The World Trade Center on a clear day in 1990.File photo/AP

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Twenty years ago, the New York City metropolitan area awoke to shockingly blue skies. It looked set to be one of the loveliest days of the season, if not the year. Then two planes hit the World Trade Center’s twin towers. The temperature was in the mid-’60s and climbing.

There’s an aviation term for the conditions fighter pilots scrambled into, and passengers on the four hijacked jets flew through, on September 11, 2001: severe clear. It’s in every photo you see of the day, backdropping smoke, swirling papers, and falling bodies. If you were most anywhere in the northeast that day your memories carry that sky, and that early fall-like feel.

In New York now, at about the same time, it is about the same temperature, and the skies are about as clear.

Weather repeats itself. May we work to make sure history does not.

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AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

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