The Last Archive

By Pushkin Industries

Society & Culture History

What's The Last Archive about?

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.

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LAST EPISODE

Is Shakespeare American? Fr...

12.22.2022

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 ...

The Last Archive episodes:

12.22.2022 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 ...
12.21.2022 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 ...
12.08.2022 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 for privacy information.
12.01.2022 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 ...
11.22.2022 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 for ...
11.17.2022 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 for privacy information.
11.10.2022 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 for privacy information.
11.03.2022 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 for privacy information.
10.27.2022 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 for privacy information.
10.27.2022 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 ...
10.13.2022 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 ...
08.04.2022 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 ...
06.14.2022 Relax and Win from Legacy of Speed Sharing a new Pushkin show, Legacy of Speed. When two Black sprinters raised their fists in protest at the 1968 Olympic Games, it shook the world. More than 50 years later, the ripple effects of their activism are still felt. ...
05.03.2022 The Sanchez Problem from Against the Rules We’re hard at work on Season 3 of the show, but in the meantime, we wanted to share an episode from another Pushkin podcast, Against the Rules. It’s hosted by best-selling author Michael Lewis. This season, Lewis is talking about ...
02.03.2022 Call The Last Archive Our first two seasons were all about problems, or, mainly, about one problem: Why does it seem so hard, lately, to know anything at all? How did it come to be that people can’t agree on basic matters of fact? ...
12.08.2021 Miracle And Wonder: Conversations With Paul Simon Presenting: An Excerpt from Miracle And Wonder: Conversations With Paul Simon by Malcolm Gladwell and Bruce Headlam. Download the audiobook today at miracleaudibook.com and receive an exclusive listener's guide pdf featuring additional commentary from Bruce, the producers and editors of ...
11.29.2021 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 ...
11.22.2021 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 ...
11.15.2021 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 ...
11.08.2021 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 ...
11.01.2021 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 ...
10.20.2021 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 ...
08.02.2021 Revisionist History Takes Down The Little Mermaid This week, we're presenting something fun from Malcolm Gladwell, co-founder of Pushkin. In a special series from his podcast, Revisionist History, Malcolm is launching a massive frontal assault on The Little Mermaid. You might wonder, "what's Malcolm doing? It's a ...
07.01.2021 HISTORY This Week: The Fairness Doctrine Presenting an episode from another podcast we think you’ll like, called HISTORY This Week. Each Monday, it brings you a story about the people, places, and moments that shaped history that week. In this episode, they delve into the history ...
06.24.2021 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 ...
06.17.2021 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 ...
06.10.2021 Children of Zorin 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 ...
06.03.2021 It Came From Outer Space 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 ...
05.27.2021 Remote Control 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 ...
05.20.2021 Repeat After Me 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 ...
05.13.2021 The Inner Front 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 ...
05.06.2021 Believe It 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 ...
04.29.2021 Monkey Business 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 ...
04.15.2021 Coming Soon: Season Two 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. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee ...
03.30.2021 Presenting: The Bomber Mafia from Malcolm Gladwell We’re excited for you to join us for our new season later this spring. Until then, we wanted to share a new audiobook from Pushkin's President, Malcolm Gladwell. The Bomber Mafia looks at what happens when technology and morality collide ...
03.23.2021 Presenting: Lost Hills Season 2 of The Last Archive is coming later this spring. But in the meantime, here's an episode of Lost Hills: A new show from Pushkin and Jill Lepore's fellow New Yorker writer Dana Goodyear. Dana is a great reporter ...
10.22.2020 Election Special 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, ...
10.12.2020 The Last Archive Presents: Brave New Planet Introducing Brave New Planet, a seven-part series that delves deep into the powerful technologies changing our world. These technologies have amazing potential upsides, but if we’re not careful, some might leave us a lot worse off. Brave New Planet is ...
09.03.2020 The Last Archive Presents: Into the Zone The newest show from Pushkin Industries is Into the Zone, a podcast about opposites and how borders are never as clear as we think. In Episode 1, Hari’s visit to Stonehenge on the Solstice prompts an investigation into the gray ...
07.23.2020 The Last Archive Presents: The Chronicles of Now The Last Archive presents: The Chronicles of Now. Three billion birds have gone missing in North America over the past 50 years. Or is that fake news? J. Courtney Sullivan, the New York Times bestselling author of five novels, including ...
07.16.2020 Tomorrowland 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 ...
07.09.2020 For the Birds 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 — ...
07.02.2020 She Said, She Said 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 ...
06.25.2020 The Computermen 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 ...
06.18.2020 Cell Strain 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 ...
06.11.2020 Project X 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 ...
06.04.2020 Unheard 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 ...
05.28.2020 The Invisible Lady 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, ...
05.21.2020 Detection of Deception 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 ...
05.14.2020 The Clue of the Blue Bottle 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 ...

Older episodes

The Last Archive

What's The Last Archive about?

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The Last Archive episodes:

Is Shakespeare American? From Where There’s a Will

The Last Archivist Introduces: Click Here

The Lost Archive

The Weather Vane

Good Boy

The Farming Game

The Tree Branch

Trial by Teenager, Part 2

Information, Please!

Trial by Teenager, Part 1

Coming Soon: Season Three

Introducing: The Last Archivist

Relax and Win from Legacy of Speed

The Sanchez Problem from Against the Rules

Call The Last Archive

Miracle And Wonder: Conversations With Paul Simon

The Evening Rocket: Robin Hood

The Evening Rocket: Baby X

The Evening Rocket: Iron Man

The Evening Rocket: Planet B

The Evening Rocket: Dimension X

The Last Archive Presents: The Evening Rocket

Revisionist History Takes Down The Little Mermaid

HISTORY This Week: The Fairness Doctrine

Epiphany

Hush Rush

Children of Zorin

It Came From Outer Space

Remote Control

Repeat After Me

The Inner Front

Believe It

Monkey Business

Coming Soon: Season Two

Presenting: The Bomber Mafia from Malcolm Gladwell

Presenting: Lost Hills

Election Special

The Last Archive Presents: Brave New Planet

The Last Archive Presents: Into the Zone

The Last Archive Presents: The Chronicles of Now

Tomorrowland

For the Birds

She Said, She Said

The Computermen

Cell Strain

Project X

Unheard

The Invisible Lady

Detection of Deception

The Clue of the Blue Bottle

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