I was surprised to find that there is no "monitor construct" implementation for the stdlib. I wrote one that I feel is pretty Pythonic, and I'd like it to be torn apart :) It's fairly well documented -- for most standard monitor use cases you can simply inherit the Monitor class and use the Monitor-specific condition variables. Hopefully the accompanying examples will also help to clarify the usage. They're somewhat silly, but get the idea across. As an aside, because this seems to come up in every conversation I've had about monitors in python: if I'm not mistaken, monitors are useful with or without the GIL :) Monitors are nifty tools that make complex synchronization problems somewhat simpler (though more serialized). So far as I understand it, the GIL provides single-bytecode atomicity, and monitor methods are rarely single instructions. Plus, Jython and IronPython don't have a GIL, so I would argue that monitors can still be valuable to "Python the language" even if you won't allow that they can be valuable to "Python the standard implementation". Looking forward to hearing everybody's opinions. Cheers, Chris