Art Spiegelman was born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1948 to Polish Jewish parents who had fled their own country to escape the Holocaust. The family moved to the United States when Spiegelman was three. Spiegelman began creating underground comics at the age of 16. Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s he wrote a serial comic, "Maus," which was collected and published in two volumes in 1986 and 1991. "Maus" is a sort of self-aware recording of Spiegelman's interviews with his Jewish father about his experience during the Holocaust. Jews are drawn as mice, Germans as cats, and (controversially) Poles as pigs. "Maus," which became one of the first comic books ever studied seriously as literature, won Spiegelman two National Book Critics Circle Nominations and a Special Pulitzer Prize in 1992. Spiegelman is is also known as the artist who created the first New Yorker cover after 9/11, which later became the cover for another grouping of comics titled "In the Shadow of No Towers."
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.
