The Most Important Question

This week: A surprise for climate development that isn't terrifying?Facebook might relax their COVID misinformation policiesLess land, more riceAlzheimer's under a microscopeA treasure trove of biological proteinsGet more:Get more news, analysis, and Action Steps at newsletter.importantnotimportant.comGot feedback? Email us at questions@importantnotimportant.comFollow us on Twitter at @importantnotimpGet fun merch at importantnotimportant.com/storeTake a nap you deserve it

This week: How to beat the heat in your cityCOVID quackeryIntroducing "Explainers"!A blockbuster depression studyA new federal privacy bill is comin'Get more:Get more news, analysis, and Action Steps at newsletter.importantnotimportant.comGot feedback? Email us at questions@importantnotimportant.comFollow us on Twitter at @importantnotimpGet fun merch at importantnotimportant.com/storeTake a nap you deserve it

This week: Manchin fuels more heat wavesCOVID reinforcements on the wayIndia and California fight plasticHow we fight monkeypoxWow Ring doorbells are not greatGet more:Get more news, analysis, and Action Steps at newsletter.importantnotimportant.comGot feedback? Email us at questions@importantnotimportant.comFollow us on Twitter at @importantnotimpGet fun merch at importantnotimportant.com/storeTake a nap you deserve it

We have ignored vaginas for so long. Hear me out.On the one hand, history and popular culture, from god-kings to love songs to movies to fan fiction, are littered with supposedly straight men with a single pursuit: intercourse with a vagina. But along the way these same men have pigeonholed women and their vaginas into simple vehicles for heterosexual sex or reproduction. They’ve ignored almost everything else in the area, and shamed women for even considering pleasuring themselves, or pleasure at all, for getting sick, for failing to carry a child, and more. This ignorance touches everything – from the law to culture to racism to medicine to psychotherapy.Sex-ed is under attack. Birth control is under attack. Reproductive rights are under attack. Trans rights are under attack.There has simply never been a better or more consequential time to understand how and why the vagina and friends work, every day, not just on "sex day", or during menstruation or menopause, to understand what lies beneath and how incredible the whole thing can be – and how different one person’s setup can be from another.My guest today is Rachel E. Gross.Rachel is an award-winning science journalist based in Brooklyn whose writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, National Geographic, WIRED, New Scientist, Slate, Undark, and NPR, among others.Rachel covers the debates and personalities that shape scientific knowledge, most recently as Digital Science Editor for Smithsonian Magazine. She has won the Award for Excellence in Religion Reporting, a Wilbur Award for Best Online Story, and she was a finalist for an Online Journalism Award in digital storytelling.And in 2019 Rachel received a MacDowell Fellowship to complete research and reporting for her new book, Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage.…and that is why we’re here today, to talk about vaginas. To be more inclusive, we’re here to talk about vaginas and friends.Because there’s so much more to the vagina and her friends than you could possibly know. From the microbiome to the clitoris, we’re learning new things every day about a hugely meaningful and ignored part of 50% of our species. -----------Have feedback or questions? Tweet us, or send a message to questions@importantnotimportant.comNew here? Get started with our fan favorite episodes at podcast.importantnotimportant.com.-----------INI Book Club:Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage by Rachel E. GrossAn Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed YongFixing Sex by Katrina KarkazisFind all of our guest recommendations at the INI Book Club: https://bookshop.org/lists/important-not-important-book-clubLinks:Follow Rachel on TwitterFollow Rachel on InstagramLearn more about Rachel's work on her websiteRead Rachel's article on "pudendum" and shameLearn more about the scientific superpowers of the uterusRead Rachel's opinion piece about thinking about female bodies beyond reproductionListen to Tight LippedLearn more about and donate to InterACTImprove your Cliteracy with Sophia WallaceFollow us:Subscribe to our newsletter at newsletter.importantnotimportant.comFollow us on Twitter: twitter.com/ImportantNotImpFollow Quinn: twitter.com/quinnemmettEdited by Anthony LucianiProduced by Willow BeckIntro/outro by Tim Blane: timblane.comArtwork by Amrit Pal

This week: What's a chief heat officer?Fixing schools in the time of COVIDWhy plant-based meat is a massive 80/20 move for the climate (and your health)Uh, Juul is back?Google's hiding your "sensitive" location dataGet more:Get more news, analysis, and Action Steps at newsletter.importantnotimportant.comGot feedback? Email us at questions@importantnotimportant.comFollow us on Twitter at @importantnotimpGet fun merch at importantnotimportant.com/storeTake a nap you deserve it

I think about time a lot. Some days I feel ancient, some days I can’t believe how old I am.I’ve got kids, too. I can’t believe how fast they’ve grown up already. They love so many things. Swimming. Cooking. Plain pasta. The beach. Vegetables, somehow. Their friends. Their family. Dinosaurs.Man, oh man, do they love dinosaurs.I love to challenge them, to help them think about how long ago it all was, and how long it lasted. How different the world was. How the land under their feet was an ocean, once.And of course, knowing what we know now, how fast it can all change. How an asteroid - or a virus, or a fire, or a flood - can change your life forever.I try to help them understand that, unlike the dinosaurs, we have the tools to prevent many of these things, and we have the foresight to understand when and how, and why they might happen.As much progress as we’ve made in these 300,000 years of Homo sapiens, from fire to wheels to meat to agriculture to handwashing –  we are in a moment when we are challenged yet again on a global scale, and unlike the dinos, our future is of our own making.Things can change quickly, and we need to understand how that’s happened before.My guest today is Riley Black.Riley is a science writer and amateur paleontologist based in Salt Lake City, Utah, right in the center of dinosaur country, where she chases tales of vanished lives from museum collections to remote badlands.Riley’s published books include Written in Stone, my favorite and critically-acclaimed My Beloved Brontosaurus, When Dinosaurs Ruled, Prehistoric Predators, and her newest: The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, a fascinating, emotional page-turner that explores the minutes, hours, days, weeks, years, and centuries after the dinosaurs were wiped out by the Chicxulub asteroid 66 million years ago.Riley’s journey and storytelling are powerful and so important in this moment when we’re so ready to move on to the next thing that we haven’t taken the time to cherish the people, the places, the world around us, and how lucky we are to have them.-----------Have feedback or questions? Tweet us, or send a message to questions@importantnotimportant.comNew here? Get started with our fan favorite episodes at podcast.importantnotimportant.com.-----------INI Book Club:Why Won't You Apologize? by Harriet LernerThe Last Days of the Dinosaurs by Riley BlackMy Beloved Brontosaurus by Riley BlackFind all of our guest recommendations at the INI Book Club: https://bookshop.org/lists/important-not-important-book-clubLinks:Follow Riley on TwitterFind more of Riley's work on her websiteFollow us:Subscribe to our newsletter at newsletter.importantnotimportant.comFollow us on Twitter: twitter.com/ImportantNotImpFollow Quinn: twitter.com/quinnemmettEdited by Anthony LucianiProduced by Willow BeckIntro/outro by Tim Blane: timblane.comArtwork by Amrit Pal

This week: The SEC's coming for greenwashing in a real wayBA4: Endgame and BA5: Infinity War are here and immune evasiveEat more local veggiesBye-bye vapes (and nicotine?)A digital privacy bill might actually see the light of dayGet more:Get more news, analysis, and Action Steps at newsletter.importantnotimportant.comGot feedback? Email us at questions@importantnotimportant.comFollow us on Twitter at @importantnotimpGet fun merch at importantnotimportant.com/storeTake a nap you deserve it

This week: Where do gas cars go when we buy electric?A bunch of COVID updatesThe Colorado River's next chapterWhat's next for Alzheimer'sHoly shit Facebook's tracking pixel is more invasive than expected, which is saying somethingGet more:Get more news, analysis, and Action Steps at newsletter.importantnotimportant.comGot feedback? Email us at questions@importantnotimportant.comFollow us on Twitter at @importantnotimpGet fun merch at importantnotimportant.com/storeTake a nap you deserve it

This week: Biden's going it alone on electrificationModerna's got a new boosterWhy food is so expensiveAn unbelievable cancer resultApple's saying goodbye to passwordsGet more:Get more news, analysis, and Action Steps at newsletter.importantnotimportant.comGot feedback? Email us at questions@importantnotimportant.comFollow us on Twitter at @importantnotimpGet fun merch at importantnotimportant.com/storeTake a nap you deserve it

Soup to nuts, I’m more concerned about COVID today than I’ve been at any point in the past year. I don’t think it’ll be a horror show soon, not like it was before, but we haven’t (yet!) put ourselves in a position to get ahead of a virus whose entire job is to find ways around our defenses, and now it’s doing just that.My usual caveats:I’m not a virologistI’m not an MDI’m not an epidemiologistI’m not a sociologistI’m not a policy makerI’m not a journalistI’m not a catI am: A former liberal arts major with a popular and critically acclaimed newsletter and a podcast, and I’ve spent the past few years trying to learn about the world’s most complex problems from a broad array of incredibly smart, capable, and thoughtful folks to understand where we are, why we’re here, where we might be going, and what the hell you and I can do about it all.I’ve covered the broader shifts of COVID every week in this newsletter, standing on the shoulders of some of the most incredible journalism we've ever seen.And here are the facts on the ground:Because of a huge, overlapping variety of societal and institutional failures, our bodies and health system, however immunized, are under assault from an increasingly wide variety of subvariants of our own making.We have chosen not to vaccinate the world, and at home, we have almost completely let our guard down, relying on a population whose existing vaccines are becoming less potent every day and who are reluctant to get any additional new ones, no matter how capable.Today I want to elaborate on these factors, and help you understand where I think we are, where we might be going, and why, and what we can do about it. While historically our “numbers” remain low (and that’s great!), there’s a very good chance the variants keep evolving to feature better immunity evasiveness, leaving our current vaccines markedly more ineffective and our population exposed again.Again, a caveat: I might be very, very wrong, and I hope I am. But I don’t think I am.-----------Have feedback or questions? Tweet us, or send a message to questions@importantnotimportant.comNew here? Get started with our fan favorite episodes at podcast.importantnotimportant.com.-----------Links:Read the full piece, including references cited hereFollow us:Subscribe to our newsletter at newsletter.importantnotimportant.comFollow us on Twitter: twitter.com/ImportantNotImpFollow Quinn: twitter.com/quinnemmettEdited by Anthony LucianiProduced by Willow BeckIntro/outro by Tim Blane: timblane.comArtwork by Amrit Pal