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What movies are the most popular with your neighbors? Netflix has the answer and the New York Times has the interactive graphic. Here in lovely downtown Irvine, for example, the most rented title of 2009 was The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Draw your own conclusions. That was a broadly popular rental, but plenty of movies have strong geographic appeal. Here in Southern California, for example, Religulous, Milk, and Vicky Christina Barcelona were popular among the liberal West LA set, but not so much elsewhere. (The map on the right is for Milk.)

If you live in one of the 12 biggest metro areas, you can play around with maps for your zip code too. Not only is it good clean fun, but surely also something that can inspire plenty of amateur sociology as well as blog posts full of partisan condescension. Latte-sipping lefties didn’t like Paul Blart: Mall Cop! Orange County reactionaries refused to see Frost/Nixon! Nobody liked Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull! (Which goes to show that at least there’s some justice in the world.) Have fun.

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We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't find elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

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