Top 10 family stories of 2013

In case you missed them, here's an encore performance of Modern Parenthood's top ten most-viewed stories. Click through to the end for a bonus track with the top 10 editors' picks for 2013.

10. Sound of Music: Von Trapp family snubs NBC casting

Will Hart/NBC/AP
The Sound of Music: Carrie Underwood, shown here with the von Trapp family children, starred in the NBC live performance of 'The Sound of Music' last night.

The live television broadcast of "The Sound of Music" was the perfect opportunity to share a favorite thing with the kids and instead poor Carrie Underwood found herself a yodel away from the most underwhelming performance of any musical in history.

While it was widely agreed that Ms. Underwood has the perfect singing voice for the role, her dreadful acting took down the house as parents tried and failed to stick-it-out with the kids.

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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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