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There are many reasons—too many to count—why Twitter is bad.

Putting aside that it still hasn’t banned Nazis, or that it’s doing a piss-poor job of preventing the spread of disinformation, it’s also a platform designed to indulge in our worst internet habits. Doomscrolling on Twitter does nothing more than exacerbate our sense of existential dread. It fuels our stress, anxiety, and anger. And that’s especially true in the midst of a pandemic and the most bonkers election in at least a generation.

But every once in a while there comes a time where two people on that cursed site have a meaningful exchange—something that I, perhaps naively, want to believe is why Twitter was created in the first place.

These instances are fleeting and don’t usually amount to much. But in the case of John Darnielle, the frontperson of indie-rock legends the Mountain Goats, one such exchange led to a beautiful new song, called “Picture of My Dress,” on the band’s upcoming album.

As Darnielle explained on—you guessed it—Twitter yesterday, the song comes from a Twitter exchange he had with poet Maggie Smith, who in late 2018 tweeted about her desire to see a photo essay of a divorced woman driving across the country to take pictures of her rumpled wedding dress in various locales. “It’s a metaphorical ‘Weekend at Bernie’s,’” she wrote. Darnielle replied back, perhaps cheekily, that “this would be a song called ‘Picture of My Dress,” and that the ideal musician to write it would be Mary Chapin Carpenter.

Of course, that didn’t happen and Darnielle ended up writing it. Like most Mountain Goats songs, it’s a sanguine story.  It’s a lovely little tune with some of Darnielle’s trademark wit and observational humor (I laughed at the line: “I’m in the bathroom of a Dallas Texas Burger King/ Mr. Steven Tyler is on the overhead speakers/ He doesn’t want to miss a thing.”). Would it have been better if Mary Chapin Carpenter wrote it? Probably. But a Mountain Goats song about this is the next best thing.

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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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