Welcome to the week.
We’re well into Black History Month already — check out the What Can I Do section below for Actions you can take to support Black lives.
Our featured story this week is a conversation with Mustafa Suleyman on how AI is hacking our empathy circuits, not because it’s conscious, but because our brains can’t tell the difference. That gap between reality and perception is where things get messy.
And of course, we have all the other important news you need to know this week, including:
This Week
And much more.
Call your friends,
— Willow
{{active_subscriber_count}}+ people who give a shit got this post in their email, for free.
🙋♀️ Vote!
When you see a video online now, what's your first instinct?
Last week, we asked: Be honest: how often do you doomscroll?
You said:
🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ Currently doing it (20%)
“Getting sidetracked by intriguing emails while I am supposed to be getting shit done. ” WB: Touché
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Daily (36%)
“Honestly, it's not so much doomscrolling as scrolling despite doom. I often watch comedy clips on Instagram for an hour or more at a time. But it's still a huge waste of time. Or not.... ” WB: Love this framing.
🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ Weekly (16%)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ I've quit! (lying) (4%)
“I'm doing my best to quit. The secret (for me) is simple. When I finish work for the day, leave my phone on the other side of the room or in my office. Then I can't doomscroll while watching TV. (I enjoy the TV a lot more too!) Also, I bought an alarm clock so I can leave my phone in the office overnight - no phones in the bedroom. ” WB: All great tips. You got this.
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ I've quit! (I promise!) (4%)
“Working on not checking headlines just before sleeping; am substituting YouTube (Matt’s Off-Road Recovery for American heroics, nerdy lectures from Words Unravelled, Smarter Every Day, and Shawn Willsey geology, even animated shorts (in languages other than English, Molly of Denali)” WB: Amazing recs!
🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ What's doomscrolling? (20%)
“My (limited) social media feeds are carefully curated to, as much as possible, avoid "suggestions" and "recommendations" intruding upon what I have chosen to see. Makes it a lot easier to pick up AND put down on my terms.” WB: Wait, tell me more. How did you do this?
New Shit Giver Katie is here because “Found your newsletter and thought it would be right up my alley. I work at the Federation of American Scientists (fas.org), a nonpartisan think tank, in the communications department.“
Awesome! So happy to have you here.
🤝 Become an Important Member
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: get and keep track of personalized 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
⚡️ Climate change:
🌎 Yes, the energy transition is going too slow, and has been hampered with policy reversals and fragmentation. But the economics of solar, wind, and batteries, can’t be stopped (Climate Home News)
The Western US is experiencing a record snow drought, threatening water supply and compounding the existing 26-year megadrought in the Colorado River basin. Nothing like a megadrought update on a Monday! (The New York Times)
🌏 Despite some scientists suggesting that Arctic warming could increase cold outbreaks in mid-latitudes, data from the last 50ish years shows the vast majority of the planet has experienced fewer and less intense extreme cold events (The Climate Brink)
🌍 Cortina, Italy has warmed 3.6 degrees C since it last hosted the Winter Olympics in 1956, and is having to invest heavily in artificial snow as the IOC considers rotating future Games among just seven or eight “climate-reliable” countries (Bloomberg)
🌎 India is industrializing on cheap solar rather than coal, deploying renewables faster and burning significantly less fossil fuel than China did at equivalent GDP levels, demonstrating a shortcut to development that avoids the expensive, emissions heavy path of China and the West (Ember)
🦠 Health & Bio:
US life expectancy reached an all-time high of 79 years in 2024, rebounding from pandemic lows due to declining death rates from heart disease, cancer, overdoses, and COVID-19 (AP News)
🌍 India is achieving steep declines in TB, malaria, and maternal mortality thanks to progress in institutional strength and sustained public participation (both key to good public health policy) (The Times of India)
The largest pediatric Long COVID clinical trial to date is launching to find better treatments for a condition that affects an estimated 5.8 million US children (The 19th)
Building codes in the US make multifamily housing significantly more expensive per square foot to build than in peer countries, with much stricter and costlier requirements on small apartment buildings than single-family homes (Vox)
🌏 Thai communities are using citizen science to monitor environmental and health impacts from Laos’s Hongsa power plant to build evidence for policy action (Thai PBS)
💦 Food & Water:
🌎 Indigenous practices of agroforestry are being scaled by companies in Brazil’s Amazon region to restore degraded land while boosting farmer incomes, we love to see it (JUST Stories)
A mother in Minneapolis has created a donation network helping over 500 immigrant families affected by ICE, including donating 350 ounces of her own breastmilk to a 3-month-old baby whose mother had been detained. It takes a village to fight fascism! (The 19th)
Conflict has destroyed nearly all farmland in Gaza since 2023, so over 40 US growers are participating in the Palestine Heritage Seed Library’s Seed Protectors Project to preserve seeds, culture, and agricultural heritage (Civil Eats)
Five states have begun banning junk food from SNAP benefits, with 13 more set to join them this year, but the roll-out has been inconsistent and confusing (The Atlantic)
Researchers at the University of Arizona are testing a brine reclamation system that can recover up to 90% of usable water from contaminated brine (the salty wastewater left from desalination, sewage treatment, and industrial processes) (The Conversation)
👩💻 Beep Boop:
Gas power projects in the US explicitly linked to data centers surged nearly 25-fold over two years, potentially increasing the US gas fleet by nearly 50% if all planned projects are built (WIRED)
Research has found that even when people are explicitly told that video evidence is a deepfake, they remain emotionally swayed by it and rely on it when making judgements (MIT Technology Review)
🌎 Countries are increasingly seeking alternatives to US tech amid growing unease about dependence on US platforms, data security, and content moderation (Rest of World)
SpaceX now controls the majority of satellites in space (over 9000), creating a concerning space launch and telecommunications megacompany intertwined with Musk’s political projects. No conflict of interest to see here, folks! (404 Media)
Mississippi senators are voting on legislation that would give residents legal protections over their name, likeness, and voice from unauthorized AI-generated content (Mississippi Free Press)
🌎 = Global news
“Your Empathy Circuits Are Being Hacked”
Last week’s most popular Action Step was donating urgently needed supplies to our neighbors in Minnesota via Community Aid Network MN.
Donate to the Black Food & Justice Alliance to build resilience and self-determination in Black communities through food security.
Volunteer with the NAACP Climate Justice Program to fight for environmental justice in communities that are disproportionately impacted by emissions and pollution.
Get educated about racism in health care by checking out a community health event at BLKHLTH.
Be heard about removing a racist, segregation-era policy that lost Hampton University its land-grant status so a leading HBCU in Virginia can expand its research funding.
Invest in Black agricultural and food businesses in the Northeast to optimize their growth potential and social impact using the Black Farmer Fund.
👉 NEW: Find every action recommended in It’s Called Science. right here.
Cat People Don't Believe In Cat Allergies
This week it's just Quinn and Claire on the pod, crashing out over academic probation (which is actually kind of a relief?), school surveillance that catches kids Googling inappropriate things (it was obviously just a prank, dad), and the theoretical question: who would you get in a suicide capsule with?
Also discussed: cat allergies are real despite what cat people tell you, being in the sandwich generation, and our favorite Spice Girls.
📖 Prefer to read? Get the transcript here.
▶ Or watch the full episode on YouTube.
Making our fossil record a better place
What happens to the things we leave behind? What would future alien archeologists think about what they find in the fossilized remains of our long-gone civilization?
In this piece, Maddie explores these questions and discovers that sometimes the path to changing the world starts with imagining what we want to leave behind.
Every Community Needs Its Wolves
Tag along with journalist and writer of The Gumbo Pot, Karen Fischer, on a trip to Yellowstone, where her personal quest to spot wolves in the Lamar Valley turned into a deeper understanding of how ecosystems actually work, and why that matters for the rest of us trying to build resilient communities.
The story of Yellowstone wolves, and their return to the ecosystem in 1995 reveals a truth about healthy systems: when you remove essential diversity, the whole thing starts falling apart.
Diversity is how healthy systems work, whether we’re talking about ecosystems or democracy.
💌 Loved this issue of It’s Called Science?
Check out what else we make (or take it easy on the emails, we get it) right in your Subscriber Preferences.
🤝 Thanks for reading. Here’s how we can help you directly:
☎️ Work with Quinn 1:1 (slots are extremely limited) - book time to talk climate strategy, investing, or anything else.
🎯 Sponsor Important, Not Important - reach {{active_subscriber_count}} (and counting) sustainably-minded consumers across our newsletters, web, and audio.