1/10/2024 0 Comments Least expensive oil change near meWe have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. 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’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. 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. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.īut you know what? We change lives. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. 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. Just maybe, Pakistani officials wanted my fellow festivalgoers to join the clamor for their country’s “king of fruits.” Just maybe, they succeeded.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”: Just maybe, the mangoes’ juicy bliss could accomplish what diplomacy has not yet done. All it lacks, says Trade Minister Azmat Mahmud, is USDA approval.I started to grasp the ulterior motive of the trays of luscious fruit arrayed before this Washington crowd. But there’s a Department of Agriculture requirement that all Pakistani mangoes enter the United States at the port of Houston, where the fruit is irradiated to USDA specifications.Pakistan has responded by building an irradiation facility in Karachi. Compare that with the mangoes coming from Mexico last year, worth $400 million. Ambassador Masood Khan wants Americans to have greater access to what he calls “the king of fruits” – not just any mangoes, but the royal varieties of Pakistan’s Sindh and Punjab provinces.Currently Pakistan exports less than $1 million in fruity gold to the United States annually. And if either diplomat was bothered by it, neither let on.That may be because the mango festival had a deeper objective. And there would be handshakes. So I decided to let the stars of the festival speak – or maybe stick – for themselves. I was about to have a pull-aside (diplomatic-speak for a brief meeting on the margins of another event) with two Pakistan officials. Come to the mango festival at the Pakistan Embassy, I had been assured, and taste mangoes as you’ve never tasted them before.Much like other festivalgoers crowded around the trays of ambrosia-like fruit, I was alternating between juicy bites and exclamations of utter deliciousness. The problem was those sticky hands. The sweet juices running down my hands from the orangy-yellow Pakistani mangoes were just what the invitation had promised.
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