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Welcome to the week.
Really, really excited about our new The Most Important Question episode with Clint Smith, author of How The Word Is Passed (and the new Young Readers edition!). It’s about how we talk about and tell the full story of history, and how we can use that history to make connections to the present. Listen here.
Speaking of the present, here’s the news.
This Week
And more.
Have a great week,
— Willow
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Last week, we asked: How often do you consider sustainability when purchasing clothing?
You said:
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Always (39%)
“I’m lucky that I can pay extra for sustainably produced clothing, though I also purchase second hand.”
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Sometimes (39%)
“They don't make it easy! I look for cotton and bamboo when I can.”
🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Rarely (15%)
“Mostly by focusing on clothing that will last for several years instead of buying new things every season.”
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Never (7%)
New Shit Giver Dave is here because “politics aside, the vast difference between the haves and have nots is putting so much pressure on Mother Earth that something must give. To make it happen without war, starvation, or authoritarian rule would be my goal.“
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⚡️ Climate change:
While rich countries that caused climate change through industrialization have historically been expected to lead mitigation efforts, developing nations like China — which has plateaued its emissions — are now doing the heavy lifting (The Crucial Years)
The devastation from the average hurricane continues for years after the initial impact, with cascading health, economic, and social effects contributing to death counts an estimated three hundred times more than official tallies (The New Yorker)
California’s new insurance regulations, designed to ensure coverage in fire-prone areas, contain loopholes that allow companies to meet requirements by insuring homes in lower-risk areas while still charging higher rates and dropping customers in truly high-risk areas. (The New York Times)
🌎 Organizations in India have launched parametric heat insurance programs to cover women in the informal sector during heat waves (UpBeat)
🌎Donors, including four European governments have renewed a $1.8 billion (2025-2030) pledge to support Indigenous and local community land rights (Mongabay)
🦠 Health & Bio:
Nearly 10,000 early-stage breast cancer diagnoses are missed annually in the US due to geographic barriers, with population density and ZIP code remaining key determinants of healthcare access (Second Opinion)
Science and health professionals are increasingly running for office (bless them), with organizations like 314 Action (that support candidates with science backgrounds) receiving nearly seven times the typical number of applications for candidate support since Jan 2025 (The Atlantic)
🌍 Following US aid cuts that eliminated funding for HIV in Uganda, health leaders in the country are rapidly adapting by integrating HIV clinics into government outpatient services, expanding partnerships with private clinics, increasing local pharmaceutical production, and pursuing AI-driven healthcare solutions (NPR)
MIT engineers have developed a programmable drug-delivery patch that can be surgically placed on the heart after a heart attack to release three different healing compounds, achieving 33% higher survival rates (MIT News)
🌍Air pollution in New Delhi is forcing schools to move classes online as levels hit nearly 30 times the WHO’s safe limit and 8 times India’s national average (Semafor)
💦 Food & Water:
Italian pasta manufacturers are preparing to withdraw from the US market because tariffs are making it too costly for Italy’s biggest pasta exporters to continue doing business in America (The Wall Street Journal)
Seven states have missed the federal deadline to reach an agreement on Colorado River water cutbacks (LA Times)
The freezing of food aid had tribal nations falling back on decades of food sovereignty work, though climate impacts and other funding cuts are threatening to undermine progress from these initiatives (Grist)
AI server deployment in the US could consume 193-297 billion gallons of water per year between 2024-2030, but strategically placing them in regions with low water stress could cut these impacts by 70-85% (Gizmodo)
🌎 Water control shapes national security and power in Africa, making water management critical for social stability, economic wellbeing, and for attracting investment (The Conversation)
👩💻 Beep Boop:
Low and middle-income countries are using AI to screen for TB, using it to analyze chest x-rays in seconds to detect TB in areas with severe radiologist shortages (NPR)
Google is hosting an app that uses facial recognition to identify immigrants and tells local police whether to contact ICE, while simultaneously removing apps designs to warn communities about ICE (404 Media)
🌎 Protests in Nepal in September resulted in the Prime Minister’s resignation and the election of an interim Prime Minister via online Discord polls and coordination. WIRED has an excellent feature of the whole story (WIRED)
Cybersecurity is facing two major threats that are reshaping the digital landscape: AI powered cyberattacks and quantum computing that could break current encryption standards, requiring organizations to adopt a zero trust approach (MIT Technology Review)
🌎 India delivered AI-powered monsoon forecasts to 38 million farmers up to 30 days in advance, successfully predicting an unusual three week pause in the 2025 monsoon season and generating an estimated $100 in farmer benefits for every dollar invested (UChicago Climate & Growth)
🌎 = Global news
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Last week’s most popular Action Step was learning how to meditate (even though there’s no one “right” way) using Vox’s Guide to Meditation.
🌎 Donate to 350.org, the global movement founded by OG Bill McKibben to build a fossil fuel-free world.
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🌍 Invest in climate solutions with this database of 600 ways to decarbonize your portfolio.
🌎 = Global Action Step
NEW: Find the action steps that mean the most to you at WhatCanIDo.Earth
I've recorded hundreds of conversations with incredible people working on the front lines of the future.
People who've asked the most important question: what can I do? Who found their answer and followed it.
But for today's conversation, we're going back to the front lines of the past because the past can tell us a whole hell of a lot about today and how tomorrow might go.
But only if we tell the full story of how we got here, about who got us here, about how my great-great-grandparents got here. And how my grandma got here fleeing the Nazis, and how millions of Africans were forcibly brought here, over 35,000 trips across the middle passage over almost 300 years.
The full story of the choices we made then, which was not so long ago, and continue to make now about wars and heritage and bondage and family and land and more.
And how, if we can break from the stories we've been told and continue to tell ourselves to choose history over nostalgia, to choose facts over memory and infinite disinformation on demand, we can make different choices.
My guest today is Clint Smith.
Clint is the number one New York Times bestselling author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, he's the winner of the National Book Critic Circle Award for nonfiction, the Hillman Prize for book journalism, the Stowe Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and was selected by the New York Times as one of the 10 best books of 2021.
And now in 2025, the Young Reader's Edition has just come out and it is wonderful. Clint is also the author two books of poetry, the New York Times bestselling collection Above Ground, as well as Counting Dissent. Both poetry collections were winners of the Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, and both were finalists for NAACP Image Awards.
Clint is a staff writer at The Atlantic and he has received fellowships for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, New America, the Emerson Collective, the Art for Justice Fund, Cave Canum, and the National Science Foundation. His essays, poems, and scholarly writing have been published in The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, the New Republic, Poetry Magazine, the Paris Review, the Harvard Educational Review, and elsewhere. Clint is a former National Poetry Slam Champion, and the recipient of the Jerome Jay Shestack Prize from the American Poetry Review.
📖 Prefer to read? Get the transcript here.
▶ Or watch the full episode on YouTube.
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