Margaret Talbot

Every day in America some 1,600 people will leave state and federal prisons. Most will start their journey with "gate money" (from $20 to $200), a one-way bus ticket, and little else. Many will be drug abusers who received no treatment for their addiction while on the inside, sex offenders who got no counseling, and illiterate high school dropouts who took no classes and acquired no job skills. A lot of them will be sick: rates of HIV, tuberculosis, and… more

If we are about to go to war, then ours is a curious sort of home front. It's not just that the public attitude toward war with Iraq is ambivalent, though that's part of it, certainly. There is a reason we think of "home front" as a World War II concept and not a Vietnam one. "Home front" suggests the appearance, at least, of unified, even monolithic opinion. Support for this war is soft and shifting -- it depends a… more

Whenever a gun is fired, a unique set of microscopic markings are left on the bullets as they travel through the barrel. Bullet casings are similarly marked by the gun's "ejecton port." Why not use this information to help solve crimes? Entered into a national database, these ballistic "fingerprints" could be used to narrow the search for a weapon and its owner considerably. After all, it is far more common to recover bullets and casings at crime scenes than the… more

If you are the parent of an American child, then yfou may well have noticed how Japanese our kid culture has become. No set of images has dominated childish desires quite so handily over the last five years or so as the amalgams of cuteness and power in the Japanese-made cartoons (and their many product spinoffs): Pokemon, Digimon, DragonBall Z, Sailor Moon, Hamtaro and, most recently, Yu-Gi-Oh. It's enough to make Disney envious.

The spike-haired, doe-eyed girls and boys and… more

"It's 10 p.m. -- do you know where your children are?" was a line from a public-service ad of the 1970's that soon became a cliche and then a kind of joke. It reminded you, in spite of itself, that parents did not, and could not always, know where their children were or what they were doing, especially if those children were teenagers. And since that fact did not inspire the sort of dread it does now -- rather more… more

Viagra has surely had many unintended consequences, but one of the strangest is the help it might bring to vulnerable animal species. Since the drug was introduced in 1998, the trade in some wild animal parts traditionally used in the creation of "impotence cures" has fallen drastically. And two researchers who have studied that trade in Canada and Alaska say they believe the link is no coincidence.

Sales of Alaskan reindeer antlers -- the velvet is used in traditional Chinese… more

It happens nearly every time a new book comes out about motherhood and work -- the flurry of responses that treat reports of a still-unsolved conflict between the two as a revelation, even a shock. Last spring it was "Creating a Life," Sylvia Ann Hewlett's dour statistical inventory of a career gal's chances for procreating. This fall it's Allison Pearson's cannily amusing novel of working-mom manners, "I Don't Know How She Does It." Each book was greeted, as such books… more

When you work at a car dealership, you spend a lot of time standing around, but that does not mean you relax. How can you, with the manager constantly hovering over you and the strains of "We Will Rock You" or some other sales-meeting anthem ricocheting around your brain? You've got to be on, you've got to be pumped, you've got to be ready to pursue a car that noses into the lot, and then be standing right there, hand… more

I went to junior high during those last awkward years when girls were segregated into home-ec classes and boys into shop. It was the early 70's, and some of us had been reared in the spirit of "Free to Be You and Me," so the whole separatist system already seemed antique and faintly comical. In sewing class, where we concocted unsightly tote bags, I earned a D-plus, but I didn't much care. In cooking class, we learned how to make,… more

Thinking of Carol Gilligan's work as social science has always been a bit of a stretch, but that is how it has generally been received by critics and adepts alike: as a body of psychological research supporting certain controversial hypotheses about the differences between men and women, probably the most influential such hypotheses of the last twenty-five years. Gilligan's famous contention is that girls and women are possessed of a distinctive morality more attuned to maintaining relationships and caring for… more