Eddard, known as Ned, is the patriarch of the Stark family and an old friend of the current king, Robert Baratheon. In the country of Westeros, there is a post called the Hand of the King, and whoever holds it serves as the most trusted adviser to the king and is allowed to give verdicts in the king's stead. The Hand of the King is second only to the king in power. After the last Hand dies, the king asks his friend Ned to take the post. Ned is reluctant, not wanting to leave his family, but finally agrees when his wife's sister sends a message saying she believes there was foul play in the death of the previous Hand, and Ned believes that the king may be in danger because of that. Eddard discovers that the queen, Cersei, and her twin brother, Jaime, are having an incestuous affair and that the children Cersei bore that were believed to be the king's are in fact Jaime's. He confronts Cersei with the knowledge, and she imprisons him for treason. Cersei says that he will be let go to join the Night's Watch, a fighting force that guards the border, but Cersei's son Joffrey, who has come to the throne after his father's death, condemns him to death unexpectedly, and Ned is beheaded.
Mark Sappenfield
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.
