Politics May 08 What is political correctness really? Filters are good. They stop us from saying what we shouldn’t when we are cut off in traffic — especially when there are kids in the car. Ideally, they remind us that we should look up the facts before we…
Politics May 01 Gwen’s Take: Ask me anything I have turned this week’s Take over to you, gentle readers, in a new, irregularly recurring feature I believe I’ll call “Gwen’s Bingo.”…
Politics Apr 24 Gwen’s Take: Accepting the Urbino Press Award Journalists get a bad rap sometimes. Often it is deserved. But that’s because bad news travels well. Less told are the stories of the imprisoned journalists who risk their lives to do their work in Iran and China and Ethiopia…
Politics Apr 17 Gwen’s Take: Dames and leadership Here’s a quiz: when you think of Civil War heroes, can you name a single woman? Unlikely. But in a new book, journalist Coke Roberts proves that women were not invisible during the War Between the States. What these women…
Politics Apr 10 Gwen’s Take: Truth, justice and the American way The best journalists can do is try to scrub our inbred biases (we all have them) by asking more questions. All the time. Every time. This is nearly impossible to do if you have already decided you know the answer.
Politics Mar 27 Gwen’s Take: Getting on with it Robin Toner did whatever was needed to file the story. In the years before Wi-Fi and hot spots, she would stop motorcades, if necessary, to find a landline from which to send her story. This week, a couple hundred people…
Politics Mar 20 Gwen’s Take: Making peace and making coffee There are so many good ways to talk about race and culture in America. Yes, even at Starbucks.
Politics Mar 09 Our colliding ideals: What I saw in Selma We are a nation that was born and bred in conflict. But at least now -- at least this weekend in Selma, we were engaged in a common cause to use conflict as a path toward a community ideal.
Politics Mar 06 Gwen’s Take: Hillary, Congress & Ferguson: The perils of seeing more clearly Let’s have a chat about transparency, and how much we really want to know about the way things work. This week provided several good examples of the discussion along the campaign trail, and in all three branches of government.
Politics Feb 27 Gwen’s Take: Demographics as political destiny The browning of America is about more than an expanding melting pot. It also has immediate implications for education and tax policy; for elective and strategic politics.