An award-winning journalist originally trained as a linguist, Margalit Fox is a senior writer at the New York Times. When archaeologist Arthur Evans unearthed the ruins of a sophisticated Bronze Age civilization that flourished on Crete, he discovered a cache of clay tablets written in 1450 B.C. Fox’s new book The Riddle of the Labyrinth blends history, linguistics, and cryptology, in telling the story of the 50-year quest to decipher the mysterious ancient script known as Linear B found on these tablets. She is also the author of Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind, the story of a remote Bedouin village with an unusually high incidence of deafness where relative isolation enabled the creation of an indigenous sign language.