San Francisco resident Anthony LaVia says he sees a difference between the items and excursions his parents will spend money on and what he, his wife and their friends choose. "My parents take frequent vacations and buy the newest cars and junk," LaVia said. "This is a typical boomer mentality that, to me, seems frivolous. When my parents visit, I think it's ludicrous that they'll spend a hundred dollars to buy us dinner at a restaurant like California Pizza Kitchen, exactly like what they've got at home.... For my wife and me and our friends, life is all about being scrappy and inventive. We buy only things that last.... You'll find almost no single-use or disposable goods in our house.... To us Costco is mostly a money pit. What's the use of getting such a great deal on a giant box of Goldfish crackers if they go stale before you eat them all?" Koslow wrote that after speaking with LaVia, she "sheepishly went to my refrigerator to evaluate the monster hunk of cheddar that I'd been enticed by at Costco two months earlier. Moldy."
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.
