An exploration of how this one thing – facial recognition – colors so many of our perceptions about ourselves and each other. For better or worse.

Revisionist History producer Lucie Sullivan, a board-certified super recognizer, explores what’s really going on in our brains when we see someone we know.

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You may be familiar with the phrase “lab rat.” Much of what we know about human beings and the way they behave are based upon the things we know about rats and the way they behave. But what if we picked the wrong animal to study? Revisionist History senior producer Ben wonders if we should have been putting another creature under the microscope.

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You might think unbelievably loud, shrill sirens on ambulances and fire trucks are just a fact of life. But what if we got the facts all wrong? In this special episode of Revisionist History, Ben Naddaff-Hafrey starts a movement to end the reign of the siren.

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With Earth Day coming up, we wanted to share a classic TLA episode about the climate crisis. Jill Lepore proposes an alternate reality in which Americans ratified an environmental rights amendment to the U.S. Constitution granting representation to the natural world. That never happened... but what would the world look like if it had?

For more episodes of The Last Archive about the environment, check out For the Birds and Parakeet Panic. 

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Elon Musk has claimed that AI is humanity’s “biggest existential threat.” Paradoxically, Musk is also working to create artificial intelligence. Why? Jill Lepore tours through a century of imagined robot rebellions, and argues that these stories are never only about robots. So what’s Elon Musk really afraid of when he wrings his hands over AI? In this final episode, Lepore argues that while Musk may be a visionary, “every piece of Muskism has origins in a future foretold in science fiction, long, long ago, as a cautionary tale.”

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In 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion, and renamed it X. When asked why he wanted to own the social media network, Musk talked a lot about something he called the “woke mind virus.” Where does the idea of a mind virus come from? Jill Lepore looks to Cold War science fiction and the recently uncovered writings of Elon Musk’s grandfather in South Africa.

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The science fiction that Silicon Valley techno-billionaires like Elon Musk adore concerns gleaming futures in which fantastically powerful, immensely rich men colonize other planets. In this episode, Jill Lepore looks at some of the science fiction that’s usually left out of this vision — science fiction by and about women.

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In 2021, Elon Musk started calling himself The Dogefather to signal his support for Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency based on a joke meme about a dog. That dog is now wagging the tail of the world’s economy. In this episode, Jill Lepore looks at Silicon Valley's cryptocurrency craze through the lens of some very old science fiction. Like everything else about Muskism that purports to be futuristic, this idea is a relic, whose history serves as a warning.

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In 2008 Tesla Motors launched its first car, the completely electric Roadster. Tesla was a great story — something genuinely new, an engineering marvel. Musk became a media darling, on the cover of countless magazines under headlines like ‘Elon Musk, AKA Tony Stark, Wants to Save the World’. Within the logic of Muskism, talking about saving the world was a business strategy, a way to sell cars without ads. Why did so many people buy what Musk was selling?

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Elon Musk is a rocket man. He wants humans to become ‘a multi-planetary species’ and talks about establishing human settlements on Mars. As President Trump talks up the Mars program while dismantling aid initiatives around the globe, Jill Lepore traces how Silicon Valley's existential catastrophism led to Musk’s extraterrestrial vision of capitalism.

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