The Last Archive

In our season finale, we travel through time.

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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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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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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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In 1911, a Native American man, the only member of his community to survive a genocide, encountered the 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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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: 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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The Last Archive​:​ a new podcast about the history of evidence written and hosted by New Yorker writer, author, and celebrated historian Jill Lepore.

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