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I got showered with comments yesterday about the Big Mac. It’s so much more than the middle bun, you cretin! Even my sister got on my case about it. My sister!

So today I went out to our newly refurbished McDonald’s and got one. My conclusion: it was fine. The special sauce was fine, the pickles were fine, and it was a perfectly good hamburger on the McDonald’s scale of hamburgers. About halfway through eating it, though, it suddenly occurred to me that…it sure had a lot of bread. But all of you Big Mac lovers like the extra bun, I guess. De gustibus.

I haven’t been to McDonald’s in a long time, and I see that they now hand out numbers like most other places. Unlike other places, however, mine has a staff that comes by and takes your number from the table without leaving any food. It took a while to sort this out, so I used the time to load Facebook on my phone. I did this because apparently blog posts with inline images (like the one on the right) don’t render very well in Facebook Instant, whatever that is. And since half our traffic now comes from mobile Facebook users, this is a problem.

So I got the Facebook app loaded and then scrolled through my feed, but there was nothing of mine there. Hmmm. I’ve never paid much attention to Facebook, so I wasn’t sure what to do. I searched for MoJo, and then liked it, figuring that might make MoJo content appear. Oddly, though, what it mostly did was make lots of Brad DeLong posts appear. What’s going on up there at Cal? I got this sorted out eventually, but it turns out the MoJo digital team has been curating the feed so that the troublesome posts don’t go up. So I still don’t know quite what’s going on. But I’ll find out soon enough when I chat with our web folks.

That was my midday. How was yours?

WE'LL BE BLUNT:

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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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WE'LL BE BLUNT

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.

payment methods

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