it, tell your group chat and subscribe wherever you listen. New episodes will be dropping on Fridays!

And if reality TV isn’t your thing yet, give us one episode. We might change your mind.

Thank you as always for giving a shit,

Willow

⚡️ Climate change:

• Stop trying to make coal happen! The feds are offering $1 billion to revive coal, while the gap between carbon removal capacity and what’s needed keeps widening. (HEATMAP)

• 🌍️Climate change is shrinking the safe window for Hajj pilgrims, with May temperatures in Mecca now matching what summers looked like in the 1980s. (Mongabay)

• The Trump admin is dismantling a $368 million ocean monitoring network that tracks Atlantic currents, carbon absorption, and marine heat waves, creating a huge blind spot in climate science. (The New York Times)

• 🌎️ Scientists are warning that a developing Super El Niño, amplified by climate change and Iran war fuel disruptions, could devastate food systems, forests, and water supplies across the Global South. #2026 amiright? (World Resources Institute)

🦠 Health & Bio:

• 🌏️ China’s biotech sector just got top billing at ASCO for the first time with a cancer drug trial conducted entirely in China, raising questions about drug applicability for US patients and America’s competitiveness in medicine. (The New York Times)

• A third of Americans now report energy insecurity, with families in Tampa cutting AC during record heat because they can’t afford the bills. (HEATMAP)

• Doctors across the US are treating children with whooping cough, rotavirus, and bacterial pneumonia they’ve barely seen in their careers, as vaccine hesitancy fuels a resurgence of diseases we’d already defeated. (The New York Times)

• 🌏️ Climate change is turning the planet into a petri dish: flesh-eating bacteria are spreading north, heat-adapted fungi are threatening the thermal barrier that protects humans, and zombie microbes are thawing from permafrost (*breathes heavily into a paper bag*). (The New Yorker)

💦 Food & Water:

• Arizona and Nevada have struck the first-ever water trade deal with San Diego, which has a surplus thanks to its desalination plant, a creative workaround as the Colorado River faces its worst drought in decades. (The New York Times)

• Google is promising to replenish more water than its data centers use by 2030, laying out a five-commitment blueprint after 70% of Americans said they’d oppose a data center in their area. (The Verge)

• This opposition isn’t just about noise and water use, but about who controls AI and whether ordinary people have any say in a transformation that’s already shaping their lives. (Vox)

• 🌏️ Papua New Guinea declared a UK-sized no-take marine protected area in the Bismarck Sea in a meaningful step to protect 30% of its waters by 2030. (Oceanographic)

👩‍💻 Beep Boop:

• AI labs are merging chatbots and agents into systems that don’t just answer questions, but take action on your behalf (booking, emailing, trading) with minimal human approval steps. (Big Technology)

• Android’s new anti-spoofing feature sends a silent verification signal to confirm callers are who they claim to be. (WIRED)

• Peptide and supplement companies are spamming Reddit to manipulate what AI chatbots tell people about their products. (404 Media)

• Meta is stuffing billions of dollars of chips into outdoor tents powered by off-grid gas plants, cutting data center build time in half. (Distilled)

Last week’s most popular Action Step was learning about the surveillance tech in use in your community using EFF’s Atlas of Surveillance.

👉 NEW: Find every action recommended in It’s Called Science. right here.

🌎️ = Global news/action steps

Vroom vroom📈 

Electric cars are starting to take over the world

Despite sluggish EV sales in the U.S., it’s full steam ahead for electric vehicles in most other regions.

Canary Media

Run for Soil and Water and Farmworkers

You may feel like you're giving it all you have, but obviously things are tough out there. We're working on all of it, but in particular, you, our listeners have asked for over and over more examples of a fight and actual progress that you can see and touch and feel.

And in these, the new second batch of conversations, in partnership with our best friends at Run for Something, we're gonna give you more of exactly what you're asking for.

Guests are sourced from the Run for Something pipeline, so they could be candidates or they could be among the graduating classes. But these are no doubt the next generation leaders of this country

Today I'm gonna introduce you to an incredible candidate who's running for a local office in their home state that is specifically working on something they were born into and care about deeply, that they represent.

We're gonna talk about what they're working on and why, where they've made progress, where they've struggled, and tactics and strategies that might be transferable to other school districts or towns or cities or whatever.

📖 Prefer to read? Get the transcript here.

▶️ Or watch the full episode on YouTube.

Listen now

Every mother deserves a doula

Off the coast of Dominica, scientists recently watched 11 sperm whales gather around a birthing mother. What happened next turned out to have a lot to say about one of the most underfunded corners of American healthcare.

This week, Syris Valentine explores what sperm whales, bonobos, and even hamsters can tell us about why every mother deserves a doula.

▶️ Watch Life Finds A Way on YouTube

Read on

<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Gabriel-Philip Santos, co-founder of Cosplay for Science. Credit: Gabriel Santos</span>

Meet the cosplaying paleontologist who teaches Jurassic Park fans about dinosaurs

Many paleontologists credit Jurassic Park and its sequels for sparking an obsession with dinosaurs that set them on their career path.

Yet as their education progressed, some budding scientists became disillusioned with their beloved childhood franchise because of the inaccuracies and outright dinosaur falsehoods it has propagated.

Gabriel-Philip Santos isn't one of them. The director of education at the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology in Los Angeles, Santos has carried his early love of Jurassic Park forward into his career as a paleontologist and science communicator.

Santos knows there's a lot these films get wrong about dinosaurs. But he also believes they provide paleontologists a tremendous opportunity to engage with the public—even if that means clearing up some misconceptions about feathers and frog DNA.

Read it