Moran writes that, in her experience, many women read meaning into random actions by the men they're dating. "'Listen to this e-mail,' a friend will say," she writes. "'He's put, "Rachel, good to see you! Great night! We should do it again sometime." That's really noncommittal, isn't it?' 'It does sound fairly noncommittal, yes,' I will agree. 'But then,' Rachel will go on, using the special 'slightly mad' tone of voice all women use during these conversations, 'he sent it at 4 p.m.' She pauses. I make a confused sound. '4 p.m.!' she says again. 'So he would still have been at work when he sent it! So maybe he was worried someone might look over his shoulder and see it, so he's kept it deliberately a little cool.' [Then she adds] 'I looked at his Facebook page, and he's changed his favorite songs list and included 'Here Comes the Hotstepper' by Ini Kamoze. AND WE WERE TALKING ABOUT INI KAMOZE DURING DINNER!' 'Rachel, I think that if he liked you, he'd just.... spend a lot more time with you, and say things like, "I really like you,"' I say. 'But don't you think that's kind of significant, though?' Rachel will plead. 'I don't think you change your Facebook playlist FOR NO REASON AT ALL. It's a message to me.' After an hour of this, I give up trying to persuade her that none of this means anything at all. There's no point in trying."
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.
