2016 Is Here, But I Still Haven’t Caught Up to 2015

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Over at the Washington Post, Jessica Contrera has a list of what’s out and what’s in for 2016. I assume that all the out stuff used to be in, and I was curious how many I had heard of. Answer: 45 out of 64. There were 19 items on the list that I had no clue about. Vetements? Ghosting? Pulp? (Actually, I’ve always liked my OJ pulpy, but I didn’t know this had become a thing.) Additionally, there are items like squad goals and walls, which I either understand or can figure out, but which I also didn’t know had become things. I assume squad goals are like group goals, but for small groups? Let’s google it.

Crap. I was totally wrong:

Everyone has a different name for that group of friends you do everything with….A group of friends is called a squad now (as seen in the phrase: squad deep, when your whole crew is together). Squads, of course, have goals….So, what are squad goals, then? Well, there’s no official definition for it (yet), but here’s mine:

Squad Goal (skwäd/??l) (noun) (plural noun: squad goals): an aspirational term for what you’d like your group of friends to be or accomplish.

Your squad goals are entirely dependent on the members of your squad; so, while some people’s squad goals involve looking like the celebs in the famous Ellen selfie, others might involve reading every Jane Austen book in the NY Public Library. Much like eating a Reese’s, there is no wrong way to squad goal.

This was a thing in 2015? Seriously? I guess this is yet another reason I’m not really going to miss 2015. I’m guessing that 2016 is the year that Donald Trump finally gets his inevitable comeuppance, so it’s almost bound to be better. Right?

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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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