January 20, 2021

Sonia Raman Joins the Memphis Grizzlies! (And Donald Trump Is Bounced From Multiple Homes!)

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Donald Trump, a former president, a pardoner of war criminals, a tax avoider, and the most-impeached president in US history, has been purged from Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (and booted from the White House). The day is here. His 1992 cameo opposite Macaulay Culkin’s 10-year-old protagonist has been scrubbed by a fan who posted the edited clip online. “Bravo,” tweeted Culkin, who now speaks in the Plaza Hotel scene to an invisible figure where Trump once stood. In brighter news:

Count it. Sonia Raman has become the first woman of Indian descent to join the NBA as an assistant coach. The celebrated move marks a milestone that takes her from MIT’s basketball program to the Memphis Grizzlies.

And one. A bipartisan group of lawmakers wants to award the Congressional Gold Medal to Eugene Goodman, the Capitol Police officer who averted an even deadlier disaster by facing down the rioters and luring them away from the Senate floor. Today, Goodman escorted Vice President Kamala Harris to her swearing-in ceremony.

With honor. Veterans were among those who attacked the Capitol, but even more veterans, enraged by them, volunteered to clean up their mess in the riot’s wake.

With justice. Circle February 4 for a crucial Mother Jones conversation hosted by my colleague Nathalie Baptiste with the Reverend William J. Barber and his daughters, Sharrelle and Rebekah, on the demands of racial justice during a coronavirus pandemic that has disproportionately affected communities of color—and the steps ahead in fighting for equality, health, and safety. RSVP here.

Top volume. Pharoahe Monch’s new album, A Magnificent Day for an Exorcism, drops in two days. Catch his NPR Tiny Desk performance with an actual tiny desk.

Diabetes advocacy. My colleague Steve Katz shares the inspiring news that his son, Noah, has an interview at Healthline opening up about Type 1 diabetes and the growing movement for more equal availability of insulin across the world.

More good news. Keep your stories coming to recharge@motherjones.com.

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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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