Kester wrote that during his time at Harvard, if anyone became ill during an exam, the patient was taken to an isolation chamber in the hospital at the school, where the patient was forbidden from communicating with anyone until they finished the test. "My buddy Ryan experienced this prisoner-of-war treatment one time after he fainted in the middle of an exam," he wrote. "He woke up in the hospital, where he stayed for the next four days.... his parents became concerned when he wasn't on his flight home for winter vacation. When they called Harvard inquiring into Ryan's whereabouts, the university informed them that their son was recuperating from a case of meningitis, and – good news! – the doctors were now confident he would recover enough to live a full and active life, after he regained his vision and completed his exam, of course. Ryan's parents asked to speak with him, but their request was denied in case they happened to know a thing or two about quantum algorithms."
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.
