Today’s Fluff: M&M’s and Royal Babies

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When Marian came home from Virginia, she did not bring me a Virginia ham or Virginia peanuts. She brought me an M&M’s chocolate bar. I’ve never seen such a thing before, so I cracked it open to see what was inside. Answer: it’s a chocolate bar with mini-M&M’s embedded in it. The mini-M&M’s, of course, are candy shells with chocolate inside, so the whole thing is basically a chocolate bar with bits of candy in it.

Now, I can see the case for M&M’s. They’re handy finger food, and they famously melt in your mouth, not in your hands. But that’s because they’re bits of chocolate surrounded by a candy shell. The chocolate bar is bits of candy surrounded by a chocolate shell. I don’t understand the point of this.

And before anyone gets peevish with me, yes, I know this is my third fluffy, nonpolitical post in a row. But this is important! What is the point of an M&M’s chocolate bar?

And as long as we’re on fluffy news, my sister writes to castigate me for blogging about “quantum whatevers” when there’s a new royal baby to talk about. It’s a boy! According to the Guardian, “The names of the baby will be announced in due course.” But you probably want to read the Daily Mail for this kind of news anyway.

Things are obviously getting out of control around here. At this point, how about if we just treat this as an open thread for whatever trivia happens to be occupying your mind at the moment?

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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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