Moran planned to leave an hour early and take the subway when she went to interview then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Because of a problem with the printer at her office, she ended up missing the train she planned to take and called a cab, then waited. "Already, it's very, very clear that when the controller said, 'Yes – we have cars free!' what he meant was, 'Yes – we have cars free! Free to do whatever they like! Play in the sun; drive round and round the park really slowly. Sit and enjoy the sheer joy of North London," she wrote. The cab finally arrived. "[The driver] is the man who will cause my death when he says, 'I don't know where Downing Street is,'" Moran wrote. "This is, I admit, difficult information for me to process. On the one hand, I am alarmed that the cab driver doesn't know where 10 Downing Street – one of the most famous addresses in the world – is. On the other hand, I don't either, really. Is it quite near the Strand?"
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.
