Zevin went on vacation with his family to Disneyland and says that his daughter found Rainforest Cafe, a theme restaurant built to resemble the environment, surprisingly scary. "There we all were, happily enjoying our nightly intake of chicken fingers, tenders, strips and/or nuggets," Zevin wrote. "Suddenly, the place goes pitch-black, a roar of thunder rips through the room, and a simulated lightning storm sends the taxidermy [animals] into a frenzy of shrieking and squawking." Because Zevin's daughter Josie was upset, her uncle suggested she order a chocolate volcano for dessert. "Little did he know this remedy would be dispensed by a team of actors/waiters who stampede around your table screaming, 'Vol-can-o! Vol-can-o! Vol-can-o!'" Zevin says he flashed back to when he and his wife saw a real volcano erupt in Indonesia. "It was pretty scary," Zevin wrote. "The presentation of the chocolate one was scarier. I finally had to slip one of the screaming actor/waiters ten bucks and ask him to take it down a notch."
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.
