As a young reporter, I detested covering press conferences. The questions were bad – seemingly designed to make news rather than elicit answers. The responses were worse – vague and filled with platitudes that neither informed nor illuminated. At the end, the public wasn’t any better off.

Reporters’ time, I thought – and public officials’ time too – would be better spent actually finding meaningful information. So as President Joe Biden gives his first press conference today, I can’t help but notice it seems to be all the media can talk about.

Journalism scholar David E. Clementson wrangles the evidence that bears out my longstanding gut feeling, declaring succinctly, “no president should want to give a press conference.” He goes beyond that, though, explaining implicitly why the press’s interest in the pageantry of transparent democracy doesn’t really help the public, either.

Also this week, we had a fascinating look at who gets to decide a person’s identity, in the context of the struggle between the Cherokee Nation and the United States government about whether descendants of Black people held as slaves by the Cherokee should be considered members of the tribe.

We dug deeper into the issues around anti-Asian violence, including how racism can play a role even if the perpetrator doesn’t know it, and how Asian women are particularly vulnerable in the U.S.

And a scholar examined whether national leaders who are women handled the pandemic better than their male counterparts.