About the Creator
Healthy Futures is created by Julia Craven, an award-winning health journalist whose reporting has shaped policy, been cited in peer-reviewed medical journals, and changed how institutions talk about health equity.
Her investigative work has directly prompted infrastructure policy change by halting a highway expansion in Orlando, and her reporting on COVID-19 in Black communities was featured in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2021. Julia’s journalism has been cited in Obstetrics & Gynecology, Health Communication, Annals of Health Law and Life Sciences, and Health Research Policy and Systems, and referenced by the American Medical Association, the American Lung Association, and the Center for American Progress. Her work has also been featured in Harvard Library’s COVID-19 Health Research Guide.
Julia co-directed a large-scale storytelling and research initiative at New America examining the role federal COVID funding played in reducing poverty—a project that produced a 51,000-word report, more than 30 articles, national media coverage, and won an Anthem Award in 2025. Her bylines include The Washington Post, Vox, New York Magazine, Slate, FiveThirtyEight, NBC News, and Popular Science, where she wrote a monthly neuroscience column.
In 2025, Healthy Futures was named a Substack Top 10 Rising Newsletter in Health & Wellness and featured by Good Good Good as one of the 24 Best Wellness Newsletters for a Balanced Inbox. Julia also founded the Library of Black Wellness, a living archive preserving the stories, practices, and cultural knowledge that have sustained Black wellness across generations.
About Healthy Futures
The simplest way to describe Healthy Futures is “a science and history-backed newsletter examining health and wellness through the lens of culture and policy.” I could go deeper than that. I could say it’s a newsletter about life or about how our society decides who gets to be healthy and who doesn’t—and why those decisions rarely feel accidental. I could pivot again and discuss the undercurrent systems and cultural beliefs that shape our well-being long before a doctor ever sees us, before we ever pick a supplement off the shelves, or put on an Apple Watch.
Really, Healthy Futures is all of those things. This newsletter tries to make sense of the blur, of the muck, of our world by focusing on how that haze affects health and well-being. At the center of this work is reverence. I approach each piece of writing with deep respect for my community, which includes all of you who read and subscribe, as well as for my ancestors and the knowledge they passed down. It’s why I talk about my own family so much. It’s why I’m obsessed with the writings of Toni Cade Bambara, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and so forth and so forth. It’s why the buttons and links are indigo, why they used to be purple. I also allow my writing to measure our systems through this lens. How does reverence, or, often, the lack thereof, factor into what policies protect, what institutions neglect, and whose well-being is treated as expendable?
I explore this central question through research-informed, narrative-driven essays that connect the dots between health, culture, history, policy, and power. Alongside original writing, you will find reporting, interviews with people reshaping our understanding of well-being, and practical tools for navigating health in a world that doesn’t make it easy to be well.
That’s what differentiates Healthy Futures from most of the other health and wellness newsletters on Substack. I’m not encouraging optimization or using health as an avenue to pursue perfection. Healthy Futures offers context, holds those in power accountable, and asks what it would mean to build health systems that operate with care versus self-responsibilization.
A few examples for you:
What You Get
Everything I publish at Healthy Futures is built on the same foundation of rigorous research, cultural depth, and a mission to treat health and wellness with reverence. Every reader receives the foundation of Healthy Futures for free. This includes the Living a Better Life resources, expert Q&As, Well-Spent recommendations, and essays exploring the viral moments in pop culture and social media that reveal how we really think about health and wellness.
Paid subscribers also receive:
Twice-monthly cultural wellness analysis, which focuses on the unseen forces shaping wellness: why your 5 AM routine might be an anxiety response dressed up as discipline, what it means to perform greatness, and the unexamined beliefs we’ve absorbed about what it takes to be well. This is the work that sits at the intersection of health journalism, cultural criticism, and lived experience — and it only lives here.
The Wellness Debrief: A monthly intelligence briefing on the health and wellness news that actually matters, decoded through the lens of culture, policy, and power. It’s the context you need to understand what’s happening in health and why.
The Shelf: My vetted shortlist of health, wellness, and beauty brands and tools I actually use—including supplements, skincare, haircare, apps, tech, and more. The bar for inclusion is: Despite the science, would I recommend this to a friend, unprompted? If the answer isn't "hell yes," it's not on The Shelf. Paid subscribers get exclusive discount codes and deals.
Paid subscriptions are $10 per month or $100 per year. Your support makes independent, research-informed health journalism that refuses to flatten the complexity of wellness into content possible. Thank you a million times over.
Not everything I write lands in your inbox. Every quarter, I post on Exploring The Shelves, the newsletter extension of The Library of Black Wellness.
Other posts end up on elsewhere, briefly, a slower newsletter that’s not about health and wellness at all.
