After having a nanny for a short while, Zevin and his wife conducted a search for another nanny to work part-time (something they ultimately decided against). Zevin says that many of their friends were certain they themselves had the perfect nanny. One mother named Paige enthusiastically recommended a nanny named Anling and finished her list of Anling's good points with "It's not important to you that she gets English, right?" "I paused," Zevin wrote. "'Well, maybe not perfectly, but-' 'Good, because Angling doesn't get English. We loved that about her.' I guess I could have asked what, specifically, it was they loved about Anling's not getting English, but it just seemed like too much to tackle at that point... I tried to be tactful. 'But what if there was ever an emergency situation? How would she be able to explain what was wrong?' 'Oh, you new dads!' said Paige, laughing at me. 'With Anling, there won't ever be an emergency situation!' I would like to note at this point that any New Yorker who can state unequivocally that 'there won't ever be an emergency situation' has crossed a line from cockeyed optimism to blind denial."
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.
