Take the "Hunger Games" love triangle and place it against the dystopian society of Huxley's "Brave New World" and you get "Matched." All her life Cassia has naively accepted her seemingly perfect society. Every aspect of her life is decided for her, what to read and to think, right down to her partner. When she is matched with her closest friend, Xander, she can't stop thinking about the mysterious Ky Markham, whose face appeared on the match screen for a split second before being replaced with Xander's face. Although she is told that his appearance on the screen was a mistake, she is falling in love with him anyway. Cassia begins to question the Society for the first time in her life. Now she must make the hardest choice she has ever had to make: Will she choose Xander or Ky? And will she accept the life Society has given her – or choose a different path that may shatter everything she has?
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.
