Top 10 highest-paid celebrities in 2015: Cristiano Ronaldo, Taylor Swift, and...Garth Brooks?

Forbes released its annual 'Celebrity 100' list on Monday, a ranking of the richest celebrities across the globe according to their earnings over the past year. Who's number one?

8. Robert Downey Jr.

Jay Maidment/Disney/Marvel/AP/File
Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man/Tony Stark in the 2015 film, "Avengers: Age Of Ultron."

The actor grossed $80 million, tying Ms. Swift for the No. 8 spot on the list. Mr. Downey’s earnings come his role as Tony Stark in ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron.’ The Disney/Marvel film recently became the fifth film in history to pass the $900 million mark internationally, according to Deadline. The film is currently the second-highest grossing movie for 2015, just behind ‘Fast & Furious 7.’ In 2008, Downey was dubbed one of Time magazine’s most influential people in the world.

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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.

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