You’ve Got Snail Mail! Handwritten Letters to Mother Jones, Vol. 1

Chinese infant sleeper cells, “tootie frooty” assholes, Einstein fraud, bad computers, and a poem.

The pile. Well, part of it.Michael Mechanic

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And you thought letter writing was a lost art? Mother Jones still receives handwritten letters every day, and not all of them are from prisoners or crazy people. In any case, they just pile up. We no longer publish letters in the print magazine, and our communications are largely digital these days. We also don’t have the staff bandwidth (if you’ll pardon the internet jargon) to respond to our digital trolls, let alone our snail-mail ones. And yet every day I walk past that stack of letters and wonder what it contains. I decided to read a handful each day, or skim them at least, and share some choice excerpts with all y’all.

Mother Jones Snail Mail, Volume 1

April 2013
Dear Mother Jones,
I haven’t heard anything again in the news regarding the “house in a residential neighborhood” that neighbors (CA) complained had a lot of Chinese pregnant women paying to have their babies there so they would have US citizenship. It sounded to me like a sure-fire way to build sleeper cells. Worth investigating?
—JPH, Washington, DC

May 2013
President, Foundation for National Progress,
The “Truth” is that despite your Assertions/claims that “your hard hitting investigative journalism” is Accurate and Factual—you are delusional self congratulating Fools. When I see distortions and outright lies being printed about firearms, firearm owners, 2nd amendment Rights Groups and organizations, your credibility about other issues you print material about becomes untrustworthy as to veracity. Good bye you San Francisco “Tootie Frooty” Assholes located in the “land of Fruits and Nuts” (California).
—Anonymous

October 2013
Mother Jones Science Editor,
Einstein, Hawking, Penrose, Randall, O’Meara: Frauds one and all. The biggest hoax on the planet is called physics. Since the 1800s, science has moved forward in most areas, backward in others. There are two Universes, not one. The greatest discovery of all time, The Jussiverse (YOU-see-verse, Jussi Huotari), is being studiously ignored by the scientific establishment. Why would they turn their backs on what they claim to be searching for? It’s simple: The truth will destroy their careers.
—RR, Clinton Correctional Facility, Dannemora, New York
[From the enclosed “Exhibit B,” titled “Physics IS Pseudoscience.”]

November 2013
Dear Senior Editors,
This is a plea for you to put Sarah Posner’s article (about George W. and his convert-a-Jew-to-Christianity-to-end-this-world nut cases) in the next issue of Mother Jones. Mother is known for front-running, hard-hitting stories no one else digs for or is willing to expose. I heard about this on Rachel Maddow‘s program. When I called Mother, I found it may just be on your magazine website. Many of us—me, for instance, since I slept with one for work for three-plus decades—wouldn’t own a computer for nutten! We (i.e. people) call each other, get together, etc. If Ms. Posner’s article isn’t published in Mother‘s mag, a huge disservice will be done to everyone. Please, please bump another story if necessary and run the one about these biblical terrorists. Thank you for shaking off the dirt to expose the poop.
—KMD, Warrenton, Oregon 

September 2013
Today Politics
In valley we blindly walk in unknown passages,
strutting naked to fierce inferno savagery
Where arsenic slides off swift tongues
to heresy of those heretics hypocritical
in rebellious house on troublesome waters.
Which tells of stiff-neck men iniquities
in socialism dark glen errs on cylinders,
death-pale before dead gods in travail
wind of mere anarchy chaos on strange concourse
leads to mayhem in this venomous house.
—Ron Collings, West Allis, Wisconsin

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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.

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.

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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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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.

payment methods

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