This is yet another panoramic photo. In order to get the whole thing, I pointed the camera toward my feet and snapped a picture, then pointed it higher, then higher, and finally pointed it up toward the houses in the background. Put all these shots together and you get the full shadow.

But! As you can see, I attracted company, which means the first photo has a cat in it. But where is the cat’s shadow? The answer is that it was there in the first shot, but in the second shot it wasn’t because the cat had moved away. When Photoshop merged all the shots, it chose the second one for the middle part, and the second one had no shadow. So you end up with a person with a gigantic shadow and a cat with no shadow. Weird.

Alternatively, the cat is actually a vampire. They’re the ones that cast no shadows, right?

August 27, 2020 — Garden Grove, California

WE CAME UP SHORT.

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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