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Via Alex Tabarrok, this comes from Catherine Rampell over at Economix.  It’s either (a) genuinely fascinating or (b) a horrible abuse of crude chartmaking based on minimal data.

I think I’ll vote for (a).  Due to an intestinal ailment in my 20s, I used to have to eat very slowly.  The result was just what you’d expect: I’d feel full pretty quickly and therefore didn’t eat very much.

Around age 25, however, some clever doctor finally figured out what was wrong with me, prescribed a proton pump inhibitor (which sounded pretty space agey until my high school chemistry came back to me and I realized that “proton” is just another word for “acid”), and I’ve been fine ever since.  I can wolf down food as fast as the next guy.  Result: I eat dinner in about 20 minutes and I’m 30 or 40 pounds overweight.

Of course, I’m also 25 years older, and you might think that has something to do with my weight gain too.  Probably so.  But it still makes sense to me that slower eating habits lead to lower food intake.  That doesn’t mean I’m eager to adopt the Italian habit of spending four hours over dinner, a practice that drove me nuts whenever I visited Italy on business, but it might not hurt.

Still, what’s with the Turks?  They make the French and Italians look like pikers.  Are they just congenitally bored over there, or what?

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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.

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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.

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