About Healthy Futures
Healthy Futures is a science- and history-backed newsletter that examines health and wellness through the lens of culture and policy, exploring what a healthy future looks like.
How can someone possibly be well in a country that is actively working to dismantle public health infrastructure? Who benefits from cycle syncing or taking NAD+? What does life look like when it isn’t shaped by fear or instability?
I explore these ideas by connecting the dots between health, culture, history, policy, and power. I experiment with formats a lot, too, bringing in interactive elements alongside my writing.
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.
Paid subscriptions are $5 per month or $50 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.
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.
