

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. He encountered a number of difficulties: Pauline's character sprite is taller than Mario's by a fair margin the background colors did not match Pauline's design, and the "M" for "Mario" next to the bonus score had to be replaced with a "P." 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”: Teaming up with fellow Atari developer Kevin Wilson, Mika dove into a program called Tile Layer Pro, which allowed him to deconstruct the assets of "Donkey Kong" using an emulated copy of the game. Kids ask parents all the time for things that just aren't possible. "But that question!" Mika wrote in a Wired article. 2," Mika initially dismissed it as impossible. When his daughter first asked to play as a female character, like she could in "Super Mario Bros. 2," but she finds "Donkey Kong" especially enthralling.
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As any good father should, Mika wants to rear his daughter on the classics: The three-year-old knows how to play "Pac-Man" and " Super Mario Bros. Game developer Mike Mika has worked on titles for consoles from the Atari 2600 to the Xbox 360. When one programmer's young daughter asked why she couldn't play as Pauline instead, her father mulled it over and replied with a hacked version of the game, completely reversing the characters' roles. Retro gaming is not much better: The old-school game "Donkey Kong" details one of Super Mario's earliest adventures, in which the plumber rescues a woman named Pauline from the titular brutish ape. In a marketplace dominated by muscle-bound space marines and ineffective female sidekicks, it's not hard to see why women might feel alienated. While women make up about half of all gamers, the hobby isn't always the friendliest place for female players.
