Billy Collins’s Horoscopes for the Dead, which was No. 1 the week of March 18th, raises very different questions. In this collection, his ninth, Collins – a former poet laureate of the United States – explores various facets of time, morality, and death. His musings, which are darker and lighter by turn, begin with his opening poem, in which he stands at his parents’ grave and asks what they think of his new glasses. Some readers won’t enjoy that edgy humor, or his suggestion later in the book that the dead make room for the living. Yet many of the poems will please, as when he describes a globe he received, or his reaction in “Good News,” after learning that his dog does not have cancer. After that phone call, he explains, “everything took on a different look/ and appeared to be better than it usually is.”
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.
