Remembrance of the Ghost of Christmas Past. Wait. That’s Not Right, Is It?

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Tyler Cowen has some reading advice for the digital age:

Everyone should have a long book on their Kindle that they otherwise would never read. Then, when you don’t feel like starting a whole new book on your Kindle, you dig into a small piece of your long book. And stop. As the years pass, you may eventually finish your long book (or not).

After three years, he’s about 18 percent finished with John Calvin’s The Institutes of the Christian Religion, which I assume has the virtue of being free in e-book form.

In any case, this sounds like good advice except for one thing: what if you have a bad memory? I have trouble remembering the first part of a book by the time I’m reading the last chapter, and that’s for books that I finish in a week. If I took years to read a book, it would be like reading random chapters completely divorced from the main narrative.

But maybe that’s a whole new way of reading? If I had to choose a long book, it would be something like Remembrance of Things Past (or whatever they call it these days, ever since they decided the old translation of the title was no good). Perhaps reading it in the normal sequence, but with each chapter completely divorced from its narrative context, would provide a whole new take on Proust? I could think of it as Forgetfulness of Things Past. But what if I cheated and reread the Cliff Notes summaries before each chapter to refresh my memory of what was going on? This is all trickier than it sounds.

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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.

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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.

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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