July/August 1995 Issue

Media Picks

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A sampling of what’s new and noteworthy, chosen with a little help from our friends:

 

“This is the eloquent testimony of an extremely gifted writer. Those who have investigated his case are convinced that he is innocent. He is the true victim of political venom.”

So says author and avid reader Jessica Mitford of Live from Death Row (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1995), a collection of prison writings from the pen of death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal, a journalist and black activist found guilty of killing a Philadelphia police officer in 1982. Abu-Jamal could be put to death within the year. Check out the World Wide Web for more information:

http://www.igc.apc.org/prisons/mumia.html

 

Remember the old “money river” theory from Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater? Turns out, it’s true and meticulously documented by Thomas Ferguson in The Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Ferguson offers staggering evidence that big money interests have played, and continue to play, a determining role in U.S. politics.

Emergency Contraception: The Nation’s Best-Kept Secret (Atlanta: Bridging the Gap, 1995) details readily available methods of preventing pregnancy within 72 hours after intercourse. To order, call: 1 (800) 847-3988, or log onto the World Wide Web for related news and updates at

http://opr.princeton.edu/ec/ec.html

Passage to Vietnam is the latest interactive coffee-table CD/book from Rick Smolan (Alice to Ocean, the Day in the Life series), who is joined by 70 photographers in a look at the “new” Vietnam. The project is published by Against All Odds and Interval Research.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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