Trump Built a Fence Around the White House. Protesters Turned It Into a Canvas.

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The 8-foot-tall fence around the White House has been creatively repurposed by the public as a wall of memorial to Black lives lost to police violence. Designed to keep protesters at bay, the fence has become a canvas of voices—a gallery of artwork, photos, posters, and letters of remembrance and petition for police reform. Art and activism have a long intersecting history in the United States, explored in Scott Saul’s Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t, James Edward Smethurst’s The Black Arts Movement, and countless other books and portraits. See the images here, here, and here. Thanks to my colleague Grace Molteni for the tip.

Bonus boost: On the brink of closure, a Florida cafe was saved by a patron who gave $40,000 to the owner to keep it open and feed hospital workers. The donor handed him envelopes of money and ordered 100 sandwiches to be sent each day to a hospital across the street. And did it anonymously.

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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.

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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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