Margaret Talbot: All Publications, Events and Press

The Lost Children

Ron Tang — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0500

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. In his haste, Majid was forced to leave behind his wife, Masomeh; for months afterward, Iranian government agents phoned her and said things like “If you aren’t divorcing him, then you are supporting him, and we will therefore arrest you and torture you.”… more

Stealing Life

Articles — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 07:27:00 -0400

On a muggy August afternoon in Baltimore, trash scuttled down Guilford Avenue, the breeze smelling like rain and asphalt. It was the last week of shooting for the fifth and final season of the HBO drama The Wire, and the crew was filming a scene in front of a boarded-up elementary school. Cast members had been joined by forty or so day players -- mostly kids from the neighborhood. Earlier, the episode’s director, Clark Johnson, had been giving some of the kids the chance to say "Cut!," and they’d bellowed it like drunks at a surprise party. Now, when… more

Duped

Articles — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 03:05:00 -0400

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. A baby-faced guy from suburban Chicago,… more

Little Hotties

Articles — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 17:11:00 -0500

Barbie is forty-seven years old, and forty-seven years is a long time to have been the alpha doll. Over the decades, many competitors have been sent out into the world to get what Mattel’s doll had: hugely profitable sovereignty over the imaginations of little girls. Some of these rivals briefly grabbed a small share of the fashion-doll market. The Tammy doll, which had a wholesome teen-aged look and came encumbered with parents, stuck around from 1962 to 1966, before Barbie squashed her flat. In 1969, Ideal Toy created Crissy, whose hair grew with the push of a button; you can… more

The Baby Lab

Articles — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 00:01:00 -0400

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. He was alerted to a new picture by a silly boing noise (and a brief appearance by Clifford the Big Red Dog).… more

The Agitator

Articles — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 04:00:00 -0400

"Yesterday, I was hysterical," the Italian journalist and novelist Oriana Fallaci said. She was telling me a story about a local dog owner and the liberties he'd allowed his animal to take in front of Fallaci's town house, on the Upper East Side. Big mistake. "I no longer have the energy to get really angry, like I used to," she added. It called to mind what the journalist Robert Scheer said about Fallaci after interviewing her for Playboy, in 1981: "For the first time in my life, I found myself feeling sorry for the likes of Khomeini, Qaddafi, the Shah… more

Darwin in the Dock

Articles — Mon, 05 Dec 2005 00:00:00 -0500

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. Even in the Scopes "Monkey Trial," of 1925, the judge, John Raulston, limited the issue at hand to whether John Scopes, a high-school teacher, had broken a Tennessee law against teaching "that man has descended from a lower order of animal." He refused to consider whether the law made any sense in… more

The Candy Man

Articles — Mon, 11 Jul 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Roald Dahl, the British author of children's books, wrote in a tiny cottage at the end of a trellised pathway canopied with twisting linden trees. He called it the "writing hut," and, since Dahl was nearly six feet six, he must have inhabited it like a giant in an elf's house. Dahl died in 1990, at the age of seventy-four, but one day a year his widow, Felicity, invites children to the estate where he lived, in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, and local families swarm in like guests at Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. There are games--Splat the Rat and Guess the… more

Best in Class

Articles — Mon, 30 May 2005 03:00:00 -0400

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."

The school had a… more

American Girl Crazy!

Articles — Tue, 10 May 2005 00:00:00 -0400

I don't have anything against dolls, but part of me has always found them a little creepy -- their inert perfection, their blinky eyes, the way you find them in odd corners of the house, limbs akimbo, as if dropped from a great height. As a child, I had a Barbie with a frothy black cocktail dress and a Heidi doll I was fond of, though I could never get her hair rigged back up into those cinnamon buns on either side of her head after I'd unbraided it. I was impatient and a klutz, so buttons and bows, especially… more

Supreme Confidence

Articles — Mon, 28 Mar 2005 04:00:00 -0500

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. But Scalia is the most likely to offer the jurisprudential equivalent of… more

The Auteur of Anime

Articles — Mon, 17 Jan 2005 00:00:00 -0500

The building that houses the Ghibli Museum would be unusual anywhere, but in greater Tokyo, where architectural exuberance usually takes an angular, modernist form -- black glass cubes, busy geometries of neon -- it is particularly so. From the outside, the museum resembles an oversized adobe house, with slightly melted edges; its exterior walls are painted in saltwater-taffy shades of pink, green, and yellow. Inside, the museum looks like a child's fantasy of Old Europe submitted to a rigorous Arts and Crafts sensibility. The floors are dark polished wood; stained-glass windows cast candy-colored light on whitewashed walls;… more

The Struggle

Articles — Mon, 08 Nov 2004 00:00:00 -0500

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. What she and her husband were worried… more

The Bad Mother

Articles — Mon, 09 Aug 2004 06:00:00 -0400

In 1977, Roy Meadow, a British pediatrician, published an account of two children whose symptoms had, for a time, baffled him. Initially, there seemed to be no similarity between the cases. Kay, a six-year-old, had what appeared to be a recurrent urinary-tract infection. In the course of consultations with sixteen doctors, she had been admitted to the hospital twelve times, catheterized, X-rayed, and treated unsuccessfully with eight different antibiotics. Charles, a fourteen-month-old, had suffered for more than a year with bouts of drowsiness and vomiting, which came on suddenly and without evident cause, and for which… more

A Stepford for Our Times

Articles — Mon, 01 Dec 2003 00:00:00 -0500

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.… more

Too Much

Articles — Sun, 02 Nov 2003 00:00:00 -0500

Every now and then a study comes along whose chief interest lies in how peculiarly askew its findings seem to be from the common perception of things. Sometimes, of course, the "surprising new study" itself turns out to be off in some way. But if the data are fundamentally sound, then what you really want to know is why sensible people hold such a contrary view.

That is certainly the question raised by a Brookings Institution report released last month showing that the amount of time kids devote to homework has not, in fact, significantly increased over the last… more

Subversive Reading

Articles — Sun, 28 Sep 2003 00:00:00 -0400

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. It wasn't long after the librarians started kicking up a fuss that Don Young, an extremely conservative Republican congressman from Alaska,… more

Why, Isn't He Just the Cutest Brand-Image Enhancer You've Ever Seen?

Articles — Sun, 21 Sep 2003 03:00:00 -0400

The Extreme skate park in downtown Louisville, Ky., sits between a loop of interstate highway and the headquarters of a grain company whose sign reads "Producer Feeds -- Since 1869." The park looks a little like a homemade Hot Wheels track, something a resourceful toy-deprived child might make out of flour-and-water paste. It has every feature a skateboarder could want, though. The city of Louisville, which opened the park a little more than a year ago, is hoping to attract ESPN's X Games to the city, and maybe other skateboarding competitions, which used to be scruffy, outsiderish sorts of things… more

Hillary's Delayed Awakening, Her Ambition at Last Her Own

Articles — Tue, 01 Jul 2003 00:00:00 -0400

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. Bush's cheerily soporific A Charge to Keep, in which the President reveals that as a college student he once… more

The Executioner's I.Q. Test

Articles — Sun, 29 Jun 2003 03:00:00 -0400

Most people will never take an I.Q. test, and if they do, it probably won't have a big impact on them. Generally speaking, I.Q. tests do not carry much weight anymore. Not with vague charges of cultural bias still clinging to them. Not at a time when multiple intelligences -- that happy, inclusive vision in which nearly everybody is good at something -- are on the ascendancy. If you do take a Stanford-Binet or a Wechsler, and you score in the average range, well, there you'll be, with hardly a reason to mention it. If you score high, the particular… more