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You ranked them: 10 top stories in America in 2013

Here are 10 top stories Americans followed in 2013, ranked by respondents to a Monitor/TIPP poll according to the percentage who said they followed the story very closely.

6. Women escape Cleveland home (39 percent)

Tony Dejak/ AP/ File
A girl adds a balloon outside the home of Gina DeJesus on May 9, 2013, in Cleveland. Ariel Castro pleaded guilty to charges related to the kidnappings and rapes of Ms. DeJesus and two other women, who were held captive for about a decade before escaping his home on May 6, 2013.

  • By CSM Staff

On May 6, three women escaped a Cleveland home where it was discovered they suffered systematic sexual and emotional abuse for a decade or more. Ariel Castro, a former school bus driver, kidnapped the women between 2002 and 2004. A young girl, conceived as a result of rape, was also freed.

The event attracted international attention, not just because of the horrific conditions the women endured – they were often chained to a basement pole and forced to wear motorcycle helmets – but also because they were thought to be dead despite being within blocks of friends and family. To prevent visitors from discovering his secret, Mr. Castro fortified his home with locks, chains, and a homemade alarm system.

Castro avoided a trial by pleading guilty to 937 criminal counts of kidnapping, rape, and assault, among other charges. He was found hanged in his prison cell in September, his death ruled a suicide. One victim, Michelle Knight, told Castro at sentencing that she forgave him, but "can't ever forget."

– Mark Guarino, Staff writer 

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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.”

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