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Welcome to a new week. As always, find our very latest at CSMonitor.com, including reports of renewed clashes in Syria and news that Mark Carney is set to become Canada’s next prime minister. The tariffs story is often cast as an outbound one, about punitive steps imposed to gain advantage. What’s the effect of tariffs on the countries at the receiving end? Depends on their cultures, political systems, and administrations.Canada and Mexico appeared to get a few weeks’ reprieve from the United States last week. New threats followed. Ann Scott Tyson reports today on China. Social unrest there has been growing, driven by economic grievances, which the impact of tariffs could further fuel.The reaction to unrest has added rigidity – including intensified police surveillance – in an already authoritarian system. That in turn appears set to drive more social unrest. Still to be seen: what effect several newly announced economic stimulus measures might have.
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In the first months of 2025, important news from the U.S. political sphere has dominated the headlines. But equally as critical are the stories that don’t plaster the front page.
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I love puzzles, so one of my favorite tasks as Weekly editor is to coordinate the lineup of stories that fill these pages.
It’s a multifaceted challenge. Variety is key, not just topical, but geographical and ideological as well. Another consideration is the availability of compelling photography and artwork. But one of the trickiest factors to wrangle is timing. Between our printer deadline and the variability of mail delivery, we have to cast our thinking forward two to three weeks in the future.
When U.S. President Donald Trump took office in late January, events in Washington were changing rapidly. We couldn’t reasonably assume that what was accurate at the time a story ran on www.CSMonitor.com would still be accurate when the Weekly magazine landed in mailboxes. In those instances, we tucked in reminders to look to our website for ongoing coverage.
But as this issue came together, a different challenge emerged: We had more coverage of U.S. politics than we knew what to do with.
The fire hose of executive orders, firings, shake-ups, and portentous speeches all felt extremely significant. The United States is clearly in a moment of profound change. And, as the cover story featured in the March 10 issue of the Monitor Weekly attests, that change is rippling around the world.
At the same time, the Monitor was founded as an international newspaper. U.S. politics has always been a mainstay of our coverage. But so has international news. Mary Baker Eddy, the Monitor’s founder, strove to cultivate global citizens who see themselves as members of a collective humanity.
That idea has only gained import in recent months and years as individuals, in the U.S. and abroad, have become increasingly insulated by echo chambers.
In the end, we took a both/and approach to this issue. As you read, you’ll find several stories exploring the ramifications of the current upheaval in the U.S. government. Those stories are important and bring a degree of clarity to a tumultuous moment that is likely to impact the world for years to come.
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But I also hope that you will take the time to peruse our other offerings. Stories like our Profiles in Leadership feature of a Nigerian farmer and our In Pictures photo-essay exploring efforts to save Madagascar’s forests may feel a bit random. But they, too, have import. They invite readers to step outside of themselves and consider the struggles, joys, and innovations of global compatriots. Perhaps their biggest value is as testament to the idea that, no matter how complex the world’s problems get, there will always be people striving to find a path forward.
This column first appeared in the March 10 issue of The Christian Science Monitor Weekly. Subscribe today to receive future issues of the Monitor Weekly magazine delivered to your home.
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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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