January 7, 2016

Is Being a Modern Teen Really a Relentless Slog of Existential Angst?

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I was just at the bookstore, and on a whim I browsed through a bunch of “Teen Fiction” titles. Good God. I’ve never seen such a pile of depressing writing in my life. Everyone is sick, abandoned, kidnapped, bullied, overweight, comes from a broken family, survived a school shooting, or caught in the middle of a gothic horror. The horror books actually seemed the most uplifting.

I dunno. Maybe they all have happy endings? In any case, if these books are typical of what teens read these days, I’m halfway surprised that any of them make it out of adolescence with their psyches intact.

On the bright side, I learned a new word: Unputdownable. So it wasn’t a total loss.

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We've never been very good at being conservative.

And usually, that serves us well in doing the ambitious, hard-hitting journalism that you turn to Mother Jones for. But it also means we can't afford to come up short when it comes to scratching together the funds it takes to keep our team firing on all cylinders, and the truth is, we finished our budgeting cycle on June 30 about $100,000 short of our online goal.

This is no time to come up short. It's time to fight like hell, as our namesake would tell us to do, for a democracy where minority rule cannot impose an extreme agenda, where facts matter, and where accountability has a chance at the polls and in the press. If you value our reporting and you can right now, please help us dig out of the $100,000 hole we're starting our new budgeting cycle in with an always-needed and always-appreciated donation today.

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