One week, Zevin's mother offered to take his two children with her to the mall while she returned items. "It'll be fun," Zevin's mother told him. "I've got a bunch of stuff to return. They'll have a ball." "Though you may wonder how returning merchandise to the mall could possibly be fun for children – or for any living organism at any stage of its life cycle – one thing I've always admired about my mother is her genuine joy of returning," Zevin wrote. "Even way back when she'd bring me, my brother and my sister to the Short Hills Mall (on an average of seven nights a week), buying stuff was always just half the transaction. The other half was bringing it all back to request a refund, rebate, exchange, exemption, credit, coupon, voucher, prize, certificate, explanation, apology, and/or affidavit... All these years later, my embarrassment has turned to respect. I tried to return Leo's coat to the store the other day because the zipper was busted. Within five minutes, I was fighting with the saleslady. I gave up when she said I should take better care of my children's clothes."
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.
