Typhoon Vera is the most destructive storm in Japanese recorded history, and it claimed over 5,000 lives when it touched down in Central Japan in late September, with damage particularly severe around Nagoya. The AP wrote at the time: "Vast areas of crops were ruined. Sea walls were breached, rivers flooded from the torrential rains, ships beached, houses smashed and communications seriously damaged." Then, as now in The Philippines, US troops were involved in the rescue efforts (though of course the US still maintained a vast military presence there). "Despite heroic rescue efforts by police and Japanese and US troops, thousands were still marooned on Nagoya rooftops," the AP reported on Sept. 30. "The commander of US forces in Japan, Lt. Gen. Robert W. Burns, ordered all available US servicemen to join in the relief work." The devastation prompted Japan to establish a long-range radar system on Mt. Fuji to detect storms before they make landfall.
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.
