1. Everything I Need to Know I Learned From a Little Golden Book, by Diane Muldrow, Golden Books
2. The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert, Holt
3. The Boys in the Boat, by Daniel James Brown, Viking
4. Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade, by Walter Kirn, Liveright
5. David and Goliath, by Malcolm Gladwell, Little Brown
6. Grain Brain, by David Perlmutter, Little Brown
7. Uganda Be Kidding Me, by Chelsea Handler, Grand Central
8. The Future of the Mind, by Michio Kaku, Doubleday
9. The Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet, by Mark Hyman, Little Brown
10. Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand, Random House
11. The Sibley Guide to Birds, Second Edition, by David Allen Sibley, Knopf
12. Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, by Brigid Schulte, Sarah Crichton Books
13. 10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works, by Dan Harris, It Books
14. Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire, by Peter Stark, Ecco
15. You Can Date Boys When You're Forty: Dave Barry on Parenting and Other Topics He Knows Very Little About, by Dave Barry, Putnam
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.
