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. A graph of gaslight’s usage since 2010 goes up like a rocket.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”: Interest in the use of the word has grown over the past decade, as shown by Google’s Ngram Viewer, which tracks words’ occurrences in printed books, and Google Trends, which tracks how often they are searched for online. It referred to psychological manipulation so extreme that people subjected to it begin to doubt their own sanity. In the 1950s, gaslighting became not just the title of the play but a name for the husband’s behavior. The house’s gas lighting – the play is set in 1880s London – flickers he tells her that her eyes are playing tricks on her. She hears him walking around upstairs at night, but he denies it. She finds a letter he steals the letter and tells her she imagined it. Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 thriller is about a woman whose husband is trying to drive her insane by contradicting the evidence of her senses. What did that mean, actually? I found myself in sympathy with a contributor to Urban Dictionary, a crowdsourced online collection of slang, which defined gaslighting as “a word you google when your significant other accuses you of doing it to them.” It is also the rare word whose etymology we can be precise about – it comes from the title of a play, “Gaslight.” My son told me recently that I was gaslighting him.
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