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Did you find all the secrets in Google's Star Trek: The Original Series doodle?

2. Why the E fears for its life

Google
In Star Trek: The Original Series, redshirts have a very short lifespan. No wonder this little E isn't thrilled about beaming to a new planet.

Even as an anthropomorphic letter, Captain Kirk boldly goes where no O has gone before.

Kirk has a rare ability, shared only among action heroes. He always escapes danger with just a few scrapes. However, his crew is not so lucky. 

Here in the transporter room – where people can warp from one place to another – you can click on the forlorn E to catch him crying? Why the tears?

Well, when Star Trek's writers wanted to show the peril of a situation, they killed off a character. They couldn't just nix an important member of the team, so instead, many episodes show a nameless security officer in a red uniform getting blasted to smithereens, crushed by rocks, or falling to their deaths. The sudden and frequent demise of these "redshirts" quickly became a joke among Star Trek fans, including the Google doodle crew.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

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.

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