The 1987 quirky fairy tale directed by Rob Reiner follows Wesley (Cary Elwes), a farm boy who falls in love with Buttercup (Robin Wright), the daughter of the family for whom he works. Wesley goes to sea to try to earn money so they can be together, but soon a multitude of obstacles stand in their way, including a sinister prince, a man with six fingers, a sword-fighting Spaniard, and a Machiavellian plotter who likes to shout, "Inconceivable!" The writer of the original book, William Goldman, visited the set one day when a scene was being filmed in which Wright's dress became engulfed in flames when she was in a fire swamp. Goldman got so caught up in the scene that he yelled, "Her dress is on fire!" and they had to shoot the scene again.
Mark Sappenfield
Editor
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.
