A woman brought in her pet sugar glider to Coston's office after the sugar glider's tail appeared to be broken. Coston agreed that it was and told the sugar glider's owner that the tail would have to come off, as the animal was so active the tail would have no time to heal. Coston completed the surgery successfully, then removed the anesthetic mask from the face of the sugar glider, Perky. "I... watched for the respiratory movements of his chest wall," Coston wrote. "There were none. I felt a cold sweat pop up on my face." Coston gave the sugar glider mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. "With a wave of relief, I felt Perky's body stiffen and his legs give a quick jerk," he wrote. "How that animal went from dead to running around the treatment room in less than ten seconds, I will never know. But before I knew it, he had jumped from my hands onto the surgery table and then climbed the stainless-steel grate covering the sink. I had to throw a towel over him like a fishnet to gain enough control to place him back in his carrier."
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.
