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At the risk of getting my commenters riled up because I’m blogging about trivia, let me tell you what I had for lunch today: a pear, some cut up pineapple, and a bag of pretzel sticks.  Believe it or not, about halfway through I suddenly remembered yesterday’s post about how we chew our food an average of ten times these days compared to 25 in the past, and I started counting chews.  The pear took ten chews per bite.  The pineapple about 13.  The pretzel sticks about 15.

This makes me suspicious of the claim that we modern Americans chew our food an average of ten times.  That pear was ripe and soft and each bite still took ten chews.  Short of chocolate pudding, I don’t think food comes much softer.  So if it took ten chews to finish up each bite of pear, I have to figure the average is quite a bit higher than that.

Unless, of course, I chew my food more than most people.  Surely, though, this is something the web excels at determining.  So here’s your assignment: pay attention today to how many times you chew your food, and then report back in comments.  I want data, people.  Let’s get the hive mind cracking.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

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