September 2, 2015

You Will Die Alone in a Ditch With a Headache—But at Least the Headache Won’t Have Been Your Fault

<a href="http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-93662965/stock-photo-silhouette-of-an-alcoholic-in-despair.html?src=j6Z2Zt8OnBK_C1mbgzQSig-1-3">thaumatr0pe</a>/Shutterstock

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Alcohol is great. Maybe not health-wise, and maybe not for your uncle who has a bunch of DUIs, but, in general, society has long agreed that alcohol is great. The bad thing about alcohol is that sometimes drinking it makes your head hurt the next day. In the world, we call this a hangover. Some people get them worse than other people. The lucky ducks who seem spry and dandy no matter how much they put away the night before often offer unluckier ducks #smarttips for not getting hangovers. Drink water! Eat grease! Meditate! Pray! Have you tried barre classes? These tips probably never work for you—or at least never work consistently for you. (Everything works anecdotally once in a while.) But that’s probably your fault, right? I mean everything is your fault. That’s why you drink so much in the first place. Your parents got divorced because of you. Your spouse is unhappy because of you. The Dow Jones is down because of you. America is entangled in a never-ending mess in the Middle East because of you. Hollywood keeps rebooting Spider-Man because of you. These hangover tips aren’t working because of you, too, right?

Wrong.

Raiding the fridge or downing glasses of water after a night of heavy drinking won’t improve your sore head the next day, Dutch research suggests.

Instead, a study concluded, the only way to prevent a hangover is to drink less alcohol.

The bad news is: You will die with a headache. The good news is: It won’t be your fault.

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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.

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