Zevin says that every Saturday, he and his wife try to have a date night, but that this was tough at first because their son and daughter would begin crying when they would leave. "The babysitter would arrive around seven, and we'd spend the first fifteen dollars of her hourly rate tending to the children's shrieking separation anxiety," he wrote. "On a good night, we'd have them silenced by the thirty-dollar mark, at which point we'd bolt out and eat an egg roll around the block... But this was in the early stages of date night, when we still believed those baby books that said it's bad to sneak out on your kids without saying goodbye because they'll get an abandonment complex. Now we never say goodbye. When the sitter shows up, we just turn on the Disney Channel and disappear. Our kids couldn't care less if we ever come back. It's a win-win. Once we learned to abandon our children each Saturday night with no explanation, date night really blossomed."
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.
