2019
March
07
Thursday

Monitor Daily Podcast

March 07, 2019
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Yvonne Zipp
Features Editor

Every Tuesday evening, Belinda George climbs into a pair of pajamas and reads a bedtime story to her kids.

All of her kids.

The principal of Homer Drive Elementary in Beaumont, Texas, reads on Facebook live so that every child at her elementary school can have the experience of someone who cares about them reading to them and wishing them good night.

In addition to “Tuck-in Tuesdays,” she also hosts dance parties and will show up at a child’s home if the child needs help. (As word has spread beyond the school district, children from out of state have started tuning in to watch Ms. George, wearing, say, a giant pair of red-and-black wings, read “Ladybug Girl.”)

“If a child feels loved they will try [in school],” Ms. George told The Washington Post. “There’s no science about it.”

Parents also need someone to show them the way, and for Jessica Ullian, that person was Brookline, Massachusetts, children’s librarian Paula Sharaga.

“Paula taught me to be a mother. Not how to nurse or change diapers, but how to play and sing and make noises that seemed like nonsense to me, but were an endless delight to my child,” Jessica Ullian writes in a tribute on WBUR of the joy she and her daughter found in the Coolidge Corner Library basement with Ms. Sharaga and her puppet, Mrs. Perky Bird.

After hearing about Ms. Sharaga’s death, Ms. Ullian wondered: “Who will teach everyone else how to parent now that she’s gone?”

So, in honor of Ms. George and Ms. Sharaga, grab a book, snuggle up with a little one, and make your silliest sound.

Now for our five stories of the day.


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Today’s stories

And why we wrote them

Kin Cheung/AP
A worker manned a mobile-phone production line during a media tour of a Huawei factory in Dongguan, Guangdong Province, China. The firm, one of the world's biggest suppliers of telecommunications equipment, filed suit March 6 against the U.S. government over a product ban.

Briefing

Saud Abu Ramadan
Mohammed Musbaih has tried to hide his anguish from his family, his father says, after his leg was amputated after being shot by Israeli sniper fire at the Gaza border fence.

A deeper look

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
A sign on the sidewalk welcomes people to Simple Church, which is held around a dinner table at a cafe in Worcester, Mass.

Alternative churches: the future of religion?

SOURCE:

Pew Research Center

|
Jacob Turcotte/Staff

The Monitor's View

Reuters
Muslims pray at the Sunda Kelapa Port in Jakarta, Indonesia.

A Christian Science Perspective

About this feature

A message of love

Fabian Sommer/dpa/AP
Visitors view vintage cars at the Retro Classics fair in Stuttgart, Germany, March 7.
( The illustrations in today’s Monitor Daily are by Jacob Turcotte. )

A look ahead

Come back tomorrow. Is the music industry having its #MeToo moment? With Michael Jackson and R. Kelly in the headlines, we’ll look at how young musicians are forcing the business to finally confront sexual exploitation that’s as deeply ingrained as the grooves of a vinyl record.

More issues

2019
March
07
Thursday
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