At one point, Ewalt embarked on a live-action role-playing weekend in which he and his team members participated in an adventure. Like D&D, the story was prepped in advance by the people who ran the LARPing event, and Ewalt says the staff members also had to contend with the difficulties of playing various roles in the story – a process he found fascinating. "They have to make quick changes and move rapidly from one area of the camp to another," he writes. "In the staff area of the main lodge there's a massive spreadsheet hung on the walls, stretching from floor to ceiling, easily sixty feet long. It describes where each and every person needs to be at each moment, and in which costume, over the course of the entire weekend. It looks like something you might have found in George Patton's command center during the North African campaigns."
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.
