Scotsman Andy Murray gave Britain its first men’s tennis champion in a Grand Slam event in 76 years, or since Fred Perry won the 1936 US championships (the current-day US Open). And Murray did it in grand style, winning the US Open crown against defending champion Novak Djokovic, 7-6 (12-10), 7-5, 2-6, 3-6, 6-2 in a match that lasted a record-tying 4 hours, 56 minutes. Thus he became only the second player in the Open era besides his coach, Ivan Lendl, to lose his first four Slam finals before breaking through. This was a glorious encore to the gold medal that he won at the London Olympics playing on the same Wimbledon center court where just weeks earlier he lost to seven-time champion Roger Federer in the men’s final.
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.
