Margaret Talbot

Better, Faster, Stronger, Smarter | WNYC - The Brian Lehrer Show

New Yorker writer Margaret Talbot explores the world of neuro-enhancing drugs. Link to audio
Margaret Talbot | April 23, 2009

A Prescription For 'Brain Gain'? | NPR

In the modern world of busy schedules and busier lives, some people are turning to "neuro-enhancing" drugs to gain a competitive edge.

As journalist Margaret Talbot writes in the April 27 issue of The New Yorker magazine, a variety of students, professors and business people are taking drugs intended for attention deficit disorder, narcolepsy and epilepsy in an effort to enhance brain function and get ahead. Link to audio

Margaret Talbot | April 20, 2009

Margaret Talbot in the Washington D.C. Examiner | ' Why Do So Many Evangelical Teens Get Pregnant?'

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. more
Margaret Talbot | November 10, 2008

Red Sex, Blue Sex

In early September, when Sarah Palin, the Republican candidate for Vice-President, announced that her unwed seventeen-year-old daughter, Bristol, was pregnant, many liberals were shocked, not by the revelation but by the reaction to it. They expected the news to dismay the evangelical voters that John McCain was courting with his choice of Palin. Yet reports from the floor of the Republican Convention, in St. Paul, quoted dozens of delegates who seemed unfazed, or even buoyed, by the news. A delegate from Louisiana told CBS News, "Like so many… more

Margaret Talbot | The New Yorker | November 3, 2008

The Lost Children

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… more

Margaret Talbot | The New Yorker | March 3, 2008

Stealing Life

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… more

Margaret Talbot | The New Yorker | October 22, 2007

Duped

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… more

Little Hotties

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… more

Margaret Talbot | The New Yorker | December 5, 2006

The Baby Lab

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… more

Margaret Talbot | The New Yorker | September 4, 2006