Must Reads: Too many men, Sean Hannity's White House pull and Barbara Bush's most pa
Compelling, ambitious reads you can’t afford to miss. When foreign correspondents Annie Gowen and Simon Denyer began working on a project about the massive imbalance between men and women in China and India more than a year ago, they approached it in a conventional way: four separate stories, each focused on a different aspect of the demographic crisis created by aborting girls. “It was going to be a traditional Washington Post series,” said Gowen, who has been covering India for five years. “It became something much creative.” That happened when managing editor Cameron Barr suggested merging the stories into one multimedia piece to explore how a strong cultural preference for boys in the two countries had created too many men and too few women. A team of Post graphic artists and designers got to work carrying out that vision while Gowen, Denyer, The Post's Beijing correspondent, and their editor, Will Englund, reshaped the text. The result: a powe...