![]() ![]() 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. A graph of gaslight’s usage since 2010 goes up like a rocket.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”: Interest in the use of the word has grown over the past decade, as shown by Google’s Ngram Viewer, which tracks words’ occurrences in printed books, and Google Trends, which tracks how often they are searched for online. ![]() It referred to psychological manipulation so extreme that people subjected to it begin to doubt their own sanity. In the 1950s, gaslighting became not just the title of the play but a name for the husband’s behavior. The house’s gas lighting – the play is set in 1880s London – flickers he tells her that her eyes are playing tricks on her. She hears him walking around upstairs at night, but he denies it. She finds a letter he steals the letter and tells her she imagined it. Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 thriller is about a woman whose husband is trying to drive her insane by contradicting the evidence of her senses. What did that mean, actually? I found myself in sympathy with a contributor to Urban Dictionary, a crowdsourced online collection of slang, which defined gaslighting as “a word you google when your significant other accuses you of doing it to them.” It is also the rare word whose etymology we can be precise about – it comes from the title of a play, “Gaslight.” My son told me recently that I was gaslighting him. The Monitor has long been touted as “an international daily newspaper.” This year, we’ll take a small step toward further proving that, while it is based in Boston, the Monitor is for the world. For the Monitor’s part, I hope we are strengthening a statement that has always been true. ![]() For my part, I hope to share with you insights gained from broadening a sense of home and identity. That is what news is. For a news organization tasked with bringing the world closer in profound ways, new possibilities are always emerging. To understand the news is to understand how the struggle over these qualities shapes our experience worldwide. The qualities that drive world events – justice, equality, compassion, trust, honesty – know no borders. But what does the Monitor do best? I would argue that it offers a transformative view of the world itself – that the human story is more interconnected and more hopeful than much media coverage would have us believe. What papers usually do best is cover their own communities. Generally speaking, international news doesn’t sell in the United States. It was time to do that before my kids are no longer kids (which will be shockingly soon).Yet the fact that the editor of The Christian Science Monitor will live in Germany for a year does say something important. The trend is for American newspapers to be scaling back international coverage. ![]() This is about my family – the fact that I am the only member without German citizenship, and yet we have never lived in Germany. You should not expect the chief of the Süddeutsche Zeitung to announce a seven-part Monitor series on Oktoberfest. By next week, I will be living in Berlin. No, I am not part of some editor exchange program. ![]()
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