March/April 2009

Spring Break: Service Gone Wild

Can good deeds and learning compete with wet T-shirt contests and random hookups? You decide.

Illustration: Gordon Studer

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For spring break fun, can good deeds and learning compete with wet T-shirt contests and random hookups? You decide.

Rite of Spring: Tequila shots
Righteous Spring: Measles shots. Public health students from the University of Michigan spend their vacation observing a childhood vaccination program in China.

Rite of Spring: Señor Frog’s
Righteous Spring: See more frogs. Life Changing Travel’s Galapagos Islands trip has students building trails, adding native plants, and working at the islands’ research stations.

Rite of Spring: Gaudy cruise
Righteous Spring: Godly crusade. Students spend four days lobbying with the Oregon Right to Life Education Foundation. Highlight: the quiz game “Who Wants to Be a Pro-Lifer?”

Rite of Spring: Contracting stds
Righteous Spring: Preventing them via an AmeriCorps condom distribu­tion and sex ed trip to Charlotte, North Carolina

Rite of Spring: Drama
Righteous Spring: Dharma. A retreat at Virginia’s Radford University includes an ass-numbing 15 hours of silent meditation.

Rite of Spring: Crossing the border
Righteous Spring: Walking the border. University of California-Berkeley students tour the routes used by illegal immigrants coming into the US. ­But instead of following los coyotes, the students are guided by la migra.

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GREAT JOURNALISM, SLOW FUNDRAISING

Our team has been on fire lately—publishing sweeping, one-of-a-kind investigations, ambitious, groundbreaking projects, and even releasing “the holy shit documentary of the year.” And that’s on top of protecting free and fair elections and standing up to bullies and BS when others in the media don’t.

Yet, we just came up pretty short on our first big fundraising campaign since Mother Jones and the Center for Investigative Reporting joined forces.

So, two things:

1) If you value the journalism we do but haven’t pitched in over the last few months, please consider doing so now—we urgently need a lot of help to make up for lost ground.

2) If you’re not ready to donate but you’re interested enough in our work to be reading this, please consider signing up for our free Mother Jones Daily newsletter to get to know us and our reporting better. Maybe once you do, you’ll see it’s something worth supporting.

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