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2. Limit cold-engine revving

Manuel Valdes/AP/File
Seattle police officer Jim Ritter inspects the engine of a 1979 Dodge Aspen being restored at the Showcase Body Shop in Kirkland, Wash. in April. For most cars, speeding up gradually is easiest on the engine.

When an engine has been sitting long enough for the temperature gauge to rest on the bottom peg, lubricants may have drained out of the upper sections of the engine. The engine needs some time for parts to reach optimal temperatures and lubricants to flow throughout it. Most fuel-injected cars don’t need to sit static and “warm up,” they can be driven as soon as ignition is achieved, but high revolutions per minute should be limited until the temperature gauge is sitting where it spends most of its time during normal use. Modern BMWs even illustrate this on the tachometer; higher RPMs are illuminated yellow and red until the engine reaches what its computer considers to be “optimal operating temperature.”

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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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