Groth got to know mythic New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell extremely well during her time at the New Yorker and, after talking with him on the subway one night by chance, began soon after to have lunch with him every Friday, a tradition that lasted until she left the magazine. "[His] hair silvered early and seemed to go with his impeccable tailoring and courtly southern manners," she wrote. Once, Groth, Mitchell, and the New Yorker writer Abbott Joseph Liebling went to a seafood restaurant where food was often presented exactly as it had been caught. "They thought it great fun to see me squirm as the waiter brought their order for me," Groth wrote. "Baby squid prepared in its own ink, a hairy concoction that seemed to sprout seaweed and feelers and eyes. Everything at the Red Devil got served in its own ink, or its own shell, or with its spine and bones intact."
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.
