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The Last Archive podcast

The Last Archive

The Last Archive​ is a show about the history of truth, and the historical context for our current fake news, post-truth moment. It’s a show about how we know what we know, and why it seems, these days, as if we don’t know anything at all anymore. The show is driven by host Jill Lepore’s work as a historian, uncovering the secrets of the past the way a detective might. iHeartMedia is the exclusive podcast partner of Pushkin Industries.

The Last Archive​ is a show about the history of truth, and the historical context for our current fake news, post-truth moment. It’s a show about how we know what we know, and why it seems, these days, as if we don’t know anything at all anymore. The show is driven by host Jill Lepore’s work as a historian, uncovering the secrets of the past the way a detective might. iHeartMedia is the exclusive podcast partner of Pushkin Industries.

 

#40

Is Shakespeare American? From Where There’s a Will

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] (https://podcasts.pushkin.fm/wtaw?sid=tla) .  See [omnystudio.com/listener] (https://omnystudio.com/listener) for privacy information. ... Read more

22 Dec 2022

11 MINS

11:23

22 Dec 2022


#39

The Last Archivist Introduces: Click Here

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] (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/click-here/id1225077306) See [omnystudio.com/listener] (https://omnystudio.com/listener) for privacy information. ... Read more

21 Dec 2022

21 MINS

21:15

21 Dec 2022


#38

The Lost Archive

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. See [omnystudio.com/listener] (https://omnystudio.com/listener) for privacy information. ... Read more

08 Dec 2022

38 MINS

38:14

08 Dec 2022


#37

The Weather Vane

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. See [omnystudio.com/listener] (https://omnystudio.com/listener) for privacy information. ... Read more

01 Dec 2022

44 MINS

44:24

01 Dec 2022


#36

Good Boy

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. See [omnystudio.com/listener] (https://omnystudio.com/listener) for privacy information. ... Read more

22 Nov 2022

53 MINS

53:32

22 Nov 2022


#35

The Farming Game

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. See [omnystudio.com/listener] (https://omnystudio.com/listener) for privacy information. ... Read more

17 Nov 2022

49 MINS

49:21

17 Nov 2022


#34

The Tree Branch

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. See [omnystudio.com/listener] (https://omnystudio.com/listener) for privacy information. ... Read more

10 Nov 2022

40 MINS

40:24

10 Nov 2022


#33

Trial by Teenager, Part 2

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. See [omnystudio.com/listener] (https://omnystudio.com/listener) for privacy information. ... Read more

03 Nov 2022

38 MINS

38:01

03 Nov 2022


#32

Trial by Teenager, Part 1

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? See [omnystudio.com/listener] (https://omnystudio.com/listener) for privacy information. ... Read more

27 Oct 2022

41 MINS

41:20

27 Oct 2022


#31

Information, Please!

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. See [omnystudio.com/listener] (https://omnystudio.com/listener) for privacy information. ... Read more

27 Oct 2022

49 MINS

49:37

27 Oct 2022


#30

Coming Soon: Season Three

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. See [omnystudio.com/listener] (https://omnystudio.com/listener) for privacy information. ... Read more

13 Oct 2022

02 MINS

02:04

13 Oct 2022


#29

Introducing: The Last Archivist

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.  See [omnystudio.com/listener] (https://omnystudio.com/listener) for privacy information. ... Read more

04 Aug 2022

18 MINS

18:13

04 Aug 2022


#28

The Evening Rocket: Robin Hood

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. Learn more about your ad-choices at [https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com] (https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com) See [omnystudio.com/listener] (https://omnystudio.com/listener) for privacy information. ... Read more

29 Nov 2021

28 MINS

28:12

29 Nov 2021


#27

The Evening Rocket: Baby X

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. Learn more about your ad-choices at [https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com] (https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com) See [omnystudio.com/listener] (https://omnystudio.com/listener) for privacy information. ... Read more

22 Nov 2021

27 MINS

27:54

22 Nov 2021


#26

The Evening Rocket: Iron Man

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. Learn more about your ad-choices at [https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com] (https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com) See [omnystudio.com/listener] (https://omnystudio.com/listener) for privacy information. ... Read more

15 Nov 2021

28 MINS

28:26

15 Nov 2021


#25

The Evening Rocket: Planet B

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. Learn more about your ad-choices at [https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com] (https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com) See [omnystudio.com/listener] (https://omnystudio.com/listener) for privacy information. ... Read more

08 Nov 2021

28 MINS

28:39

08 Nov 2021


#24

The Evening Rocket: Dimension X

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. Learn more about your ad-choices at [https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com] (https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com) See [omnystudio.com/listener] (https://omnystudio.com/listener) for privacy information. ... Read more

01 Nov 2021

30 MINS

30:01

01 Nov 2021


#23

The Last Archive Presents: The Evening Rocket

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. Learn more about your ad-choices at [https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com] (https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com) See [omnystudio.com/listener] (https://omnystudio.com/listener) for privacy information. ... Read more

20 Oct 2021

01 MINS

01:56

20 Oct 2021


#22

Epiphany

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. Learn more about your ad-choices at [https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com] (https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com) See [omnystudio.com/listener] (https://omnystudio.com/listener) for privacy information. ... Read more

24 Jun 2021

45 MINS

45:01

24 Jun 2021


#21

Hush Rush

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. Learn more about your ad-choices at [https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com] (https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com) See [omnystudio.com/listener] (https://omnystudio.com/listener) for privacy information. ... Read more

17 Jun 2021

48 MINS

48:09

17 Jun 2021