October 12, 2009

Need To Read: October 12, 2009

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Today’s must-reads are at work on Columbus Day:

  • “Is Columbus Day Sailing Off the Calendar?” [WSJ]
  • Obama’s speech on gay equality was “highfalutin bullshit” [Sullivan/The Atlantic]
  • Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell protects bigots [WaPo op ed]
  • Great Recession Landmark: 100 failed US banks [NYTimes]
  • Nobel Prize in economics goes to Americans Oliver Williamson and Elinor Ostrom, the first woman win the award [BBC]
  • George Soros invests a cool billion in clean tech [FT]
  • “Yes We Can (Get Republicans to Support Climate Bill)” [NYTimes op ed]
  • Obama should earn that Nobel at the Copenhagen Climate Conference [MoJo]
  • The White House goes on the offensive against Fox News [TPM]
  • Iran sentences three post-election protesters to death [AP]
  • Armenia and Turkey sign a peace deal and reopen their border for the first time since 1993 [Reuters]
  • The dangers of drudgery: bad jobs are killing people [The Economist]
  • Google co-founder Sergey Brin defends the controversial Google Books project [NYTimes op ed]
  • Listen to Michael Jackson’s final single, the appropriately titled “This Is It” [Bitten and Bound]

Nick Baumann posts pieces like these throughout the day on twitter. You should follow him for more must-reads. David Corn, Mother Jones’ DC bureau chief, also tweets. So do my colleagues Daniel Schulman, Rachel Morris, Kate Sheppard and our editors-in-chief, Clara Jeffery and Monika Bauerlein. Follow them too! (The magazine’s main account is @motherjones.)

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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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