Margaret Talbot: All Related Content

New Yorker writer Margaret Talbot explores the world of neuro-enhancing drugs. Link to audio

Margaret Talbot, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation has recently written in The New Yorker about “Red Sex, Blue Sex.” She states the “The ‘sexual debut’ of an evangelical girl typically occurs just after she turns sixteen.” She reports that a number of social scientists and family scholars have taken up this serious and troublesome social pattern that has obvious ramifications for a lot of good young women, their boyfriends or sexual partners, and the families involved.

In the summer of 1995, an Iranian man named Majid Yourdkhani allowed a friend to photocopy pages from “The Satanic Verses,” the Salman Rushdie novel, at the small print shop that he owned in Tehran. Government agents arrested the friend and came looking for Majid, who secretly crossed the border to Turkey and then flew to Canada.

The most egregious liar I ever knew was someone I never suspected until the day that, suddenly and irrevocably, I did. Twelve years ago, a young man named Stephen Glass began writing for The New Republic, where I was an editor. He quickly established himself as someone who was always onto an amusingly outlandish story -- like the time he met some Young Republican types at a convention, gathered them around a hotel-room minibar, then, with guileless ferocity, captured their boorishness in print. I liked Steve; most of us who worked with him did.

On weekday mornings at nine o’clock, at Harvard University’s Laboratory for Developmental Studies, the babies start arriving in a long procession, looking like young pashas in their luxurious, oversized strollers. Researchers rush out to greet them, brandishing toys and consent forms. One day this summer, eight-month-old William was carried into a small, darkened room, where he sat on his father’s lap and viewed, on a screen in front of him, rectangles and dots shrinking in size or number.

Courtroom battles about the teaching of evolution rarely have devoted much discussion to the science of evolution. This is partly because few working scientists have been willing to testify against evolutionary theory, and partly because judges have been reluctant to engage the heady question of what constitutes science.

Daniel Kennedy remembers when he still thought that valedictorians were a good thing. Kennedy, a wiry fifty-nine-year-old who has a stern buzz cut, was in 1997 the principal of Sarasota High School, in Sarasota, Florida. Toward the end of the school year, it became apparent that several seniors were deadlocked in the race to become valedictorian. At first, Kennedy saw no particular reason to worry. "My innocent thought was what possible problem could those great kids cause?" he recalled last month, during a drive around Sarasota. "And I went blindly on with my day."

Lining up to hear a Supreme Court Justice speak is more like lining up for a rock concert than you might think. This is especially true if the speech is on a college campus and the speaker in question is Justice Antonin Scalia. Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a favorite on the feminist lecture circuit; Clarence Thomas has vivid stories of growing up as a "nappy-headed little boy running barefoot" around Pinpoint, Georgia; Sandra Day O'Connor is the preferred Justice at awards luncheons where crystal figurines are handed out.

It was hard to find anyone at the recent anti-gay-marriage rally in Washington, D.C., who had a bad word to say about gays. Chandra Judy, who had come to the "Mayday for Marriage" rally on the Mall with her husband, Manford, and their ten-month-old baby, Eloise, "really wanted to say," for instance, "that this was not about gay-bashing." Chandra, who is slender and blond and wore jeans and shiny pale-pink lipstick, said she was a professional dancer in Washington, and knew a lot of gay people. She had no objection to civil unions.

In 1975, when the movie The Stepford Wives first came out, it was widely regarded as a chilling parable about men's fears of feminism, a tale of horror that also worked as a social satire on sexism. Sure, it struck some women's liberationists as a ham-fisted attempt to cash in on the movement. But Ira Levin, who wrote the novel on which the movie was based, seems to have been in earnest -- or as earnest as he could be with a brisk little potboiler in which suburban husbands band together to replace their wives with lubricious and empty-headed robots.

From a certain perspective, there is something thrilling about the recent face-off between Attorney General John Ashcroft and the librarians. The American Library Association and many of its members, indignant about a provision of the U.S.A. Patriot Act that could oblige them to cooperate with federal agents by turning over the records of what some library patrons have checked out, have managed to unleash the most rigorous re-examination of the entire Patriot Act since its passage in October 2001.

One question for the reviewers and readers who have professed disappointment in Hillary Clinton's new book: What did you expect? Or to put it another way: When was the last time you read a really good book by an American politician at mid-career? It probably wasn't John Ashcroft's Lessons from a Father to his Son, an inspirational tome that recounts his fairy-tale rise from Missouri state auditor to Missouri state attorney general. And I'd be surprised if it were George W.