Have We Reached Peak Internet Annoyance Yet?

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I have some horrible news about the search for ALS cures:

The breakthrough research unravels the mystery about a protein called TDP-43….In a study of the protein in mice cells….Johns Hopkins scientists detail how TDP-43 — which is supposed to decode DNA — breaks down and become “sticky.”…When the researchers inserted a special protein designed to mimic TDP-43 into the neurons, the cells came back to life and returned to normal. That’s sparked fervent interest that the treatment could possibly be used to slow down or even halt the disease.

It’s a big step for the 15,000 Americans living with ALS, which currently has no cure, usually ends up killing people two to five years after they are diagnosed.

Oh wait. That’s great news. Here’s the horrible news:

One year ago….the Ice Bucket Challenge had become the viral campaign everyone was talking about — an online effort to raise awareness and funds for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease….More than $220 million in donations later, scientists at Johns Hopkins are claiming a major breakthrough in ALS research and are partly crediting the success to the massive influx of public interest.

“Without it, we wouldn’t have been able to come out with the studies as quickly as we did,” said Philip Wong, a professor at Johns Hopkins who led the research team….”The money came at a critical time when we needed it,” Wong said.

Crap. I guess this means we can no longer mock annoying internet memes that claim to be for a good cause. Or worse: annoying internet memes will become a staple of charitable fundraising.

But maybe it’s not really so bad. After all, there has to be some kind of limit to annoying internet memes. There are just so many people in the world and so many hours in the day. And if we have indeed reached peak annoyance, the ALS meme added nothing to the total. It merely sucked it away from some other potential annoyance that never took off. It’s sort of like an energy conservation law, except for annoying internet memes.

But….what if we haven’t reached peak annoyance yet? And how would we know? As a wise man once told me, no matter how bad things get, they can always get worse.

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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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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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