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 written & hosted by Ben Naddaff-Hafrey, and was created by the historian Jill Lepore. iHeartMedia is the exclusive podcast partner of Pushkin Industries.

00:51:27 2024-03-28
In our first installment of essays from The Deadline, we’re bringing you ‘The Ice Man,’ a story about the history of cryogenic freezing, and the perils of being unable to let go.  After the essay, Jill and Ben talk about where the essay began and t...
00:01:25 2024-03-21
Last year, Jill Lepore published a book called The Deadline. It’s a compilation of years worth of beautiful essays Jill has written on everything from the history of cryogenics to the Silicon Valley gospel of disruption. For the next six weeks, we’re ...
00:41:32 2024-03-14
We’re bringing you an episode of Decoder Ring from our friends at Slate. This episode dives into a strange historical urban legend: Did Peter Falk of Columbo fame really help quell a Romanian communist revolt during the Cold War? Host Willa Paskin inves...
01:01:58 2024-03-07
In a special, all-new episode of ‘The Returns,’ host emerita Jill Lepore returns to talk about the post-truth moment we find ourselves in and what it means for the 2024 election.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
00:46:37 2024-02-29
Each week on ‘The Returns,’ we pull a different episode from our own archive to help put our present politics into historical context. This episode, Epiphany, first ran in 2021, as the finale to Season 2, which was all about lies, fakes, frauds, and h...
00:50:54 2024-02-22
Each week on ‘The Returns,’ we pull a different episode from our archive to help put our present politics into historical context.  In the 1980s, Rush Limbaugh transformed talk radio. In the process, he radicalized his listeners and the conservative ...
00:45:27 2024-02-15
Each week on ‘The Returns,’ we pull a different episode from our archive to put our present politics into historical context. The election of 1952 brought all kinds of new technology into the political sphere. The Eisenhower campaign experimented with...
00:01:42 2024-02-08
Election Year 2024 is upon us. And it promises to be a bit of a mess. But where did all this mess come from? In a 4-episode mini-series drawing from our own archive, Jill Lepore and Ben Naddaff-Hafrey investigate, situate, and contextualize our present mo...
00:23:45 2023-11-20
This is the first episode in Radio Diaries’ new series The Unmarked Graveyard, untangling mysteries from America’s largest public cemetery. Each week, they’re bringing you stories of how people ended up on New York City's Hart Island, the lives they...
00:48:04 2023-07-27
In our season finale, we travel through time.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
00:43:12 2023-07-20
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 spiri...
00:48:53 2023-07-13
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...
00:40:01 2023-07-06
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.See omnystudio.com/listener for priva...
00:49:18 2023-06-29
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...
00:53:09 2023-06-22
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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
00:02:06 2023-06-08
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...
00:11:23 2022-12-22
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 dire...
00:21:15 2022-12-21
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 U...
00:38:14 2022-12-08
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....
00:44:24 2022-12-01
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.Se...
00:53:32 2022-11-22
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 p...
00:49:21 2022-11-17
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....
00:40:24 2022-11-10
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/listen...
00:38:01 2022-11-03
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....
00:41:20 2022-10-27
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 poste...
00:49:37 2022-10-27
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....
00:02:04 2022-10-13
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...
00:18:13 2022-08-04
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,...
00:28:12 2021-11-29
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 jock...
00:27:54 2021-11-22
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 ...
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