Mother Jones is one of my sources for posts on this blog.
I like Mother Jones, both to read myself and use as a source, because it’s real journalism: Truthful, honest, factual, informative. Sadly, these qualities are in short supply in much of today’s media, so I treasure sources where they still exist.
One of its writers is leaving, and in his farewell column (here), he says, “Each time you read one of these posts is a gift. Your time and mental capacity are gifts.”
In no small part, my posts are me thinking out loud, so this blog might still exist even without readers. But it does have readers.
They’re predominantly in the U.S., but this week, readers have come from Canada, Germany, Russia, Brazil, and Pakistan. And over the last month, also readers in China, Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines, India, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, the U.K., Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, and Turkey.
In case you don’t know, this blog was founded in Seattle by the late Dr. Steven Schwartz, a University of Washington medical researcher, and I’m also in Seattle. But following his death from Covid-19 in March 2020, it’s not very Seattle-centric anymore, as I draw on national and global news sources for my postings.
Dr. Schwartz and I were friends, and one thing we had in common is that both of us were steeped in academic culture, and worked in professions demanding a high degree of intellectual integrity and factual accuracy (he was a doctor; I started as a newspaper reporter, then became a lawyer). While I have no editor, nor anyone supervising me, I self-adhere to those values. I hope doing so makes this blog valuable to its far-flung readership.
Which brings me back full-circle to what the Mother Jones columnist said: Your time and attention is a gift from you to me, and a vote of confidence in my own writing and work. As we begin another new year, I, too, want to say: THANK YOU SO FREAKING MUCH.