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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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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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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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. Host Malcolm Gladwell tells the stories of the runners who took a stand, and the coaches and mentors who helped make them fast enough — and brave enough — to change the world.

In this episode, we hear how coach Bud Winter took what he learned from working with fighter pilots in World War II and created a system for training sprinters at San Jose State. His “Relax and Win” methods used breathing, visualization and other unconventional coaching techniques to create a powerhouse track program. Another thing that made him unique at the time? His focus on recruiting Black athletes to a mostly white school.

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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 expertise: why Americans are pretty good at creating experts, but really terrible at listening to them. And this particular episode takes on a subject many of you might be familiar with, especially if you’re longtime listeners of The Last Archive: Expert witnesses. Back in season one, Jill Lepore talked about the strange backstory of “The Frye Test” and why certain types of evidence, like lie-detector tests, are not admitted in court. Michael Lewis has his own take on this subject, and he brings us up to date. It’s called “The Sanchez Problem.” 

You can listen to more Against the Rules episodes at https://link.chtbl.com/lastarchiveatr.

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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? In our new season, we’re all about answers. But: We need your help!

So we’re asking for your ideas. Tell us about a breakthrough you’ve had. Or a fix you’ve heard about. What works? What helps? What’s the way out of this pickle? Call us. Leave a message on the answering machine we’ve got here, inside the archive. Tell us your name, and a story. Who knows — we might use it in an episode. The number is (802)-417-2010. And thank you!

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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 Miracle and Wonder.

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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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