Mah studied andouillette, or a sausage made with parts of a cow or pig, including the intestines. She found it hard to stand the idea of the food at first, but was helped somewhat by learning the history of it. Mah discovered that in 1560, the French national army went to attack the town of Troyes and were routed by an unexpected, supposedly delicious, smell. "Royal soldiers breached the city walls and spread through the narrow cobblestone streets of the Saint-Denis neighborhood, where they suddenly halted en masse, drawn to the allegedly tantalizing aroma rising from the quartier's tripe shops. They lingered, stuffing themselves with andouillette, which gave the town's troops time to assemble and swoop to victory in a surprise attack."
Mark Sappenfield
Editor
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.
