Margaret Talbot

Seventy years ago, in a book called Convicting the Innocent, the Yale Law School professor Edwin Borchard produced a classic study of how the wrong person gets sent to prison or to death. The hapless innocents Borchard profiled included a coal miner and a doctor, Central European immigrants and American blacks, an unemployed religious visionary and an Algerian john named Frenchy. In those days exoneration was almost always a matter of luck -- occasionally, for example, a supposed murder victim… more

I've always been fond of the movie "A Summer Place," one of those late-50's Technicolor melodramas that can barely contain the enormous and genuine emotions it evokes. Its subject is the dangers for teenagers of sexual repression, and the dangers for their parents of lying to them about it -- quite a radical subject when you think about it, though sometimes it's hard to with the made-for-Muzak theme song swelling on the soundtrack. Molly, played by the 17-year-old Sandra Dee,… more

Last fall, something peculiar began to happen at more than two dozen elementary and middle schools scattered across the country. Suddenly, groups of children started breaking out with itchy red rashes that seemed to fade away when the children went home -- and to pop up again when they returned to school. Frustratingly for the federal, state and county health officials who were working to explain this ailment, it did not conform to any known patterns of viral or bacterial… more

There are things about one's life and especially about one's children that cannot be known in advance and to which it would be foolish to assume a right outcome or a wrong one. How, for example, could you possibly know whether you and your family would be better off having had a boy child and then a girl, or a girl first, or two girls or two boys? What would your standard for comparison be? Which child would you have… more

Today is Apologies Day in Rosalind Wiseman's class -- so, naturally, when class lets out, the girls are crying. Not all 12 of them, but a good half. They stand around in the corridor, snuffling quietly but persistently, interrogating one another. "Why didn't you apologize to me?" one girl demands. "Are you stressed right now?" says another. "I am so stressed." Inside the classroom, which is at the National Cathedral School, a private girls' school in Washington, Wiseman is locked… more

It took awhile to unlearn the number 6,000. Though the estimated death toll at the World Trade Center has been falling steadily since early October -- and has by now shrunk by half -- the smaller number proved hard to absorb. As late as Thanksgiving, the larger figure was still being cited by disc jockeys and pundits, by Northern Alliance fighters and admirers of Osama bin Laden. Maybe even now it remains embedded in the minds of Americans who have… more

Communal Bereavement

Anyone who has ever mourned the death of a loved one knows that grief can be a curiously somatic experience -- that the body can register sorrow as sensitively and as involuntarily as a seismograph, that sorrow can make you sick. Scientists have documented insomnia, depressed immune function, greater susceptibility to heart attacks and elevated levels of corticosteroids, the so-called stress hormones, in recently bereaved people. But a bereaved person is by definition someone who has lost an intimate.… more

I've been wondering lately what multiculturalism was. I remember, of course, that it was a cause celebre of the 80's and 90's, a big deal on campus, a hot ticket at the Modern Language Association. I remember all the talk about overthrowing the "dead white males" of the old canon and opening it up to the "subaltern" and the "displaced" and the "other." And I figure that along the way it got some good writers included on reading lists, where… more

In the 1980s, when newspapers and magazines first started reporting on parents who had rejected school in favor of teaching their children at home, it seemed that the movement would never last -- or if it lasted, would never grow. More and more mothers were working outside the home. More and more parents, especially in the upper middle class, were fretting about their children's pursuit of academic excellence and healthy socialization, while simultaneously outsourcing the management of both to recognized… more

Because airline travel has become a matter of tedium or fear for adults, it is easy to forget that for children, it was something magical. For them, it was friendly visits to the cockpit, stick-on wings and half-forbidden sodas given to them by flight attendants, cotton-candy clouds outside and a toy world below. National Airport is one of the few in the country you can fly into and know you are not gliding over some anonymous landscape but are nearly… more