Confidential to Amy Winehouse

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winehouse-250x400.jpgI’m worried about little Amy.

I’m not a huge fan of her music, but I liked Rehab and her whole downtown, big hair, hard partying girl schtick. She’s the antithesis of the fake-squeaky clean, “I’ll pretend to be a virgin,” blonde plastic Barbie Hollywood crams down our throats everyday.

But that was when I thought she knew what her limits, however stratospheric, were. Clearly, she does not. Way she’s going, she’s gonna wake up dead one day, as a grizzled old west Texas cowboy I used to know put it.

Girlfriend, fresh from a collapse and a grim diagnosis, just spoiled her reemergence by cold cocking a fan during a concert. Now, it’s every woman’s right—nay, her duty—to slap the crap out of any man who gropes her, but given the increasing likelihood that record companies may rethink their investment in what may be a very short career, Winehouse might oughta have let those enormous bouncers flanking her flatten the twerp. Amy, Amy, Amy—what are you doing?

But here’s what I also dread: That bad-ass Amy Winehouse will get straight…and then go straight.

There’s no doubt in my mind that if Britney Spears ever pulls it together—and I sincerely hope she does—she’ll go all chirpy Christian and ‘ain’t life grand?’ on us. She’ll start a foundation to ’empower’ young girls. She’ll lead anti-smoking campaigns and re-virgination ceremonies. She’ll get all “up with people,” and give us all diabetes with her newfound sweetness.

Ah, the future talk of enjoying sunsets and how she gets high on little Skeevy and Bucket, or whatever her poor, benighted kids are named. What else can we expect from the only adequately talented, or interesting, Spears? Here’s hoping she lives a long time to bore the hell out of us with her Christian Pop comeback and near-Mormon sons.

But Amy—I’m hoping for a snarling recovery in which she terrorizes the staff at Betty Ford and refuses to let anyone around her drink or do drugs. Not because she’s so holy, post-recovery, but because she’s such a bitch.

“If I can’t get high, no one can, mate!” or whatever it is that a downtown Brit would say in such a situation. I want to hear her sing songs about how much fun crack was and how she wished she could still do it. I want to hear her dish on the other celebs puking in their $20,000 a week suites at the clinic, how many of them she shagged, how many of them she karate chopped. I want to see paparazzi photos of her bitch slapping that godawful husband of hers into sobriety along with her.

Even better, shots of her stone, cold sober throwing him and all his clothes from the window of their flat.

I hope Winehouse the junkie “dies” so that Winehouse the magnificent bitch survives to terrorize the weak for a long, long time. Get well, Amy, but don’t get nice.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

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