September 3, 2021

All Right, Let’s Talk About the Poop in the Pit Thing

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Each Friday, we bring you an article from our archives to propel you into the weekend.

In Santa Cruz, California, earlier this week, the unthinkable happened: Someone pooped in the pit. At a show for Turnstile—who released a new record, Glow On, this week—someone, um, yeah, they took a literal poop in the mosh pit and within the melee the feces was reportedly flung about!

Turnstile is known for crazy shows. There’s an old Washington Post article about how they wrecked a new venue; that includes a fantastic two paragraphs about moshing/slam-dancing as juvenilia but also beautiful. My initial reaction was basically in that vein of an adult giddily re-finding a single pulsing emotion in modernity: That’s really funny that someone pooped in the pit because poop is funny! Others have pointed out it is unsanitary. Oh, yes, I shake my head. Yes. I see that, too. Poop is gross.

Here’s my recommendation for how to get through this crisis of “How to think about poop in the pit”: Read more about feces. There’s a lot of stuff in our archives (kinda weirdly) about it. We’ve got explainers on whether it’s OK to poop in the woods; long pieces on fecal transplants; and an old report about how there is poop in hamburger meat(!). Another you should read about: bidets.

So, first, everyone listen to the Turnstile album. Former MoJo writer Matt Cohen and I were chatting about it and realized both of us listened to it over a dozen times in less than 48 hours. (As a local DC guy, he sent me the WaPo link.) This record is an unstoppable machine. It’s like I am a 13 years old again and just playing the same music until it’s engraved in one part of my brain instead of a memory of my friends and/or family. A good analysis is over at Pitchfork, about how the album fits into the broader hardcore landscape—and what it means. Or, you know, just watch their live sets, especially the one in Baltimore, filmed for some reason like someone teleported back to the 1990s.

And read our genuinely interesting and high-impact coverage about poop while you do.

I hope that helps you out when thinking about the national crisis of Poop in the Pit 2021. I’m sorry I said poop so much.

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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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