Editor’s Letter: Introducing Our July/August 2025 Issue

Partial remarks given at the 2025 MOLLY Prize Gala on May 28:

Suddenly, it’s become a bit of a sad time for the Texas Observer community. Later in the program, you’ll hear about Carlton Carl—our former publisher and longtime board member who passed away in March. Then, yesterday, we learned that the Observer’s founding editor, a legend of Texas journalism, Ronnie Dugger had died at age 95—peacefully and surrounded by family.

I had planned to talk about the Lege here tonight, but that just doesn’t feel right now. It’s not that I knew Ronnie terribly well; I believe I met him five times total, but he left an impression. Back sometime before COVID, when he was still driving, I recall him coming to use the office to bang out an op-ed about the threat of nuclear war for I don’t recall what news site. He would have been maybe 88 years old.

Last year, I reconnected with him at his little old house that backs up to Shoal Creek. The dementia was pretty advanced; the things he said just didn’t quite tie together, or he’d swap in wrong words without realizing it. But I’ll never forget what he was trying to communicate. I was there with other former Observer staffers, and he was trying to recruit us to a cause. Trump was a fundamental threat to democracy, he got the point across, and we needed to put our heads together and do something to stop him. The U.S., China, and Russia were all making a mess of world affairs, and similarly we needed to come up with some actionable ideas. And, crucially, the next time we met we needed to bring more people into the project.

I think for some people who’d known him for decades it would have been sad that he couldn’t quite articulate his ideas anymore. But for me it was inspiring. This was a man who simply never stopped waking up, reading The New York Times, being troubled by the injustices he saw, and feeling called to do his part to address them. As his daughter Celia told me after a visit, that was his “essence.”

Well, so it goes: Whether in journalism or electoral politics or more radical activism—whatever your project to improve the world—eventually our forebears leave us. And it’s up to us to look around, accept that sadly most of the evils they fought to end are still the evils we fight today, and take our shot at doing as well or better than they did in the time we’re given. 

In a way, I now think the reason for this little gathering tonight is to celebrate the miraculous fact that neither Molly [Ivins], nor Carlton, nor Ronnie lived to see the Observer die—a fact that in no small part can be attributed to their own actions… — GB

Note: To be the first to get all the stories in our bimonthly issues, become a Texas Observer member here.