For Only $1,000 You’ll Never Get Lost Again

I’ve never gotten excited about the wearables trend, probably because I don’t like wearing things and I don’t even use my ordinary, non-wearable smartphone very much. And yet, Kaitlyn Tiffany’s piece about the latest attempt at making smart eyeglasses is intriguing. They cost a fortune and have to be personally fitted—and they’re currently available only in two cities in North America—but they seem oddly friendly and perhaps genuinely useful:

North Focals

I get lost really easily and even Google Maps on my phone doesn’t always save me—which makes a heads-up display like this sort of appealing. The strange thing is that although the glasses themselves seem OK to me, I’m less excited at the idea that you control them via a “loop” that you wear on your finger:

So you have to wear a joystick on your hand all the time? Half of me hates this idea and half of me thinks it’s actually very clever, almost James Bondish. Unfortunately, it would cost me a thousand dollars plus a plane ticket to New York to try it out, so I suppose I’ll let other people be the guinea pigs. In any case, the company that makes these glasses, North, is funded by Amazon, so if they’re as useful as they look I’m sure they’ll be available in a city near me soon.

The future is here. Or in Brooklyn, anyway.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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