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Farhad Manjoo writes in Slate today about the holy grail in indoor lighting: an energy-efficient bulb that’s dimmable and produces nice warm light. It comes from a company called Switch, and it all sounds very nice. But I found this parenthetical pretty interesting:

(The 60- and 75-watt-alternative bulbs are also available in neutral white, which Sharenow says is a popular color in many different places around the world—people in Japan, India, and other Asian countries can’t stand the yellow light we find comforting, Sharenow says.)

Obviously people don’t like bulbs that flicker, can’t be dimmed, and don’t come on immediately. But the recent freakout over the end of incandescent bulbs has been at least equally driven by an insistence that a less yellowy light than Thomas Edison bequeathed to us is simply intolerable. This is, and always has been, nuts. It’s a product of habit, not a law of human optics. The warm incandescent bulbs we use today are closer to candlelight than to sunlight, and I’ll bet that every single person in America would very quickly get accustomed to a more neutral color in light bulbs if they’d just use them for a while and allow their old habits to die out.

In any case, if the Switch folks are on the level, they’ve got an LED bulb that doesn’t flicker, comes on immediately, can be dimmed, and is available in old-school “warm” white or a more neutral white. So now you’ll have your choice. But the neutral bulb puts out more light per watt, and it’s almost certainly a better light source for anyone willing to give it a chance.

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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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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.

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