PANEL with Moderator Margaret Carlson - A Letter from Washington

Margaret Carlson is best known for being the first female columnist at Time magazine. Carlson joined Time in January 1988 from The New Republic, where she had been managing editor; in 1994, she became the first female columnist in the magazine's history. Carlson covered four presidential elections for TIME, but in 2005 she left for Bloomberg News where she writes a column.

Carlson spent a year after college working at the U.S. Department of Labor and three other agencies. During that year she lived on Yuma Street in Anacostia with her grandmother Nellie McCreary, a maid at the Hotel Washington (Washington, D.C.) and former nurse's aide at St. Elizabeth's Hospital. After that she taught third grade in Watts, Los Angeles, before joining Nader's raiders. After law school, she was briefly a Federal Trade Commission lawyer under Michael Pertschuk, until the Carter administration ended.

John Dimitri Negroponte is an American diplomat.…