After dreaming her entire life of being a flight attendant, Poole's mother became one in her late 40s – a development that took a turn for the surreal when she began living at Poole's apartment building in New York, the "crash pad" where many flight attendants stayed when not working. On a few flights, by quirks of scheduling Poole and her mother were assigned to work on the same plane, and once when that happened, a ticket agent announced over the intercom that a mother-daughter flight attendant team would be serving passengers that day. "The response can only be compared to that of telling a bunch of kids that Mickey Mouse and Goofy will be on board handing out snacks," Poole writes of passengers' reactions. Once, a passenger got snippy with Poole's mother when she accidentally spilled a small amount of water on the armrest, and Poole was quick to defend her mom. "I am not a confrontational person," Poole writes. "But no one was going to treat my mother like that!.... I stood right there to make sure the guy didn't say anything disrespectful."
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.
