When Deresiewicz was assigned to read "Emma" for a literature class in school, he did so, he writes, with an eye-roll. "Everything was so unbearably banal," he wrote. He quickly grew tired of the long passages in which the protagonist Emma's father or a character named Miss Bates would go on for what seemed like forever about the grandchildren or receiving a letter. Then he reached the part in the book where Emma, who finds Miss Bates intolerably boring, insults her in front of multiple people, and Deresiewicz suddenly realized that Austen was showing readers the unkind thoughts they'd been having about this character. "By creating a heroine who felt exactly as I did, and who behaved precisely as I would have in her situation, she was showing me my own ugly face," he wrote. Deresiewicz also quickly realized why Austen had her characters discuss mundane matters for pages. "Those small, 'trivial,' everyday things, the things that happen hour by hour to the people in our lives," he wrote. "That, she was telling us, is what the fabric of our years really consists of. That is what life is really about." Deresiewicz says he also recognized Emma's self-importance in himself and realized that his intellectual airs were harming him more than helping him.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
