Alice joined a water polo team and was enjoying it, but after some time on the team, the coach e-mailed all the parents, including Cummings, and said she was leaving and asked for someone to step up and be the new team parent. Cummings and two other parents volunteered, and Cummings said that in her new role, collecting fees from the parents of the teammates, she was no longer a passive watcher on practice nights. "My public demeanor changed from blissful indifference, sitting idly in the stands flipping through a magazine, to behaving like the poolside button-man for the water polo Mafia," she wrote. "I'd lurk up behind a late-paying parent and murmur in a flat, ominous tone, 'Jackson seems to love water polo. Be a pity if we had to pull him out of the pool because his fees aren't paid.'"
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.
