The Most Important Question

Today: New York City cleaned up its air over 22 years with multiple policies, and a Columbia University study tracking 1100 children tested from toddlerhood during the same period found that as air pollution decreased, standard development and cognitiv...

Today: The Fifth Circuit just dismissed a Jackson, Mississippi family's lawsuit over alleged lead-contaminated water, stating that "the Constitution does not guarantee clean water." We can change that, like in New York, where a state constitutional ame...

Today: When someone is detained in the US, the government must quickly justify the detention to a federal judge. But judges are only instructed to decide cases "summarily" with no set deadline, leading to major differences by district. What Can You Do:...

Today: Parents should have transparent access to measles vaccination rates for their child's specific school and classroom so they can assess their child's risk. Statewide averages can be misleading, and vaccine disinformation and declining rates are m...

Today: Senator Ron Johnson claimed that the COVID vaccine causes an 82% miscarriage rate in pregnant women. How did he get that number? He just made it up by taking the real 2021 study and excluding about 700 participants. ----------- Have feedback? Tw...

Today: Parents often lose the "phone at bedtime" battle because social media is designed to keep users (kids) engaged. The attorneys general in 51 states and territories sued Meta, alleging Facebook and Instagram were built so kids can't put them down,...

Today: Dolly Parton's life is defined by her unmatched generosity and impact, from her Imagination Library, which has distributed at least 300 million books, to her donations of tens of millions to global disaster relief, to her efforts in helping prot...

Today: We are working on projects we may never live to finish, building cathedrals we won't see completed. Think about the work done so far on lead contamination: scientists and activists spent years getting it banned from gasoline. But we still have l...

Today: While people focus on newborns, new mothers often go unchecked. In Arkansas, Medicaid covers childbirth but ends 60 days postpartum even though the period when mothers die extends to up to a year. What you can do: Call the free hotline 1-833-TLC...

Today: The president signed an executive order directing pediatricians to give children 3 separate shots instead of the combined MMR vaccine, despite those separate products not currently existing in the US. ----------- Have feedback? Tweet us ( http:/...

Welcome to our new series, The Most Important Question Today. These will be short (1-3 minutes) drops, responding to just one news story daily, with action steps. Today: The FDA is handling eleven different food poisoning cases right now, and even thou...

Today, another in our series of conversations with friends who are part of the pipeline at Run For Something. I'm excited to introduce you to Sophia Gibb. She is a public servant and elite athlete who knows what it means to perform under pressure, whic...

Today we're gonna talk about Florida and representation, and how Florida has very little of it, in even the loosest definition of the word. We're gonna do that by introducing you to my new friend, May Thach. May is a candidate for state representative ...

There are a lot of folks in rural America that can say, "No candidate's ever come and knocked on my door." So today, I'm going to introduce you to the one who knocks, my new best friend, Brittany Newton. You folks around the world have said very clearl...

A huge catalyst for our 2025 pivot towards courting a much wider audience was AOC’s post-mortem of the 2024 election: “We can’t just be right. We have to be effective.”But at the same time, we have to also agree on the fundamentals — human rights — and...

Today we're gonna talk about Texas. For a decade, maybe 100 years, we've heard over and over, this is the year we flip Texas. Sometimes we get closer, sometimes we get much further away. But as much as I'm excited about a candidate like James Talarico,...

Today, we're gonna talk about data centers. Now, I know these things are a hot topic amid everything else: the heat, water, prices, lack of homes, lack of childcare, you name it. But we do need to speak out about them. So, who is the most qualified her...

Something new from the team behind The Most Important Question! It's Called Reality is a podcast about reality TV, and the systems hiding inside it. Every episode, hosts Willow Beck and Briana Brown take a show you're already watching and pull the thre...

You may feel like you're giving it all you have, but obviously things are tough out there. We're working on all of it, but in particular, you, our listeners have asked for over and over more examples of a fight and actual progress that you can see and ...

We've spent the last two essays building the case for *Actually* Pro Life: wht it means, where it comes from, and why the logo was designed to be worn, carried, and declared in public. Now we're asking you to do exactly that. We just launched our first...

If the name Actually Pro Life is deliberate, then so is the logo. Because like I said in our intro post, we’re reclaiming "pro-life" from the same people who blame kindergartners for getting shot at school, and we’re grounding it in evidence. Evidence ...

250 years after a group of slaveowners wrote that "all men are created equal", we're done letting hypocrites own the language of life.Introducing Actually Pro Life: a reframe, a research platform, and a direct challenge to anyone willing to be held acc...

Last Christmas we teamed up with about 40 other big podcasts to support our dear friends at Give Directly with a very special campaign called Pods Fight Poverty. The goal was to raise $1 million to send to families in extreme poverty in Bwakira, Rwanda...