Everyone in the pool at the Marmont, wrote Sarlot and Basten, seemed to be waiting for an important phone call from a producer or director, and since there was only one phone near the pool itself, many brought their phones out as far as they could go from the houses surrounding it. When a phone would ring, it was often hard to tell which it was because there were so many. "Whoever was [in the water] would surface in a flash, wide-eyed in anticipation," Sarlot and Basten wrote of those who were underwater when a phone rang. "But no one hurtled out of the pool – and no one along the sidelines made the first move to answer the calls. Only after a suitable pause would some brave soul give in. Then there was a hush, as everyone waited for his or her name to be called... One of the regulars confessed... 'Who in Hollywood would dare appear so anxious, or insecure, as to ask, "Is it for me?"'"
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.
