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:
Most of the work I share is free, but paid subscribers receive a few perks.
Access to the subscriber chat, which is really access to me, for thoughtful conversation and community programming.
MICRODOSE: a twice-monthly offering that explores ideas to help you think critically about the culture of health and wellness.
The unmitigated joy of supporting insightful, no BS, independent health and wellness reporting that bridges science, history, culture, and policy.
Paid subscriptions are $6 per month or $50 per year. Your support sustains this work, making it possible for me to share the wonderful world of health and wellness—and, when done with care and reverence, it is oh so wonderful—with you in a way that’s measured and, most importantly, fact-based.
Thank you for being on this journey with me. Let’s get into it, y’all.
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.
