Just 15 minutes north of The Mount in Pittsfield is Arrowhead, the house where Herman Melville lived for his most productive literary years. Named Arrowhead for the Indian arrowheads unearthed around the house during planting season, the house sits at the bottom of Mount Greylock in the Berkshires. While at Arrowhead from 1850 to 1865, Melville wrote his most famous work, "Moby Dick," as well his other novels, including "Pierre" (which he dedicated to Mount Greylock), "The Confidence-Man," and "Israel Potter." He also wrote "The Piazza Tales," a collection of short stories including "Benito Cereno" and "Bartleby the Scrivener." Frequent visitors included Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Catharine Maria Sedgwick. Although he is now considered a great author, Melville's books did not bring in much money during his lifetime. Finances forced him to sell Arrowhead to his brother and move to New York in 1865.
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.
