Hello!

Greetings from Lima, Peru, where I've spent the last few days with folks from Partners in Health learning about tuberculosis care and mental health initiatives. Lima is a MASSIVE city—bigger than I can really even fathom or describe. With over 12 million residents and every kind of neighborhood imaginable, it has completely overwhelmed my senses, but in a thrilling way.

I've been thinking a lot on this trip about the fifteen years of work our community has done with Partners in Health, from helping to fund the Maternal Center of Excellence in Sierra Leone (good news on that front forthcoming!) to supporting efforts at TB case-finding in Lesotho. I'm very proud to work so closely with PIH in their mission to close healthcare gaps and offer quality healthcare to the most vulnerable among us. I'm grateful to the thousands of folks who donate monthly to support our maternal health project in Sierra Leone.

You can learn more and join us at pih.org/hankandjohn.

John

You can always email us at [email protected]

This Week in Stuff

• Hank was featured in episodes 3 and 4 of a new BBC podcast series called Like and Subscribe: How YouTube Changed the World. (BBC)

• A very sticky PB&J descriptive writing lesson went viral. (TikTok)

• Runner Perdo Arieta set aside his goal to help a stranger cross the Boston Marathon finish line. (Boston.com)

• Fremont Library calculated how much money folks have saved using free library services. (Instagram)

• Scientists discovered a new color and named it olo! (Smithsonian Magazine)

Please send us stuff you think we should feature to [email protected]

Once widespread, smoking is now uncommon in Great Britain

Saloni Dattani

Fifty years ago, almost half the adults in Great Britain smoked cigarettes, but this has become much less common.

In the 1970s, half of men and 40% of women over the age of 16 reported smoking cigarettes. Since then, smoking rates have steadily fallen. By 2023, this was just 12% of men and 10% of women.

This dramatic decline is the result of decades of public health efforts such as clear warnings on cigarette packs, bans on tobacco advertising, indoor smoking restrictions, and support to help people quit. Newer technologies — including vaping products, nicotine patches, and medications — have also helped many people quit.

Despite this, smoking remains the leading risk factor for preventable death in the UK, raising the risk of many cancers, heart attacks, and strokes. Fewer smokers means fewer people suffering from these serious diseases.

Our World in Data is a UK-based non-profit organization that publishes research and data to make progress against the world’s largest problems. You can find more of their data insights here.

This Week at Complexly

Unlike in fiction, giant whales do not emerge fully-formed from the ocean deep. So, where did Livyatan melvillei come from? How did such a large predator live? And what caused the titan to die out? The answer may lie in an appetite so large that it may have eaten itself to extinction.

Dry cleaning has gone from kerosene to perc to wet cleaning in an attempt to make it less ...deadly. Over the years, dry cleaning has evolved to address the dangers of flammability, interactions with your lungs, and environmental harm, among other problems.

Some Games to Play!

Pedantle (by Julie)

SpellCheck.xyc (by Answer in Progress)

Download Gubbins on iOS or Android!

If you post your results on social media, we’d love it if you post a link for folks to subscribe to “We’re Here” (https://werehere.beehiiv.com/subscribe)

Celebrate Earth with EcoGeek

Happy belated Earth Day! Did you know that most cleaning supplies are 90% water and it’s super inefficient to ship them from place to place? Talk about unnecessary carbon emissions, not to mention those plastic bottles that stick around for millennia.

Luckily, there’s a better way to clean–with EcoGeek. Our products are eco-friendly, non-toxic, and clean just as well as name brands, without all the waste. And the profits? 100% of them go to the Coral Reef Alliance, a non-profit focused on saving reefs across the Pacific Ocean. Plus, if you sign up for an EcoGeek subscription right now, we’ll throw in a free scrub brush.

Check out EcoGeek today!

Your 4×3 creations

Last week, Hank introduced us to a game he created that he’s been calling 4×3. He asked for 4×3 submissions, and we got LOTS! We plan on featuring them in the game section in future newsletters, but we want to share a few here today. We’d love to make a playable web version, but we’re old school for now!

How to play: Find 4 categories with 3 words in each category. One special word will be used in all 4 categories, and none of the other words will be used more than once!

Thanks for playing! All 3 answer keys will be published next week.

That’s the end of the newsletter!

As a belated celebration of Earth Day, we’d love for you to write a poem about Earth. You don’t need to be a poet to participate! We can’t wait to read them.

Send your Earth poetry to [email protected].

We're Here is the newsletter of Nerdfighteria; the community of people that sprung up around Hank and John Green's YouTube videos. That community has many focuses and has spawned many projects but the overarching theme is that hopelessness is the wrong response to imperfection. What makes the world better is groups of people trying to understand and solve problems, and people can only do that for an extended period if they're having at least a little bit of fun.