Here’s another picture from my Arizona trip. Back in the day, the only way to cross the Colorado River at Hoover Dam was to drive across the dam itself. Everyone knew this couldn’t last forever, and in 2005 construction was finally started on a bridge across Highway 93. The Mike O’Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge—the highest concrete arch bridge in the world—was finished in 2010 and here it is, in a shot taken from down near the dam itself:

This is a panoramic photo. I couldn’t fit the bridge into a single shot, so I took two pictures and then stitched them together using Photoshop. However, that produces a bit of a fisheye effect, which requires yet more Photoshop magic:

January 25, 2020 — Hoover Dam, Clark County, Nevada

Not bad! In the slot canyon pictures, a modest amount of fisheye isn’t even visible since the walls of the canyon swoop and curve in the first place. But in a picture like this, where the deck of the bridge is obviously supposed to be flat, it really needs to be corrected.

As usual, however, note that it’s not possible to correct everything at once. The bridge is tolerably straight now, but the Lexus at the bottom right is visibly stretched, as if it were one of those old wide-track Pontiacs. But you probably wouldn’t have noticed it unless I had pointed it out.

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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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