Margaret Talbot

Margaret Talbot joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2004, writing Profiles in addition to dispatches and commentary on legal issues, cultural history, social movements, and indie music. She has written about a villa in Austria where a doctor performed experiments on children; a trial about the teaching of evolution that divided a Pennsylvania community; the aftermath of an anti-Muslim hate crime in North Carolina; the myth of whiteness in classical sculpture; and profiles and essays on musicians including Kate Bush and Mitski, filmmakers including Hayao Miyazaki and Joachim Trier, several Supreme Court Justices, and Alex the parrot. Previously, she was a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine and, from 1995 to 1999, the executive editor of The New Republic. She was one of the founding editors of Lingua Franca and was a senior fellow at New America.

Talbot is the author of “The Entertainer: Movies, Magic and My Father’s Twentieth Century,” a history of twentieth-century entertainment told through the adventures of her actor father, Lyle Talbot. She also wrote, with her brother David Talbot, “By the Light of Burning Dreams: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the Second American Revolution,” about left-wing activism in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. A native of Los Angeles, she now lives in Washington, D.C.