We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. We 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. They share hand structure with orangutans, who probably evolved them independently.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”: By contrast, chimpanzee hands have changed significantly "since their last common ancestor, around 6 million years ago," Almécija says. Most strikingly, their fingers have become much longer.
"Instead, we tested that assumption by incorporating actual morphological and phylogenetic information in a large sample of primate species."Īlmécija and his colleagues found that the hands of our distant ancestors were actually very similar to our own. "Contrarily to most studies in the field of human evolution, we did not assume that the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees was like a chimpanzee," Dr. But in some ways, that may not be entirely true. Paleoanthropological studies tend to lean on the notion that human ancestors were originally monkey-like, slowly losing those traits through evolutionary time. The study was led by Sergio Almécija, a paleoanthropologist at Stony Brook University, and published Tuesday in Nature Communications. New research suggests that human hands may actually be more primitive than the hands of other dexterous primates, like chimpanzees. When humans think about primate evolution, we tend to picture ourselves at the pinnacle.
And that takes a lot of work. Today’s lead story, as arduous as it was, is an attempt to do that – to understand an important part of America just a little bit better, to help open the door to progress for all. Finding answers will be impossible without understanding those deeper forces. The roots of violence everywhere are as much mental as political, influenced by culture and values. But that same rule applies to all regions – in the U.S. To ensure he got the story right, Patrik went back a second time. What we found was a portrait not of policies or legislative bills, but of an underlying mental landscape and how that has led to higher rates of violence. Why?In traveling to Nashville, Tennessee, and Alexander City, Alabama, Noah Robertson and Patrik Jonsson sought to show different faces of violence in the South, in large cities and rural hamlets, without falling into stereotypes or shallow narratives. And within these trends, one sticks out for its clarity and constancy: The American South has dramatically higher levels of violence. There is no single “gun violence problem” in the United States, but different challenges in different places. Rather, it is a product of the subject: the roots of violence. American conversations about gun violence – particularly mass shootings – often revolve around gun laws and mental health.But the closer we looked, the more we saw something else. Today’s lead article was not one of those stories. That’s not criticism. An idea emerges, and with a minimum of fuss, it is done. Sometimes, a story comes together with kinetic beauty.
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