After volunteering to take Prim's place in the Hunger Games, Katniss receives several visitors. Among them is her friend Madge Undersee, who convinces Katniss to take her mockingjay pin as her tribute token – an object a tribute is allowed to carry to the games to boost morale. The pin with a mockingjay on it is a small gesture of rebellion to the evil Capitol that rules their world. The Capitol tried to breed jabberjays, birds that would relay conversations back to government officials, but the experiment was a failure when people began lying in the presence of the jabberjays. Jabberjays then mated with mockingbirds to create the mockingjay, a bird that only repeats songs it has heard. The mockingjays are a reminder to the government of the collapse of the jabberjay plan, and the bird becomes an important symbol for Katniss in later books.
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.
