From a giant (echoey) conference room at the American Public Health Association’s annual conference, Jake sits down with Linda Blount, President and CEO of the Black Women’s Health Imperative.

Linda explains BWHI’s mission of reducing health disparities for Black women and fills us in on what we can learn from Black women about the public’s health. She’s got fascinating thoughts as well on how we sell public health like companies sell products, that is, how we make people want better health.

Linda also joins in to bust some health myths – you know we love that – and brings the politics as well. With Black women more-or-less always saving the electoral chances of Democratic candidates, why aren’t those Democrats delivering for Black women? And what can we do about it?

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Transportation Alternatives advocates for New York City’s streets to be safer for pedestrians and cyclists. They’ve got to navigate both the difficult physical and political terrain in their quest to make the city safe for residents who want to commute by walking and biking.

How do you organize to move elected officials? How do you change the characterization of injuries and deaths from “accidents” into “traffic violence?”

Transportation Alternatives Director of Advocacy Thomas Devito joins us to chat about the future of active transportation in the country’s biggest city.

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Last night, Democrats seized control of the House of Representatives after a campaign waged on the issue of health care and as a check on President Trump.

With midterm-induced change ringing in our head, we check in with Rich Pelletier, who was Bernie Sanders’s National Field Director.

What’s next for Bernie? How did Bernie manage to so substantially outperform expectations? What do voters really want in the next presidential candidate?

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Hey! It’s officially time for the Wooden Teeth to start chattering!

We’re here to bust some myths, find out where your health collides with politics, laugh, and take some action. For our inaugural episode, we’ve got Brad Woodhouse in Washington, DC, who runs Protect Our Care, the organization fighting to defend the Affordable Care Act. And Brad’s magnificent Carolina accent. We’ve got that too.

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We’ll be up with our inaugural episode real soon.

For now though, to get a taste of where we’ll meander on the podcast, here’s a recent piece that our host wrote and was featured on Medium. Jake discusses his Native heritage, Elizabeth Warren’s recent DNA test to ‘prove’ hers amid insults from the president, what it means to erase a culture, and his own struggle with identity.

My father (my full-blooded grandfather’s son) presents as nonwhite and has spent much of his life working in Indian country. I present as white, and I get to reap all the benefits of that status as I walk through the world.

This status does not excuse me from what I now consider to be my responsibility to represent my Native heritage. There was a period in my life, however, when I concealed an important piece of who I am because of resentful mockery akin to the kind invoked by Trump.

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