When she focused on parenting, Rubin tried to adopt a policy of underreacting to situations. "I also found that underreacting to little household accidents made them less irritating, because after all, they were only as annoying as I allowed them to be," she wrote. "When [her daughter] Eliza raced into the kitchen to say, 'I didn't mean to, it was an accident... but, well, a bottle of purple nail polish spilled on my carpet. It fell off a shelf and the top was off,' I didn't leap to my feet to yell, 'Why was a bottle of nail polish sitting open on a shelf?' or 'You're eleven years old! Don't you know how careful you need to be with nail polish?' or 'Why do we even own purple nail polish?' Instead, I calmly went to her room, told her to look for stain removal suggestions on the Internet, looked at the stain, and then spent a few minutes scrubbing it.... She looked relieved that she wasn't in trouble, and I'd spared myself a session of pointless anger."
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.
