May 21, 2020

The Greatest Birthday Gift the World Has Ever Seen

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If you’re like me and can’t carry a tune to save your life, so you speak or mouth the lyrics to “Happy Birthday” instead of spoiling a perfectly good singalong, there are other ways to celebrate someone’s birthday. Ask them questions, and truly hear the answers. Happy birthday today to our outstanding Mother Jones environmental reporter Rebecca Leber, who reluctantly agreed to a Q&A:

You tweeted “It’s my birthday soon and I am very alone. All the presents.” Have all the presents come in? What’s on your climate wishlist?

I live on my own, so it’s been a weird time, but the chain reaction of that tweet was hearing really kind words from some readers!

Tips for those of us living alone during the pandemic?

None, but I am determined to get through this without baking bread.

Top wish?

There’s a lot of talk about returning to normal, but “normal” means a heavy pollution footprint from transportation. We could be thinking bigger in redesigning cities—less for cars and more for walkability and resilience.

Send Rebecca the presents and watch in awe as she tracks the ways the administration is racing to roll back environmental protections while no one is looking. But Rebecca is looking and she’s compelling officials to take notice and take action. Happy birthday, RL.

Today’s Recharge menu continues with a seasonal selection of immunity boosts:

Delivered. Despite the ruthless, bloodsucking practices at GrubHub that siphon profits from independent restaurants during the pandemic—well documented by the New Yorker’s Helen Rosner and TechCrunch’s Jon Evans—one restaurant has a creative workaround. A dish on its Grubhub menu is called “Please help us reduce our fees by ordering through our website. $0.00.” Ingredients: “During this time of crisis, I ask for your little help—please place your order through our website.” Order up and send all pro-worker justice stories to recharge@motherjones.com.

Solving it. A coding teen took matters into her own hands after seeing “firsthand how flawed our system is for survivors” of sexual assault by designing an app “to help you, free of judgment,” access emergency resources. “This is why we need more women in STEM!” she says in her vastly popular TikTok video, set to inspiring music.

Never-before-seen Trump photo. No one can safely get a haircut in a salon right now, including the president. Here’s proof, a photo of his overgrown pandemic hair, sent to me by a senior White House official and verified by a second administration source. “The hair is his real hair from quarantining and not being able to get a haircut,” the first official tells me.

Hawking hope. An Atlanta boy got a surprise from his skating idol, Tony Hawk, thanks to a FedEx driver who made the 8-year-old’s day when the kid ran up to his truck shouting, “Excuse me! Can you mail something for me?” The boy handed the driver his skateboard to send to Hawk, but not knowing Hawk’s address, the driver posted a video. Hawk responded with a video of his own, flashing a skateboard he’d send the 8-year-old in return: “Thanks buddy. I hope to meet you sometime.” Watch here (sound on, upper right).

Competition. Recharge is America’s top-rated solutions-driven column of good news, but we have competition: a 16-year-old in Fairfield, Connecticut, launched his own good-news newsletter, SunShow. Congratulations to Kush Maisuria. Recharge salutes you. “There’s just so many people doing good everywhere and I wanted to contribute to that,” he says.

Send inspiring stories to recharge@motherjones.com, and stop by our daily blog at motherjones.com/recharge.

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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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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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