10 best Facebook apps and games

Bejeweled Blitz

PopCap/Screenshot
Bejeweled Blitz players must match up identical gems in rows of three in order to score points and beat rivals on Facebook.

It’s a Facebook classic that boasts more than 5 million likes. Match up gems to get a high score in 60 seconds. Then compete with your Facebook friends for the top score. Simple, sure, but it’s a great way to ignore the person who’s Facebook chatting you nonstop. For those of you who don’t do well under pressure, Bejeweled 3 (which does not have a Facebook app) offers some calmer game modes, including Zen, which has no time limit. But until PopCap Games makes an app for Bejeweled 3, the sudden-death format of Bejeweled Blitz will do quite nicely.

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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.

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