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2012's legacy: The Monitor's Top 11 US stories

From storms to politics, the year was a wild ride. What are the most meaningful US stories of 2012? Here's the Monitor's list, in roughly chronological order.

Drought

AP
Drought-damaged corn grows in a field near Nickerson, Neb.

  • By Staff The Christian Science Monitor

Damage estimates from superstorm Sandy have grabbed headlines, but the most expensive US weather disaster in 2012 may turn out to be the drought that has gripped half or more of the continental United States since late June.

As of early December, slightly more than 62 percent of the US remained in the grips of moderate-to-exceptional drought, with about 6.5 percent under exceptional drought – largely up and down the central Plains, but with small patches appearing at the southern tip of Texas, as well as in parts of Alabama and Georgia.

Rough estimates of the drought's economic impact range from $60 billion to more than $100 billion, according to Steve Cain, a disaster communication specialist with Purdue University's College of Agriculture in West Lafayette, Ind. The dry conditions not only are expected to lead to higher food prices, but have also contributed to wildfires that have blackened more than 9.1 million acres this year – the third-largest annual extent on record, after 2006 and 2007.

– Pete Spotts, Staff writer

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

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.”

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