Year’s Best Culture Interviews

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From John Cusack banter to Joss Whedon podcasts, MoJo talked with some fascinating culture-makers this year. Below, six of our favorite culture interviews of 2008.

January/February 2008

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Never Mind the Mullahs

Iranian exile Marjane Satrapi speaks out.

March/April 2008

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Interview: Shepard Fairey

Five questions for the pop-art provocateur of Andre the Giant poster fame.

May/June 2008

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Interrogating Errol Morris

The Oscar-winning filmmaker talks about turning his camera on Abu Ghraib for Standard Operating Procedure. Plus, the best political ads you never saw and why.

July/August 2008

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The MoJo Interview: John Cusack

The former Lloyd Dobler banters with MoJo editor Clara Jeffery about his movie War, Inc., her inner 16-year-old, and what it’s like to still be Gen X’s favorite antihero heartthrob.

September/October 2008

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The MoJo Interview: Bill Maher

Caustic comedian Bill Maher on his new movie Religulous, bargaining with God, and why Christianity is just as crazy as Scientology.

November/December 2008

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The MoJo Interview: Joss Whedon

The geek god behind Dollhouse, Buffy, and Firefly talks about “womb envy” and why feminists are hot.

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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.

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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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