The Last Archive - Pushkin Industries

John Birch vs. the PTA Oct 31, 2024

In the 1960s, a right-wing organization led by a former candy tycoon rose to fame in America for their anti-communist campaigns. They called themselves the John Birch Society. Then, they tried to take over the Parent-Teacher Association. This week, what the battle between the two organizations tells us about the fate of American politics, and the history of your Halloween candy.

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Leon Neyfakh on the Bush v. Gore Fiasco Oct 24, 2024

Today on the show, Leon Neyfakh, co-creator of the hit podcasts Slow Burn and Fiasco, discusses his season on the aftermath of the 2000 election between Al Gore and George W. Bush.

You can listen to the full season of Fiasco now.

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Part 2: Long Jump, Tall Tale Oct 10, 2024

Jesse Owens spent the rest of his life retelling the story of the 1936 games and his encounter with Luz Long. We trace the evolution of a tall tale, discovering the hidden life of one of America’s iconic sports heroes.

This is part two of a two-part crossover from Revisionist History’s ‘Hitler’s Olympics’ series. To listen to the whole series, head over to the Revisionist History show page.

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Part 1: The Jiggle & the Giddy Up Oct 10, 2024

The most famous athlete in 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany was the American sprinter Jesse Owens, and one of the most famous stories from those Games was the unexpected, heartwarming encounter Owens had with the German long jumper Luz Long. The friendship between the two athletes would serve as a symbol of how sports can overcome national antagonisms. We wonder: What really happened at the long jump pit that day?

This is part one of a two-part crossover from Revisionist History’s ‘Hitler’s Olympics’ series. To listen to the whole series, head over to the Revisionist History show page.

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70 Years of Brown v. Board of Education May 17, 2024

Jill Lepore returns to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the ruling in Brown v. Board of Education with a special episode of The Last Archive. She and Ben Naddaff-Hafrey explore the amazing new AI-powered recreation of the Brown v. Board cases over at the Oyez project. Then, Kenneth W. Mack, the Lawrence D. Biele Professor of Law at Harvard University, stops by to discuss the enduring significance of the case.

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Man in the Box - 'The Deadline' May 02, 2024

Today, we’re ending our Deadline mini-series with an essay about one of our favorite TV shows: Dr. Who. Afterwards, Jill and Ben talk about the greatness of genre fiction and Jill’s love-hate relationship with postmodernism.

We hope you’ve enjoyed this special series of essays from The Deadline. You can purchase the full collection at https://www.pushkin.fm/audiobooks/the-deadline-essays.

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No, We Cannot - ‘The Deadline’ Apr 25, 2024

This episode features an essay from Jill Lepore’s ‘The Deadline.’

Why are there so many stories about the end of the world these days? Jill’s essay “No, We Cannot,” elaborates a political theory of dystopian fiction. And then, after the essay, Jill and Ben talk about the use and misuse of the genre.

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The Disruption Machine - ‘The Deadline’ Apr 18, 2024

This episode features an essay from Jill Lepore’s ‘The Deadline.’

Today on the show, Jill and Ben travel back in time to the disrupt-or-die 2010s to revisit Jill’s essay about the gospel of disruption. And afterwards, they talk about the consequences and challenges taking on controversial subjects, Ben’s time as a media disruptor, and Jill’s time as a temp worker.

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It’s Still Alive - ‘The Deadline’ Apr 11, 2024

This episode features an essay from Jill Lepore’s ‘The Deadline.’

Why do we insist on misreading ‘Frankenstein?’ Hardly a day goes by without someone comparing some new technology to Frankenstein’s monster. But there’s a much richer set of lessons to draw from Mary Shelley’s book.

Today on the show, Jill reads her essay “It’s Still Alive.” And then afterwards, Jill and Ben talk about the meaning of the story, the biography of its author, and how what you read shapes who you are.

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The Valley of the Dolls - ‘The Deadline’ Apr 04, 2024

This episode features an essay from Jill Lepore’s ‘The Deadline.’

Jill reads her essay on the tangled history of Barbie. And then, after, Ben and Jill talk about how the film fits in with the core concerns of the essay — the tangled web of intellectual property, IP theft, and the relationship between corporations and feminism.

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The Iceman - ‘The Deadline’ Mar 28, 2024

In our first installment of essays from The Deadline, we’re bringing you ‘The Ice Man,’ a story about the history of cryogenic freezing, and the perils of being unable to let go.

After the essay, Jill and Ben talk about where the essay began and the moral challenges of writing about a living person.

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Coming Soon: Jill Lepore’s The Deadline Mar 21, 2024

Last year, Jill Lepore published a book called The Deadline. It’s a compilation of years worth of beautiful essays Jill has written on everything from the history of cryogenics to the Silicon Valley gospel of disruption. For the next six weeks, we’re going to be bringing you one of those essays each week. And then, at the end of each essay, Ben Naddaff-Hafrey will interview Jill about her craft and the themes of her essays.

Remember when DVDs had special features? This would be the best of the special features.

You can purchase the full collection at: https://www.pushkin.fm/audiobooks/the-deadline-essays

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From Decoder Ring: “The Curious Case of Columbo's Message to Romania Part 1” Mar 14, 2024

We’re bringing you an episode of Decoder Ring from our friends at Slate. This episode dives into a strange historical urban legend: Did Peter Falk of Columbo fame really help quell a Romanian communist revolt during the Cold War? Host Willa Paskin investigates.

Listen to “The Curious Case of Columbo’s Message to Romania Part 2” on Decoder Ring’s feed and follow to never miss an episode: https://slate.com/podcasts/decoder-ring.

This podcast was written by Willa Paskin, who produces Decoder Ring with Katie Shepherd. This episode was edited by Joel Meyer. Derek John is Slate’s executive producer of narrative podcasts. Merritt Jacob is senior technical director.

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The Returns: A Conversation with Jill Lepore Mar 07, 2024

In a special, all-new episode of ‘The Returns,’ host emerita Jill Lepore returns to talk about the post-truth moment we find ourselves in and what it means for the 2024 election.

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The Returns: Epiphany Feb 29, 2024

Each week on ‘The Returns,’ we pull a different episode from our own archive to help put our present politics into historical context.

This episode, Epiphany, first ran in 2021, as the finale to Season 2, which was all about lies, fakes, frauds, and hoaxes. In this episode, Jill Lepore takes listeners down the winding path from the little-known Iron Mountain hoax of the late 1960s to the Capitol insurrection on January 6th, 2021.

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The Returns: Hush Rush Feb 22, 2024

Each week on ‘The Returns,’ we pull a different episode from our archive to help put our present politics into historical context.

In the 1980s, Rush Limbaugh transformed talk radio. In the process, he radicalized his listeners and the conservative movement. Limbaugh’s talk radio style became a staple of the modern right. Then, the left joined the fray. This week: partisan loudmouth versus partisan loudmouth, and the shifting media landscape that helped create modern political warfare.

This episode first ran in June, 2021.

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The Returns: Project X Feb 15, 2024

Each week on ‘The Returns,’ we pull a different episode from our archive to put our present politics into historical context.

The election of 1952 brought all kinds of new technology into the political sphere. The Eisenhower campaign experimented with the first television ads to feature an American presidential candidate. And on election night, CBS News premiered the first computer to predict an American election — the UNIVAC. Safe to say, that part didn’t go according to plan. But election night 1952 is ground zero for our current, political post-truth moment. If a computer and a targeted advertisement can both use heaps of data to predict every citizen’s every decision, can voters really know things for themselves after all?

This episode first ran in the summer of 2020.

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The Returns: An Election Mini-Series from The Last Archive Feb 08, 2024

Election Year 2024 is upon us. And it promises to be a bit of a mess. But where did all this mess come from? In a 4-episode mini-series drawing from our own archive, Jill Lepore and Ben Naddaff-Hafrey investigate, situate, and contextualize our present moment in the history that brought us here. This series contains episodes from our original seasons alongside new material. Coming next week.

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The Unmarked Graveyard from Radio Diaries Nov 20, 2023

This is the first episode in Radio Diaries’ new series The Unmarked Graveyard, untangling mysteries from America’s largest public cemetery. Each week, they’re bringing you stories of how people ended up on New York City's Hart Island, the lives they lived, and the people they left behind.

This debut episode goes back to a few years ago, when a young man who called himself Stephen became a fixture in Manhattan’s Riverside Park. Locals started noticing him sitting on the same park bench day after day. He said little and asked for nothing.

When Stephen’s body was found in 2017, the police were unable to identify him, and he was buried on Hart Island. Then, one day, a woman who knew him from the park stumbled upon his true identity, and his backstory came to light.

Listen to new episodes of The Unmarked Graveyard from Radio Diaries every week, wherever you get your podcasts.

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The Krononauts Jul 27, 2023

In our season finale, we travel through time.

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Callings Jul 20, 2023

In the 1940s, a freelance wiretapper named Big Jim Vaus got mixed up with the cops, the mob, and the most famous evangelist in America. This week on The Last Archive: The ballad of Big Jim and what the intersections of telephone history and American spirituality reveal about how we understand the phone.

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Acting Out Jul 13, 2023

In the 1930s, at a women's reformatory in upstate New York, an upstart social scientist made a study that launched the field of social network analysis. It was revolutionary, but missed something happening at the same time at the same school, something we know now in part from the story of the school's most famous inmate: Ella Fitzgerald.

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Parakeet Panic Jul 06, 2023

When invasive parakeets began to spread in New York City in the 1970s, the government decided it needed to kill them all. Today: The offbeat panic about wild parrots, and a history of anxieties about population growth.

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The Word For Man Is Ishi Jun 29, 2023

In 1911, a Native American man, the only member of his community to survive a genocide, encounteredthe new Anthropology department at The University of California, Berkeley. What happened next helped to define the ethical quandaries of the field and, in a strange turn, the history of science fiction. This episode: That story and the moral stakes of imagining the past and the future.

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Player Piano Jun 22, 2023

This week on The Last Archive, the story of the composer Raymond Scott’s lifelong quest to build an automatic songwriting machine, and what it means for our own AI-addled, ChatGPT world.

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Coming Soon: Season 4 Jun 08, 2023

This upcoming season on The Last Archive: early artificial intelligence, the forgotten origins of social network theory, invasive species panics, freelance wiretappers, time travelers, and science fiction family histories. How do we know what we know? Why does it feel like sometimes it’s impossible to know anything at all? Host emeritus Jill Lepore passes the torch to producer Ben Naddaff-Hafrey for six gripping stories about the history of truth.
The Last Archive Season 4 launches on June 22nd with new episodes out weekly. Subscribe to Pushkin+ to hear the whole season at once, ad-free. Find Pushkin+ on the Last Archive showpage in Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin.fm/plus.

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Is Shakespeare American? From Where There’s a Will Dec 22, 2022

We’re bringing you an episode of a new Pushkin podcast we’re enjoying and think you will, too. Where There’s a Will: Finding Shakespeare searches for the surprising places Shakespeare shows up outside the theater. Host Barry Edelstein, artistic director at one of the country’s leading Shakespeare theaters, and co-host writer and director Em Weinstein, ask what is it about Shakespeare that’s given him a continuous afterlife in all sorts of unexpected ways? You’ll hear Shakespeare doing rehabilitative work in a maximum security prison, helping autistic children to communicate, in the mouths of U.S. presidents, and even at the center of a deadly riot in New York City. In this episode, Barry and Em take us back in time to 1849 – a riot at a Shakespearean theater has left dozens of people dead. But as it always is with the Bard, there's more here than meets the eye. Why did some people think Shakespeare was important enough to die for? How did the work of one man writing in Victorian England capture the tensions brewing in a newly independent America? And who, if anyone, is Shakespeare really for?

Hear the full episode, and more from Where There’s a Will, at https://podcasts.pushkin.fm/wtaw?sid=tla.

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The Last Archivist Introduces: Click Here Dec 21, 2022

From Click Here, a podcast about the world of cyber and intelligence.

As Vladimir Putin attempts to redraw the Iron Curtain, we take a trip back to 1985 to tell the story of four American musicians who smuggled messages in and out of the former Soviet Union — with music.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/click-here/id1225077306

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The Lost Archive Dec 08, 2022

Jill Lepore goes back to her first archive — the public library in the town where she grew up. In this season finale, old books, hot dogs, and a town hidden beneath a lake.

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The Weather Vane Dec 01, 2022

The story of weather forecasting is the story of how humans came to think they could predict the future. In this episode, Jill Lepore looks at the history of meteorology, and the story of a revolutionary cloud scientist who tried to control the weather.

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Good Boy Nov 22, 2022

In 1920, a young writer named Hugh Lofting published the first Dr. Dolittle story. A century years later, Jill Lepore goes in search of the new Dr. Dolittles changing the world of animal science. Specifically, dog science.

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The Farming Game Nov 17, 2022

During the 1970s farm crisis, a young family nearly lost everything as family farms and agricultural folk knowledge began to vanish. Then, they invented a board game.

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The Tree Branch Nov 10, 2022

This episode, an alternate history: imagining what the world might be like if, fifty years ago, in 1972, Americans had an amendment to the U.S. Constitution granting not only protection–but representation–to the natural world.

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Trial by Teenager, Part 2 Nov 03, 2022

The fact-checking experiment gets scaled up with 40 students in two states. The Super Bowl of fact-checking, and a final test of an idea that might help save American democracy.

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Trial by Teenager, Part 1 Oct 27, 2022

What if there were a way to stop politicians from lying on social media? Jill Lepore heads to a local high school to test out a crazy idea: Should juries of high school history students decide whether each and every political ad is true enough to be posted to social media?

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Information, Please! Oct 27, 2022

What if one book could contain the sum of human knowledge? Jill Lepore looks at the history of an improbable Enlightenment idea, tracing it from Encyclopedia Britannica to Wikipedia and beyond.

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Coming Soon: Season Three Oct 13, 2022

Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore returns with the third season of her Pushkin Industries podcast The Last Archive. Across two seasons, Lepore has unspooled a history of the United States's post-truth crisis — of how we know what we know and why it seems lately as if we can't agree on anything at all. In her third and final season, Lepore tells eight stories about common knowledge. From high school juries ruling on the truthfulness of political ads to profiles of cutting-edge animal scientists, Lepore offers a season of celebration.

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Introducing: The Last Archivist Aug 04, 2022

PROGRAMMING NOTE: The third season of The Last Archive is coming this fall! It will remain free and available everywhere. In the meantime, we are launching a new, subscription-only series as part of the Pushkin+ offering. It’s called The Last Archivist, a series of conversations between historian Jill Lepore and collectors, curators, librarians, and keepers of history. This first episode is available for free, but if you want to listen to the rest of the series, subscribe in Apple Podcasts, or at www.pushkin.fm. Stay tuned for Season Three of The Last Archive later this year, which will be free and available everywhere you listen to podcasts.
DESCRIPTION: In the first episode of this Pushkin+ series, Jill Lepore talks to Reginald Dwayne Betts about Freedom Reads: an initiative to build libraries in prisons and jails across America. Betts is a MacArthur Genius Grant award recipient and the author of "Felon" – a collection of poems about the effects of incarceration.

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The Evening Rocket: Robin Hood Nov 29, 2021

At the start of 2021, Elon Musk briefly became the richest man in the world. The global pandemic was a boom time for American billionaires, many of whom saw their wealth rise even as much of the world was locked down. As Musk, Bezos, Gates and others jockeyed for first place in the world’s richest-man contest, the rise of cryptocurrencies was generating headlines about the fictive quality of money. “All forms of currency are acts of imagination”, says Jill Lepore: they require communal belief in their value - what economists sometimes call the Tinkerbell Effect. Musk started tweeting about Dogecoin - a cryptocurrency started as a joke, based on a meme about a dog - even dubbing himself 'The Dogefather'. Although Musk’s tweets looked ironic, jokey, irreverent, they seemed to be having a very real and destabilizing effect on financial markets.

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The Evening Rocket: Baby X Nov 22, 2021

The science fiction that Silicon Valley techno-billionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel adore often concerns gleaming futures in which fantastically powerful and often immensely rich men colonize other planets. In this episode, Jill Lepore takes a look at the science fiction that’s usually left out of this vision. New Wave, feminist, post-colonial science fiction. Including the story of Baby X, a story from the 1970s about a child - like Musk’s youngest son - named X.

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The Evening Rocket: Iron Man Nov 15, 2021

How Silicon Valley capitalism is as much about narrative as the bottom line. In 2008 when Tesla Motors launched their first car, the completely electric Roadster, Tesla was a great story. Something genuinely new. An engineering marvel. Elon Musk as CEO was an even better story. He had already disrupted banking and aerospace. Now the automobile industry. That same year, the superhero film Iron Man was released. Its creators turned to Musk to help shape this version of the character of Tony Stark, a billionaire arms dealer who believes everything is achievable through technology, and private enterprise. Musk was on the cover of countless magazines, under headlines like “Elon Musk AKA Tony Stark, Wants to Save the World.” He was becoming a celebrity, on a superhero scale.

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The Evening Rocket: Planet B Nov 08, 2021

Why does Elon Musk believe he can save the world by colonizing Mars? When PayPal was bought for $1.5 billion, Elon Musk and other company founders made huge personal fortunes. Musk used his to start the rocket company, SpaceX. He also began talking about very big plans for the future of humanity. He wanted humans to become ‘a multi-planetary species’ and said he was accumulating resources to 'extend the light of consciousness to the stars’. Soon he was talking about humans moving permanently to Mars. Future-of-humanity questions used to belong to religion and philosophy. Under ‘Muskism’ they belong more to engineering and entrepreneurship. Jill Lepore traces the history of Silicon Valley's fascination with existential catastrophism. In the second of five programs, strap in to head to Mars.

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The Evening Rocket: Dimension X Nov 01, 2021

Jill Lepore untangles the strange sci-fi roots of Silicon Valley's extreme capitalism - with its extravagant, existential and extra-terrestrial plans to save humanity. In this world, stock prices can be driven partly by fantasies found in blockbuster superhero movies, but that come from science fiction, some of it a century old. If anyone personifies this phenomenon, it's Elon Musk, the richest or second-richest person in the world on any given day. "The bare facts of Musk’s life, the way they’re usually told, make him sound like a fictional character, a comic-book superhero," says Lepore. He says he hopes to colonize Mars, create brain-hacking implants and avert an AI apocalypse. He even has a baby named X. In this first of five episodes Lepore looks at the early origins of ‘Muskism’, and explores how the science fiction stories that today’s techno-billionaires grew up on have shaped Silicon Valley’s vision of the future.

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The Last Archive Presents: The Evening Rocket Oct 20, 2021

Last Spring, Jill Lepore made a radio show with the BBC’s Radio 4 called The Evening Rocket, and now Pushkin Industries is releasing that show stateside for the first time. The Evening Rocket is all about Elon Musk, and his strange new kind of capitalism — call it Muskism, extravagant extreme capitalism, extraterrestrial capitalism, where stock prices are driven by earnings, and also by fantasies. The series explores Silicon Valley’s futurism, and how, in Musk’s life, those visions of the future all stem from the same place: the science-fiction he grew up on. To understand where Musk wants to take the rest of us - with his electric cars, his rockets to Mars, his meme stocks, and tunnels deep beneath the earth — Jill Lepore looks at those science fiction stories, and helps us understand what he’s missed about them.

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Epiphany Jun 24, 2021

This season has chronicled a long, dark century of lies, fakes, frauds, and hoaxes. In the season 2 finale, Jill Lepore draws that history all the way down to the lie that the 2020 election was stolen. This week: the winding path from the little-known Iron Mountain hoax of the late-1960s to the Capitol insurrection on January 6th, 2021.

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Hush Rush Jun 17, 2021

In the 1980s, Rush Limbaugh transformed talk radio. In the process, he radicalized his listeners and the conservative movement. Limbaugh’s talk radio style became a staple of the modern right. Then, the left joined the fray. This week: partisan loudmouth versus partisan loudmouth, and the shifting media landscape that helped create modern political warfare.

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Children of Zorin Jun 10, 2021

In the 1970s, a Soviet journalist named Valentin Zorin made a series of documentary films about the United States. At a time when few Russian journalists came to the U.S., Zorin traveled all across the country, and gained access few American journalists had. The Cold War was a battle of ideas, and Zorin saw himself on the frontlines. He was on a quest to unmask the United States by spreading doubt, conspiracy theories, and a strange cocktail of truth and misinformation.

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It Came From Outer Space Jun 03, 2021

A fake moon landing. Astronauts carrying space pathogens back to earth. Michael Crichton’s Andromeda Strain. HIV manufactured in a government laboratory. COVID-19 vaccines killing millions. In this episode, Jill Lepore follows a trail of disease stories and conspiracies from Apollo 11 to COVID-19. In part two of our series about the moon landing: Apollo’s splashdown, and the tidal wave of doubt it set off.

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Remote Control May 27, 2021

In 1961, President Kennedy announced that the United States would go to the moon. Eight years later, the Apollo 11 astronauts set foot upon its surface. Millions of Americans watched live on their televisions as it happened, but somehow the pinnacle of man’s achievement became a wellspring of conspiracy theories. In this first episode of a two-part series on the moon landing, Jill Lepore traces the explosion of conspiratorial thinking that began with Apollo 11’s lift off — a path winding from awe of science, to the unshakeable faith that everything is a conspiracy. The more extraordinary scientific research and technology got, the more difficult it became to keep sight of the line between fact and fiction, and between the believable and the unbelievable.

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Repeat After Me May 20, 2021

One night in 1952, a Coloradan businessman hypnotized a local housewife. Under his spell, she began to recount her past life as a 19th-century Irish woman. He caught it on tape. The story of her reincarnation tore out of their Colorado town and across the world. It spawned major motion pictures, an international bestselling book, and a national hypnosis craze. But beneath all the uproar lay a set of questions that revealed a deep worry about the nature of self in the 1950s, the decade’s strange mishmash of psychology and spiritualism, and an anxiety about gender. This week on The Last Archive: Who are you, really?

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The Inner Front May 13, 2021

During World War II, Nazi radio broadcast the voice of an American woman who came to be known as Axis Sally. She spoke, via shortwave radio, to American women, attempting to turn them against their country and the American war effort. She was waging a battle on what came to be called the Inner Front, the war of public opinion. Propaganda-by-radio was new then; so was psychological warfare. Writers, poets, psychologists, propagandists, and broadcasters all took to the airwaves in the 1930s and 1940s in a pitched battle of words and sound. After the war, two American women who had broadcast for Axis powers, Germany and Japan, were prosecuted for treason. How did the courts measure the power of words, over radio, to change minds?

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Believe It May 06, 2021

Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! was one of the most popular radio shows of the 1930s, and for good reason: Early radio, not unlike the Internet of nearly a century later, was obsessed with doubt about belief. On this episode of The Last Archive, Jill Lepore spins the dial and takes a tour of 1930s radio — from Robert Ripley to Charlie Chan, from Mexican broadcaster Pedro González to the shows of Orson Welles: the full spectrum of true and false on the air.

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Monkey Business Apr 29, 2021

In 1925, John Scopes, a high school teacher from Dayton, Tennessee, was put on trial for teaching evolution. It came to be called the "monkey trial," a landmark in the history of doubt. All over the country, Americans tuned in on their radios as science and faith battled in the courtroom. But the nation also witnessed something else: the beginnings of a culture war that’s been waged ever since. This episode on The Last Archive, a skeptical chronicle of an early battle in that war.

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Coming Soon: Season Two Apr 15, 2021

Coming Soon: the second season of The Last Archive, a podcast about the history of truth and the shadow of doubt written and hosted by New Yorker writer and celebrated historian Jill Lepore.

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Election Special Oct 22, 2020

We're back with a special, election-themed episode of The Last Archive! While reporting Episode 5: Project X, Jill spoke to Bob Schieffer, famed TV newsman of CBS, about how computers and the Internet changed the way we report on elections, and even the way they turn out. It's been sitting on the shelf here in the last archive for a little while now, but it feels eerily prescient. So, take a listen, take a deep breath, and good luck come November.

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Tomorrowland Jul 16, 2020

For ten episodes, we’ve been asking a big question: Who killed truth? The answer has to do with a change in the elemental unit of knowledge: the fall of the fact, and the rise of data. So, for the last chapter in our investigation, we rented a cherry red convertible, and went to the place all the data goes: Silicon Valley. In our season finale, we reckon with a weird foreshortening of history, the fussiness of old punch cards, the unreality of simulation, and the difficulty of recording audio with the top down on the 101. Hop in.

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For the Birds Jul 09, 2020

In the spring of 1958, when the winter snow melted and the warm sun returned, the birds did not. Birdwatchers, ordinary people, everyone wondered where the birds had gone. Rachel Carson, a journalist and early environmentalist, figured it out — they’d been poisoned by DDT, a pesticide that towns all over the country had been spraying. Carson wrote a book about it, Silent Spring. It succeeded in stopping DDT, and it launched the modern environmental movement. But now, more than 60 years later, birds are dying off en masse again. Our question is simple: What are the birds trying to tell us this time, and why can’t we hear their message any more?

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She Said, She Said Jul 02, 2020

In 1969, radical feminists known as the Redstockings gathered in a church in Greenwich Village, and spoke about their experiences with abortion. They called this ‘consciousness-raising’ or ‘speaking bitterness,’ and it changed the history of women’s rights, all the way down to the 1977 National Women’s Convention and, really, down to the present day. The idea of ‘speaking bitterness’ came from a Maoist practice, and is a foundation to both the #MeToo movement and the conservative Victim’s Rights movement. But at what cost?

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The Computermen Jun 25, 2020

In 1966, just as the foundations of the Internet were being imagined, the federal government considered building a National Data Center. It would be a centralized federal facility to hold computer records from each federal agency, in the same way that the Library of Congress holds books and the National Archives holds manuscripts. Proponents argued that it would help regulate and compile the vast quantities of data the government was collecting. Quickly, though, fears about privacy, government conspiracies, and government ineptitude buried the idea. But now, that National Data Center looks like a missed opportunity to create rules about data and privacy before the Internet took off. And in the absence of government action, corporations have made those rules themselves.

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Cell Strain Jun 18, 2020

In the 1950s, polio spread throughout the United States. Heartbreakingly, it affected mainly children. Thousands died. Thousands more were paralyzed. Many ended up surviving only in iron lungs, a machine that breathed for polio victims, sometimes for years. Scientists raced to find a vaccine. After a few hard years of widespread quarantine and isolation, the scientists succeeded. The discovery of the polio vaccine was one of the brightest moments in public health history. But a vaccine required Americans to believe in a truth they couldn’t see with their own eyes. It also raised questions of access, of racial equity, and of the federal government’s role in healthcare, questions whose legacy we’re living with today.

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Project X Jun 11, 2020

The election of 1952 brought all kinds of new technology into the political sphere. The Eisenhower campaign experimented with the first television ads to feature an American presidential candidate. And on election night, CBS News premiered the first computer to predict an American election — the UNIVAC. Safe to say, that part didn’t go according to plan. But election night 1952 is ground zero for our current, political post-truth moment. If a computer and a targeted advertisement can both use heaps data to predict every citizen’s every decision, can voters really know things for themselves after all?

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Unheard Jun 04, 2020

In 1945, Ralph Ellison went to a barn in Vermont and began to write Invisible Man. He wrote it in the voice of a black man from the south, a voice that changed American literature. Invisible Man is a novel made up of black voices that had been excluded from the historical record until, decades earlier, he’d helped record them with the WPA’s Federal Writers Project. What is the evidence of a voice? How can we truly know history without everyone’s voices? This episode traces those questions — from the quest to record oral histories of formerly enslaved people, to Black Lives Matter and the effort to record the evidence of police brutality.

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The Invisible Lady May 28, 2020

In 1804, an Invisible Lady arrived in New York City.

She went on to become the most popular attraction in the country. But why? And who was she? In this episode, we chase her through time, finding invisible women everywhere, wondering: What is the relationship between keeping women invisible and the histories of privacy, and of knowledge?

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Detection of Deception May 21, 2020

When James Frye, a young black man, is charged with murder under unusual circumstances in 1922, he trusts his fate to a strange new machine: the lie detector. Why did the lie detector’s inventor, William Moulton Marston, a psychology professor and lawyer, think a machine could tell if a human being is lying better than a jury? And what does it all have to do with Wonder Woman?

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The Clue of the Blue Bottle May 14, 2020

On a spring day in 1919, a woman’s body was found bound, gagged, and strangled in a garden in Barre, Vermont. Who was she? Who killed her? In this episode, we try to solve a cold case - reopening a century-old murder investigation - as a way to uncover the history of evidence itself. What is a clue? What is a fact? What is a mystery? We put the pieces of the puzzle together: photographs, newspaper articles, a private eye’s notebook, the trial record and, last but not least, a trip to the scene of the crime.

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