August 18, 2012

Introducing “A Movie & an Argument,” With Alyssa Rosenberg and Asawin Suebsaeng

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Today, we’re introducing a new weekly feature—a podcast called A Movie & an Argument, with Alyssa and Swin.

Each week, I’ll be sitting down to chat with ThinkProgress critic Alyssa Rosenberg (who also does awesome work at The Atlantic and “Double X” at Slate). We’ll talk, argue, and laugh about the latest movies, television series, and pop-cultural nonsense—with some politics thrown in just for the hell of it.

Alyssa describes herself as being “equally devoted to the Star Wars expanded universe and Barbara Stanwyck, to Better Off Ted and Deadwood.” I (everyone calls me Swin) am a devoted lover of low-brow dark humor, Yuengling, and movies with high body counts. I hope you tune in for this episode and the ones to come.

We’ll be featuring guests on the program, and also taking listeners’ questions, so feel free to Tweet them at me here, and we’ll see if we can get to them.

Below, you’ll find the audio for our inaugural episode, in which we discuss:

  • The second season of Boss, starring Kelsey Grammer as a slick, corrupt Chicago mayor (the new season premiered Friday August 17 on Starz).
  • 2 Days in New York, a new indie comedy starring Julie Delpy and Chris Rock.
  • The Expendables 2, the testosterone-sodden ensemble action flick (had its wide release Friday August 17).
  • Copper, a BBC America dramatic series created by Tom Fontana and Will Rokos that takes place in 1860s New York after the American Civil War.
  • The ongoing first season of Aaron Sorkin’s HBO series The Newsroom.

 

Thanks for tuning in!

Click here for more movie and TV features from Mother Jones. To read more of Swin’s reviews, click here.

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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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