The Most Important Question

To continue our Good News series, we’re looking back to Episode 78, when Quinn & Brian discussed: Planning for chaos. (Cheery, right?)

For real, though. This episode offers an actionable, helpful, revealing, and — dare we say it? — PLEASURABLE way of looking at the world. And that perspective comes from the delightful Bina Venkataraman, author of The Optimist's Telescope and the Editor of The Boston Globe’s editorial page.

Fair warning, so you don’t get upset like Brian did: this is not a real telescope. But you should still be excited, like Brian is now, because Bina is awesome and her book is fantastic — and it’s more applicable now than ever.

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In Episode 75, Quinn & Brian discussed: Beating the crap out of childhood cancer with science and... zebrafish?

Our guests are Dr. Jaclyn Taroni and Dr. Genevieve Kendall.

Dr. Kendall is a Postdoctoral scholar at UT Southwestern Medical Center who utilizes zebrafish genetic models to understand how pediatric muscle cancers develop and better identify any therapies we can use to treat it. 

Dr. Taroni is a Principal Data Scientist at the Childhood Cancer Data Lab, an initiative of Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation, and her job is to help childhood cancer researchers like Dr. Kendall use data to answer some of the most important questions in the field.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: fuck kid cancer. This conversation gets really nerdy and is surprisingly fun, and it offers some much-needed perspective — because there ARE people out there smarter than us using science to solve problems that may seem impossible from our positions at home right now.

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If you haven’t already heard, we received a Webby nomination for Best Podcast Episode in the Science & Education category. We’re really proud to be nominated again… but, we also really want to win. So, today, we’re re-airing the episode that received a nomination and asking you to help us with your vote.

Back in Episode 70, Quinn & Brian discussed: When things are broken, when the people who are working on those things are also broken, and why we need to help them.

Our guest was Nikki Silvestri, the founder and CEO of Soil and Shadow, the Co-Founder of Live Real, and the former Executive Director of People's Grocery and Green for All. She is a nationally recognized thought leader and general good doer, including being named as one of The Root's 100 Most Influential African Americans and receiving both ELLE Magazine's "Gold" Award and OxFam America's "Act Local, Think Global" Award.

We don’t hesitate or feel like we’re overselling things when we say that what Nikki has to say is something that most people need to hear, and this could be a truly transformative message if it falls on the right ears. Brian said it, Quinn took credit for it, and now we hope you take it to heart.

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• I Hate You - Don't Leave Me by Hal Straus and Jerold Jay Kreisman

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That's right, we are now a four-time Webby-nominated podcast! But what we really want is to be a Webby-winning podcast. So, please, go vote! It's free and you can stick it to the AARP.

Vote for Important, Not Important for Best episode (Science & Education): https://vote.webbyawards.com/PublicVoting#/2020/podcasts/individual-episodes-mini-series-specials/science-education

Vote for Important, Not Important for Best newsletter: https://vote.webbyawards.com/PublicVoting/#/2020/websites/general-websites/email-newsletters 

 In Episode 73, Quinn & Brian asked: Did A.I. take our jobs?

Of course, we aren’t talking about our jobs. If A.I. took our jobs, the show would have won that goddamn Webby.

No, no — we’re talking about really, really important jobs – the jobs being done by people like Dr. Mohammed AlQuraishi, who is a Department Fellow at the Laboratory of Systems Pharmacology and the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School.

Still, Dr. AlQuraishi is hopeful about the future and his role in it — an attitude that was refreshing the first time we aired this episode and is downright necessary right now.

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Our “Good News” series of replays begins today with Episode 66, when Quinn & Brian hosted a delightfully important discussion: Why, apparently, we shouldn’t just blow up asteroids.

Our guest is: Professor K.T. Ramesh, who is an absolute delight and may have the coolest job in the world. He is the founding director of the Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute (HEMI), which is pretty much a real-life Avengers, except every member is like Bruce Banner without all the Hulk-iness or Tony Stark if he was never kidnapped by terrorists. Every day, they’re working to protect people, structures, and the planet, exploring a number of topics that are both critically important and impenetrably complicated.

If, like us, you’ve always considered the seminal feature film Armageddon a blueprint for what to do in case of planetary disaster, Professor Ramesh is here to set the record straight about how we will have to deal with any incoming extraterrestrial projectiles.

This conversation is just so much fun, and we hope it provides a welcome distraction to everything else going on in the world right now.

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