For years Neill has been working for Amiante Systems, an artificial intelligence company, in an effort to build the world’s first sentient computer. Using the thousands of pages of journal entries his father left behind when he committed suicide, Neill is literally working to input language and human responses – in the form of his father’s words – into the system. After his very short-lived marriage melts down, Neill must do everything possible go keep his life from running off the rails. But when he discovers a missing year in the diaries, he becomes obsessed with the notion that this year and what happened in it holds the key to his father’s suicide and his parents’ marriage. A deftly managed novel about the ways we move on and the ways we don’t, the stock we put in memory and language, and the incompetent ways that we strive to love each other.
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.
