Read Healthy Futures

The thesis

Healthy Futures is about how health, wellness, history, culture, and politics collide to determine our personal and communal well-being.

These connections are the architecture of everything else associated with the project. I created Healthy Futures because I wanted a place where writing about proteinmania could sit next to writing about how unemployment affects your health, which could sit next to writing about Tyra Banks and Fannie Lou Hamer and RFK Jr.—and where all of it could be taken seriously as one body of work. Mainstream health outlets don't make that connection. Most wellness newsletters don't make it either. Healthy Futures was built specifically to do this.

How it's built

Free is the default. I built Healthy Futures as a public good. The free tier carries the bulk of the editorial work, which includes the Living a Better Life resources, expert Q&As, and essays on pop culture and political moments relevant to health and wellness. The principle is that anything that could improve someone's health or well-being is free, and will always be free. The audience I most wanted to reach—Black women who may not have the access or capital to pay for information that journalists like me get for free as a function of the work—should not have to pay for the things that matter most.

Paid as the specialty layer. The paid tier holds three products that are extras rather than essential: cultural wellness analysis (twice-monthly essays on the unseen forces shaping how we live), the Wellness Debrief (a monthly intelligence brief that decodes health and wellness news), and the Shelf (my vetted shortlist of brands and tools, with paid-subscriber discount codes).

That structure is itself an editorial argument: the things that matter for your health are free; the things that are fun, deeper, or specialty are paid. Most newsletter monetization runs in the opposite direction.

Ecosystem, not silo. Healthy Futures is one of two properties I run that share an editorial thesis but do different work. The other is the Library of Black Wellness, a cultural preservation project and archival resource. They're separate properties because they do separate things. People don't come to Substack for an archive, and they don't come to an archive for a weekly newsletter. One holds the past. The other writes the future. But they sit on the same continuum.

Healthy Futures is a working artifact of how I think about connection across domains. The reason a piece about Clavicular can sit next to a piece about the Louisiana cup cure— and have both feel like part of one project—is the same reason I can scaffold a research initiative on family economic security, or build editorial infrastructure for a health brand, or construct a Slate piece that bridges lived experience, medical history, and policy in 4,000 words.

That capability is connection-making at scale, made coherent through deliberate architecture. Healthy Futures is the place where I do it on my own terms.