THE TIPPING POINT

Turns out we’ll need just a couple more days before we can put the tip jar on top of the piano. We want to get absolutely everything right – beta-tested, designed, aligned – to make giving a donation to the site as easy and reliable as humanly possible. There will be three options – the Amazon link, a separate credit card link that will give 100 percent to the site (rather than 15 percent to Amazon), and an old-fashioned address to send old-fashioned checks to. We’re anticipating that most of you will prefer to give once a year, if at all, so don’t worry about constant badgering or PBS-style pledge weeks. And we hope to set up a page on the site for any of you who want to be recognized as major donors of over $100. (A buck a month or nothing at all is just as acceptable, if not, obviously, as welcome). Jonah Goldberg, a friend and jolly chap, predicted last week that this business model for the web wouldn’t work. We have only to wait till Wednesday to prove him wrong.