One of Shakespeare’s most villainous villains, Aaron never changes even as he faces his death, maintaining, “If one good deed in all my life I did, / I do repent it from my very Soule.” He is the primary provoker of the horrific violence that takes place in the play, but the most terrifying aspect of him is that he has no obvious motivation for it. He gets pleasure from bringing other people pain. He wants to be hated. To take revenge on Titus, he plots and carries out his daughter’s rape and, then, cuts out her tongue and chops off her hands so that she cannot identify her attacker. He then frames Titus’s two sons for Bassianus’s murder and cruelly bargains with Titus when he tries to set his boys free. All the while Aaron laughs to the audience as he describes his brutal plans.
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.
