2018
September
17
Monday

Monitor Daily Podcast

September 17, 2018
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Mark Sappenfield
Senior global correspondent

For a week in 2017, Max Karlsson was the voice of Sweden. If you have never heard of Mr. Karlsson, don’t fret. The rest of the world had never heard of him, either. He just happened to be one of about 360 everyday Swedes chosen by the Swedish Institute to run the @sweden Twitter account for a week during the past seven years. 

The experiment often plunged into the ridiculous, including a Twitter war with Denmark about moose. The chosen Swedes, after all, could pretty much tweet about anything they liked. Nothing illegal, nothing promotional, nothing dangerous, nothing discriminatory. Other than that, go nuts.

Quirky, yes. But also a statement. The Swedish Institute, which promotes the country worldwide, wasn’t scared by what its citizens would say. After all, there isn’t just one Sweden; there are many, the government wrote on the project website. What makes Sweden special are Swedes themselves.

The project has now ended, with the institute saying it has run its course. But the spirit is bigger than a Twitter feed. Behind democracy is the conviction that no one person speaks for a country. We all do. “Being on social media is to let go of control,” an official with the institute told The New York Times, “but if you want to show Sweden as an open country, this is how to do it.” 

Now, here are our five stories for today, with glimpses of the power of practicality in the Carolinas, a new humility in economics, and many Israelis’ changing views of Arabic. 


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Today’s stories

And why we wrote them

Patrik Jonsson/The Christian Science Monitor
Shrimp boats were clustered on shore ahead of hurricane (now tropical depression) Florence at the Swan Quarter, N.C., harbor, just outside an $18 million, 18-mile-long dike that protects the Hyde County seat.
Jacob Turcotte/Staff

Patterns

Tracing global connections
Victor Mazuz
Israeli singers Achinoam Nini, Mira Awad, and Gil Dor perform at a July 31 rally in Tel Aviv that featured a mass Arabic lesson. Nini, who is Jewish, and Awad, who is Arab-Israeli, are known for performing together in Hebrew and Arabic.

The Monitor's View


A Christian Science Perspective

About this feature

A message of love

Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP/File
An interview was conducted in 2015 near a statue of Junipero Serra in Carmel-by-the-Sea, Calif. Northern California’s Stanford University announced Sunday that it will drop the name of the 18th-century Spanish priest – canonized by Pope Francis in 2015 – from two dormitories and its mailing address. Serra founded the first nine of 21 missions built by Spanish colonists from 1769–1823, a system now charged with having destroyed native culture throughout California. An advisory committee acknowledged the “sense of loss” that alumni and others might feel at the changes, the AP reported, but also called the Serra name a source of “genuine pain.”
( The illustrations in today’s Monitor Daily are by Jacob Turcotte. )

A look ahead

Thank you for spending time with us today. We’ll be back tomorrow with the second part of staff writer Harry Bruinius’s look into what justice means for the survivors of sexual abuse by church leaders. If you didn’t see the first part, you can read it here

More issues

2018
September
17
Monday
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