From Amherst to Concord is about a 90-minute drive east on Route 2 through the mountains and beautiful scenery of Western Mass. Concord was a flourishing literary center, and many authors there (including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne) were friends who would visit frequently and often shared, rented, or bought houses from each other (or woods, in Thoreau's case). Louisa May Alcott lived at the Orchard with her family from 1858 to 1877, and in 1865 wrote her well-known novel, "Little Women," on the writing desk in her room. Also on the grounds was a school built by Alcott's father, Bronson, named "The Concord School of Philosophy," which served as a successful adult education center from 1879 to 1888. In 1884 Alcott sold the house and moved into her sister's house on Main Street along with her father.
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.
