Why We Wrote This
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Why We Wrote This
Who reports the news? People. And at The Christian Science Monitor, we believe that it’s our job to report each story with a sense of shared humanity. Through conversations with our reporters and editors, we explain the qualities behind our reporting that affect how we approach the news. Behind toda...
Episodi recenti
172 episodi
You Can’t Sneak Up on a Wolverine
We’re back from our hiatus! In this episode, we talk with Mark Sappenfield, the Monitor’s former top editor turned roaming Europe reporter and watcher...
New Cities in an Old City’s Orbit
Nairobi is like many cities. It’s vibrant but chaotic. Well-functioning here, showing cracks in its infrastructure there. In this episode we go behind...
A Sustainable, High-Tech Life
A lot of technology, including some that ultimately makes us “greener,” calls for extractive practices and carries upfront costs. Its use slurps resou...
To Russia, With Hope
How does a Saskatchewan farmer dreaming of a better life end up in rural Russia? In this episode, the Monitor’s Fred Weir, a Canadian journalist with...
‘The Work Is Mysterious and Important’
What does the hit Apple TV+ show that could be thought of as “Black Mirror” meets “Office Space” tell us about perceptions of workplace culture and Ge...
U.S. Politics and Legal Tests
How does a justice reporter stay focused when nearly every politics story seems to have intricate – and sometimes massive – legal ramifications? Avoid...
How Crowd Control Evolves
What does good policing looks like when it comes to managing sometimes bristly human interactions at street protests or in rowdy sports stadiums? Writ...
What Faith Looks Like Now
Who’s in the pews these days? What about those in – or adjacent to – American political leadership who proclaim religiosity even while exhibiting beha...
A Kingdom of Empathy?
When it comes to humanity’s relationship to Earth’s other creatures, does “dominion” really mean “stewardship”? Monitor writer Stephanie Hanes joins h...
A Mother’s Strength
A new writer’s local assignment on a gun violence memorial brought him face to face with a mother whose trying experience, and her telling of it, seem...
Reading America’s Shift: Part 2
Covering an incoming administration is about more than tracking the words and deeds of the new chief executive. Plates are shifting from the Cabinet t...
Reading America’s Shift: Part 1
In this stretch between Election Day and the inauguration, the United States waits on a president-elect who has a long list of actions to take “on Day...
A Chatty Thanksgiving Primer
Fresh cranberries or canned? Northern pumpkin pie or Southern sweet potato pie? An assembling of intergenerational family members, a handful of friend...
Encore: Respect, Dignity, and Getting Along
Another U.S. election is behind us. Can civility – deep civility, not just politeness – heal divides? Stephen Humphries, the Monitor’s chief culture w...
Why We Went Deep on Sudan
A land war grinds on into another winter in Europe’s east. The Mideast keeps spiraling, old enmity refueled. A U.S. presidential election claims whate...
Election Unprecedented, Part 2
Georgia’s voting-rules dispute has been given a lot of attention. So have process changes in other states, along with the standard complexities of mai...
Election Unprecedented, Part 1
The late-game ouster of an incumbent as candidate, state rules in flux, and back-to-back hurricanes in battleground states? Yes, the 2024 U.S. preside...
Gaza’s Story, From the Inside
Amid intensifying strife and humanitarian disaster, how do you report a story like the war in Gaza accurately and compassionately? How do you recogniz...
Encore: The Power of Porches
Americans’ loss of social connection has long been an issue, and it worsened during the pandemic era to the point where loneliness hit epidemic levels...
A Fuller View of Taiwan
Western news reports about Taiwan tend to focus on the island’s relationships with global superpowers, notably China and the United States. The people...
A Fight Over Students’ Phones
You wouldn’t want your kid toting a television to class. So why allow a smartphone? That’s one take on a big back-to-school issue this year. Another t...
Encore: A Zeal for Reels
How does the Monitor’s film critic decide what to review – especially in festival settings? For Peter Rainer, it’s about staying moored by his own lon...
A Beat That’s Bigger Than Borders
Hopes, fears, and hard decisions: The stories of would-be immigrants are stories that matter. So, too, are the stories and views of the many other sta...
Scenes From the Press Pool
What’s it like being in a president’s presence at big moments? What about at small ones, as when the commander-in-chief offers to buy you a burger? It...
An Alchemist of Folk
An Americana-infused folk music revival has been a surging in the United States for years now. Georgia’s Jake Xerxes Fussell has emerged as one of the...
Writers’ Read: Drug Use and Compassion
Drug decriminalization is another story that often sets up as a binary debate: It's either a path to societal meltdown or a way to regulate behaviors...
On the Run at the Games
When a sports-loving writer gets a shot at covering an Olympic Games, the story becomes one of joyful immersion and inspired output. Ira Porter joins...
How To Listen to the World
Reporting straight news can be an outsider’s game: Get the facts, look for color, file on deadline, repeat. Gathering news that’s meaningful to reader...
A Climate Saga Gets Sticky
Good research can transform public knowledge. It can affect the evolution of public attitudes. But the way in which data and findings are arrayed and...
Encore: Images That Bring Humanity Into Focus
Photography does so much to humanize reporting. What does it mean to come at stories quite literally through the “Monitor lens” that this show explore...
Can Trust Cool a Murder Rate?
Everyone loves a good counternarrative, especially when the prevailing narrative is a dire one and the counter offers credible reasons for hope – back...
Title IX at 50 Plus Two
What’s happening in women’s sports besides Caitlin Clark? A lot. Two years to the week since this podcast soft-launched with a conversation with write...
Turning Trust Into Tree Cover
Urban tree loss is a widespread phenomenon that has been addressed, with different degrees of success, in cities from New York to Nashville. For multi...
A Kinder Brand of Capitalism
Maybe it’s because she came up through the Monitor’s Points of Progress franchise. We like how Erika Page, our Madrid-based writer, frames one big par...
A Writer’s Retrospective
Capturing the nation’s mood in the hours after 9/11. Trading parts of a Soviet Army uniform for some “CIA trinkets.” Keeping that one big foster beagl...
In Voting We Trust?
To some degree, members of one major political party or the other have historically swung into distrust mode when it comes to elections – typically (a...
Where Black Women Reclaim Power
What might help give Black women more agency and control around their care when it comes to maternal health? It’s a realm in which positive outcomes h...
Looking for Trust as India Votes
What does it take to run a democratic election in a nation of 1.4 billion people? Well, time, for one thing. And as the 40-plus-day process has been e...
Writer’s Read: What Gaza’s Women Endure
“I grew up in Gaza, loved it – and complained about it for most of the time.” From that honest starting point of resilience, writer Ghada Abdulfattah,...
Telling Stories Readers Can’t Resist
What does it take to weave a creative nonfiction tale that’s engaging and universal enough to draw readers all the way through? Owen Thomas, a longtim...