2021
July
19
Monday

Monitor Daily Podcast

July 19, 2021
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Clayton Collins
Director of Editorial Innovation

How can we credibly maintain hope in these times?

Consider the alarming narratives, both long-running and new: “cracks in the global order” and climate catastrophe, not to mention market woes and moon wobble. (Those are all from weekend headlines.)

Problems need to be exposed and confronted. But there’s inspiration in personal stories of adaptation and pushback. It’s real and worth reaching for. It fortifies and adds perspective.

Our new podcast, “Stronger,” resumes today with another profile in persistence. By the end of this week, it will have featured a half-dozen women who live and work at an epicenter of the economic upheaval wrought by a pandemic from which much of the world is only now kicking clear.

A colleague wrote last week about the openness and trust you can feel in this podcast – both in the empathetic approach to its reporting and from the women whose stories it tells. But there’s something else about our audio series, something intentional: It advances a counternarrative. 

In covering the very real economic setbacks dealt to women, in particular, many outlets have gone in for full, bleak accounting. One major U.S. outlet burrowed into the “loss of self-determination, of self-reliance.” Another focused on lifetime costs of $600,000 to the “typical American woman.”

Losses and costs are not the whole story, though. There’s power and hope to be found in reinvention, in resourcefulness, in reaching out to help others. “Stronger” shows what resilience can mean.


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Today’s stories

And why we wrote them

Virgin Galactic/Reuters
Billionaire Richard Branson makes a statement as crew members Beth Moses and Sirisha Bandla float in zero gravity on board Virgin Galactic's passenger rocket plane VSS Unity after reaching the edge of space above Spaceport America near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, on July 11, 2021, in a still image from video.

Listen

Photo: Samantha Laine Perfas, photo illustration: Jacob Turcotte

In year of tests, this hotel worker found community – and her voice

The Service Worker

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Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
Tomato chutney from the "Five Morsels of Love" cookbook of Indian food by Archana Pidathala. The chutney can be served on flatbread or rice.

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A Christian Science Perspective

About this feature

A message of love

Damian Dovarganes/AP
Matthew Mata, 11 months old, stands on the front seat of his father's vintage Chevrolet Corvair on Sunset Boulevard, while watching lowriders cruise in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles on July 18, 2021. Click below to read our story about lowriders’ focus on family, community, and respect.
( The illustrations in today’s Monitor Daily are by Jacob Turcotte and Karen Norris. )

A look ahead

Thanks for starting another week with us. Come back tomorrow to learn about a New York company that teaches adults – many of them women and immigrants – to overcome fear and embarrassment and learn to ride bikes, to work or with their kids.

More issues

2021
July
19
Monday
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