Margaret Talbot

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

Margaret Talbot

Operations — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 18:24:00 -0400

Senior Fellow

Margaret Talbot is currently a staff writer at The New Yorker. She has also written for The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, where she published numerous cover stories as a contributing writer from 1999 to 2003, and The Atlantic Monthly, among other publications. Her essays have been anthologized in several books, including The Best American Science Writing 2002 (Ecco/HarperCollins) and Because I Said So: 33 Mothers Write about Children, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race, and Themselves (HarperCollins, 2005). Ms. Talbot is a recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award.

As a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, Ms.… 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