Illustration By: Mark Matcho

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Despite dire warnings from public-health officials, Americans keep packing on the pounds. Bad news for our hearts and kidneys, but
good news for the marketplace, which can now sell us Atkins shakes and supersize
showers. Entrepreneur.com sees the hefty (along with metrosexuals and Hispanics) as one
of 2004’s six hottest markets. “Plus-size is morphing into regular size,” gushes an analyst.
“There are no boundaries.” Indeed:

Whole Girth Catalog: Amplestuff.com offers airline seatbelt
extenders, scales that go up to 1,000 pounds, “extra-large fanny packs,” “big bibs”
and wearable napkins, and, for those who can no longer bend over, sock installers, lotion
appliers, leg lifters, and (depressingly) porta-bidets.

No Butts About It: Theaters and stadiums are widening most seats by four inches and instituting
“persons-of-size sections.”

Mile Wide Club: After “overloading” was suspected in a small plane crash last year, the
FAA upped its estimate of the average passenger’s weight from 180 to 195 pounds.

An Apple Pie a Day: In part to accommodate the boom in gastric bypasses, hospitals are
rolling out bigger, sturdier gurneys, operating tables, ambulances, wheelchairs, walkers,
and, of course, gowns.

Lazy Boys & Girls: Berkline’s new “XL-Series” motorized recliners can bear 600 pounds.
“There seems to be an insatiable appetite for these products,” says a company V.P.

Hippo-crisy: In February 2003, McDonald’s quietly dropped plans to use healthier oil.
Six months later, it released “Happy Meals for Adults,” which include a salad, an exercise booklet,
and a pedometer.

Speaks Volumes: What Are You Looking At?, “the first fat fiction anthology,” was published
last fall by Harvest Books.

Very Big Adventures: The staff of Freedom Paradise, “the first and only size-friendly
resort in the world,” reportedly watches Beauty and the Beast as sensitivity training.

This End Up: The 44-inch “triple wide” wasn’t big enough, so Goliath Casket just introduced
the B-52, designed to hold a 1,100-pound corpse. The company reports its sales are swelling
20 percent annually.

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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 canā€™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 wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”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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