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Talk of Takoma • by Howard Kohn
Wilmoed and David: a year of change
For the past two decades David Corn’s name was linked to The Nation, the most prestigious of the East Coast liberal monthlies. As the Washington correspondent he wrote a sharp-edged column and handled much of the political coverage, but his downtown office was usually an outpost of one.
This summer David was approached by the editors of Mother Jones, a bi-monthly that in many ways is West Coast counterpart to The Nation, and in October he took over as chief of the magazine’s Washington bureau with five reporters as his staff. “I always wondered what it’d be like to work with five of me,” says David, who, with his wife Welmoed Laanstra, comprise one of Takoma Park’s best known liberal-arts couples.
Welmoed is one of the creative forces behind the avant-garde public art of Street Scenes, and earlier this year she helped pull off a high-profile weekend with Yoko Ono and her “wish trees” that have become an ambitious global arts adventure.
This summer, after several years of working solo or on projects with a short turnaround, Welmoed also settled into a professional gig in an office of constant companions as public art projects curator in Arlington County.
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