Maybe you’re familiar with the girl-power version of the orca menopause story: post-reproductive females leading their pods, holding essential ecological knowledge, coming into their power. It’s a good story, but it’s also incomplete. This week, science journalist Sarah DeWeerdt examines what killer whale life histories actually reveal about menopause, aging,…
It's Maycember, and we're not okay. This week, Claire and Quinn are back to commiserate about the absolute chaos of late spring parenting, from overloaded school calendars to the age-old debate between fifth and eighth grade graduation parties. Also discussed: Teacher Appreciation Week, Mother's Day logistics, being the "hang-out" house,…
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 like, “Does this action make it measurably…
This week in Life Finds A Way, writer Kavin Senapathy explores how we think about neurodiversity when we take a step back and consider cognitive diversity in other species. While the neurodiversity paradigm emerged in the 1900s as a human-centered concept rooted in social justice, the biological reality it describes…
This week, Claire and Quinn are joined by AJ Daulerio, He's a dad of three, founder of the recovery community The Small Bow, host of The Small Bow Podcast, and parenting advice columnist for Slate. AJ has been sober for nearly 10 years, and he brings the same honesty and…
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 accountable to what they claim to believe. This…
Every spring thousands of siblings hatch from a single egg cluster and immediately get to work, spinning a collective silk shelter so well-engineered that it can hold 20 degrees C of warmth while outside the world sits at minus 5. There's no blueprint, no leader. Just cooperation, refined over millions…
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. Today, I want to share…
Migration is essential to survival for many species, from salmon to jaguars to humans. But as border walls multiply around the world, the routes that animals have traveled for millennia are being severed. In this essay, writer Syris Valentine travels to the San Rafael Valley in Arizona (one of the…
This week, Quinn and Claire are joined by Willa Koerner, a creative strategist, writer, gardener, flower farmer, newsletter author, artist residency co-founder, and mother of a very busy four-year-old. They get into unschooling, invasive species, gardening, skincare, aging, and late-stage capitalism. ----------- Have feedback or questions? Send a message to…
Your kids are hearing about the news whether you are ready or they're ready or not. One study said two-thirds of kids aged 8 to 14 are absorbing current events at least every few days, and almost none of it was made for them. They're getting the fear without the…
Whoever said this country can't come together about anything anymore in the year of our Lord twenty twenty-six was wrong because PFAS, or forever chemicals, are in the blood of ninety-seven percent of Americans right now. They're in our water, our cookware, our food packaging, children, pets. The companies that…
This week, Quinn and Claire are joined by journalist and author Fortesa Latifi. She's pregnant, has a toddler at home, and is somehow also promoting a book. Respect. Fortesa has spent years reporting on the world of mom influencers and family vloggers, and the result is her new book, Like,…
Since the dawn of recorded history, our living earth has been changed by everyone who spends time on it or in it from the smallest bacteria to the largest animals. But like the brain-gut axis inside of us that we still barely understand, we've really never had the ability to…
This week, Quinn and Claire get into their March Madness brackets, before discussing how the gambling industrial complex is ruining sports, and what it's like to raise kids in the age of the manosphere. Also discussed: vasectomies, testing our knowledge of slang, and what really makes men attractive to their…
The CDC issued six health alerts in all of 2025, down from dozens in a normal year, whatever that means anymore. Measles, a disease we basically eliminated 26 years ago, is closing in on 1000 cases, with children hospitalized for brain swelling. And the people now running our top health…
This week, Quinn and Claire are joined by L'Oreal Thompson Payton, a bestselling author, award-winning journalist, yoga teacher, mom to a four-year-old junior bookseller, and the founder of Zora's Place, a Black-owned independent bookstore in Evanston, Illinois. She is also, somehow, simultaneously writing a memoir about infertility while going through…
Just because we're done caring about an outbreak doesn't mean the outbreak is done with us. Over the last year, we have watched something unsettling happen in plain sight. The quiet, active dismantling of the systems built to catch outbreaks early, coordinate a response, and keep hospitals and communities from…
This week, Quinn and Claire are joined by Garrett Bucks, a writer, organizer, recovering white do-gooder, and parent based in Milwaukee. Garrett runs The Barnraisers Project, writes The White Pages newsletter, and is the author of the memoir The Right Kind of White. He also has a son who is…
Plastic. It is the miracle material that has quietly become the infrastructure of modern life over the past 63 years and the almost undefeated business model that's continuing climate change and keeping fossil fuel companies alive and reshaping our bodies, our oceans, and our politics. Yeah, plastic keeps food fresh…
This week, Quinn and Claire talk about first crushes, school dances, bloody noses, and other horrors of middle school before getting into why youth sports are dying across the US, especially because coaches make no money while dealing with our asshole kids, so yes, they do deserve a Target gift…
This week, writer Emily Gould joins Quinn and Claire to discuss her obsession with Heated Rivalry (it's about hockey, primarily), the aging cliff at 44, ruining everything you used to find fun by professionalizing it, and parenting the kid that's exactly like you. Also discussed: food parties, advice columns, Julia…
This week, we have Meghan Keane Graham and Mark Graham on the show to chat about their podcast, Back In My Day, where they watch movies from when they were 12 and force their kids (ages 12 and 9) to discuss them. We discuss: movies that don't hold up, what…
This week we're talking about the delicate art of making everything toxic for your children (Whole Foods? Ruined. Florida? The worst. Every public figure? Probably a Nazi.), how to tell kids bad news on their level ("Grandma is cooked"), and whether you're still a trad wife if you do all…