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And now, from the Department of Random Stuff, we have seat belt use in the 50 states. Christopher Ingraham writes about this today over at Wonkblog, and his map showed shockingly low seat belt use. There were quite a few areas with seat belt use around 50 percent, and more than half the country was under 70 percent. Can that be true?

To find out, I headed over to the Orwellian-named Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System at the CDC and created my own map. Here it is:

This doesn’t look so bad. The Dakotas are laggards at 70 percent, but most of the country is between 75-90 percent, with 11 states over 90 percent. The national average is 86.4 percent. I sort of assumed that after all these years, seat belt use was pretty much automatic for nearly everyone, but I guess not. Especially in the Dakotas.1

1And New Hampshire. Live free or die!

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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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