April 23, 2020

Evil Dex Update

The Evil Dex.Kevin Drum

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I’ll bet you’re tired of hearing about COVID-19, aren’t you? What you’d really like is to hear someone griping about some other disease. I’m here to help.

Back in 2014, when I went through my first round of chemo, part of the treatment was dexamethasone. The dose was 20 mg every Friday, and on Sunday I would crash as the dex wore off. This usually happened in the afternoon and lasted a couple of hours. I would fall hard asleep during the first quarter of some football game and then wake up in the fourth quarter.

Today, I still take dex. The dose is 4 mg every Friday and on Sunday I crash. For about eight hours. I fall asleep around 10 am and wake up a little before dinner time. Then on Monday I do the same for two or three hours.

Plus I take a second dose on Monday, so I crash for eight hours on Wednesday and another few hours on Thursday.

Altogether, then, I spend something like 20+ daytime hours in a deep dex stupor these days even though I’m taking a fraction of the dose I used to take. This is ridiculous. On the bright side, that’s 20 hours when I’m not tempted to leave the house. So there’s that.

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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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