Continuing with my Overexposed LA™ series, this is one of my favorites—although it’s not especially overexposed, is it? In any case, you may recall a story a couple of months ago about going up to Griffith Observatory, taking a wrong turn, and then stopping because I saw a picture I had to take right away. This is it. While I was looking for a spot to turn around, I looked out the car window and saw the observatory with the moon rising right above it, so I pulled over at my first opportunity and ran back with my tripod in hand to get this picture. I really like it.

As it turned out, my “first opportunity” to pull over was a spot that didn’t allow parking. Luckily for me, another guy saw me parking and apparently figured that if I was parking there, it must be OK. Not so. When I huffed and puffed my way back, his car was being towed away. If he hadn’t been there, it probably would have been me being towed away. Needless to say, I hopped into my car and took off before anyone had a chance to get a second tow truck up there. Then I zipped over to the observatory and took this picture, another of my favorites. It was a very productive half hour of photography.

June 28, 2018 — Los Angeles, California

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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.

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