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. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.īut you know what? We change lives. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.” My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier.

“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. But that can be true only when we give up.Ībout 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”: It’s a public safety issue,” the nonpartisan coalition said.So often, the product of entrenched politics is a loss of hope and agency. Eastern time today.In Nashville, Tennessee, last month, more than 5,000 people linked arms, forming a chain 3 miles long that ended at the statehouse. The special edition was sent to your email at 10:30 a.m. To this end, the Monitor has put together a collection of stories to show that ways forward are possible and that problems remain entrenched only so long as we turn away or view the other side as the enemy. But it can keep us awake. Falling into the indolence of despair must never be an option. It does not need to tell us what to think. But here is where journalism can play a vital role. Why are guns seen as different?This past weekend, I felt that profound sense of impotence after the latest in America’s series of mass shootings. Although mass shootings are not unique to the United States, their scope and frequency are. We know deaths would rise if we loosened seat-belt laws or car safety regulations. Yet it is inescapable that mass shootings, while the result of many variables, are inextricably connected to America’s gun laws. This can be accomplished in countless ways that defy partisan lines. With devastating frequency, mass shootings tragically underscore this fact. The Monitor does not exist to advocate for any particular policy, but for the expansion of universal values such as compassion, freedom, responsibility, or honesty, to name a few. So much of American politics today promotes a profound sense of impotence – the inability to move entrenched forces, even a degree.

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