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You’ve probably all been wondering about me and my new toy. “I wonder how Kevin likes reading on an iPad?” you’ve been asking yourself. “I sure wish he’d write a blog post telling us.”

OK, fine. I will. I’m not sure if I’m surprised by this or not, but I like it a lot. I bought a Kindle a few years ago and used it for several months, and while I didn’t hate it, I never really warmed to it either. But the iPad feels entirely different. Partly it’s the larger screen. Partly it’s the faster page turning. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s just enough to make it feel a lot more comfortable than the Kindle. Having readable graphics in nonfiction is a huge plus too. (Though I wish Amazon would make their inline graphics a little higher resolution. I know that would make file sizes bigger, but it would be worth it.)

But what about eyestrain? One of the reasons I waited so long to try a tablet was because I was afraid that long reading stints on a low-res display would make my eyes ache. I don’t know if that would have been a problem since I never tried it, but the retina display on the iPad is as good as advertised, and so far hasn’t caused any eye fatigue at all.

I’m also pleased with Readability, an Instapaper-like app that allows you to easily save long magazine articles and then read them later on the iPad. Everybody told me I’d love this, and everybody was right. I’m way more likely to read long-form stuff if I can do it in my easy chair instead of sitting in front of my desktop display. (I’m using Readability because for some reason Instapaper wouldn’t work properly for me. But it works great and the app is free, so I guess this was a blessing in disguise.)

I ended up buying a leather cover for the iPad, and although that probably marks me as terminally unhip, it’s been great. For me, reading is partially a tactile experience, and I don’t like to read on a device that’s cool and slick to the touch. The leather cover gives the iPad a warmer, friendlier quality that just feels more like a book. Besides, the leather cover also has a flip stand thingie that props up the iPad when I’m reading at a table, and that’s something I like a lot too.

It’s still possible that I’ll get bored with the iPad at some point and drift back to dead-tree books. But so far I’m a convert.

POSTSCRIPT: Is there anything I don’t like about the iPad? Well, it takes a helluva long time to charge, but that’s not too big a deal. And it’s all but impossible to move files on and off the iPad unless you have a handy copy of iTunes running on a desktop machine. That’s a pain in the ass, and especially annoying because it’s a deliberate design decision, not a sad but necessary compromise. Still, I don’t have a big need to do this, so I can live with it.

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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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