July 12, 2022

All the Angles We Tried for Our James Webb Space Telescope Article Before We Decided that Space Itself Is Cool Enough

Thank you, NASA.

Star birth in the Carina NebulaNASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI

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NASA has released the first photos from the James Webb Space Telescope, and they’re really fucking cool.

I, personally, will take any excuse to divert my attention away from the shitstorm we’ve created for ourselves here on Earth. But my coworkers and I spent a while trying to figure out how best to sell the photos to our readers. Here’s a sampling:

“We Finally Have the New Webb Photos of Space. They’re Kinda Disappointing.”
Meh.
—Jeremy Schulman

“Finally, A Reason to Go On Living.”
I want to meet the aliens.
—Abigail Weinberg

“I Hate This World. Eject Me to Space.”
—Inae Oh

“It’s Just Pictures of Colored Dots. I’ll Pass.”
— Jacob Rosenberg

“These Photos Provide a Majestic Backdrop to Listen to Jamie Raskin Read the Federalist Papers”
—Jeremy Schulman

“Oh, Fuck, That’s Cylon Raider”
All this has happened before…
—Jeremy Schulman

“You Think Biden’s Old. This Is the Earliest Recorded Light.”
—Anonymous Contributor

All right. Here are the photos. (To hear about these images from people who actually know what they’re talking about, visit NASA.)

The deepest infrared image of the universe yet. These stars are older than each member of our gerontocracy combined.

NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI

A dying star. Would that we’d all go out in such a blaze of glory.

NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI

Star birth in the Carina Nebula

NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI

Stephan’s Quintet, a collection of galaxies. Is there anybody in there?

ASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI

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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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