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Rebecca Jennings writes today that Instagram makes us, individually, look wonderful all the time. Twitter, by contrast, makes us, collectively, look outrageous and appalling all the time. What happens when you follow both?

Beats me. But I am becoming ever more convinced that social media provides us with such a distorted view of the world that we would all be better off without it. Each of us may be convinced that, of course, we take all this into account and don’t believe everything we see, but I’m skeptical that any of us can really do this no matter how hard we try. Twitter in particular provides a view of the world so massively distorted that we can hardly help but come away from it convinced that society is about to collapse any second now.

That’s my cheery thought for Monday morning. And now I’m off to get livesaving chemicals dripped into my body. Have a nice day!

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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