PODCASTS
X Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story
JILL LEPORE — 1 Season
The story of Elon Musk, the way it’s often told, makes him sound like a fictional character, a comic-book superhero—or, especially lately, a supervillain. As the world’s richest man, the US President’s right-hand man, and the owner of X, he’s possibly the world’s most powerful man.
Musk wants to build robots and colonise Mars and appears to be dismantling sizable parts of the US government. His vision of the future seems to stem from the science fiction that has fueled his imagination since he was a boy. But what’s the real story, the true history, behind Musk’s sense of destiny?
Back in 2021 Harvard history professor and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore became fascinated by this question. So she made a podcast that tried to explain Musk through the science fiction he grew up with. A lot has happened in the four years since. So she’s gone back in to bring the story up to date.
“X Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story” is a production of the BBC and distributed by Pushkin Industries.
The Last Archive
BEN NADDAFF-HAFREY, JILL LEPORE — 4 Seasons
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.
The Last Archive is a history show. Our evidence is the evidence of history, the evidence of archives. Learn more about how we turned historical record into a podcast.
People have asked about teaching The Last Archive. We are here to help! There’s lots in the show that can be used in college or high school classes, and even some middle school classes. Learn more about how to teach The Last Archive.
AUDIO BOOKS
Who Killed Truth?
JILL LEPOREMany historians and cultural observers argue we live in a post-truth world—but if truth is dead, who killed it? And how did it die? Join celebrated historian Jill Lepore as she cracks the case by examining key moments in the history of truth, doubt, and evidence across the last century.
In Who Killed Truth? acclaimed Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore traces the origins of our current post-truth crisis. In a series of spellbinding stories, Lepore investigates murders, hoaxes, lies and delusions to reckon with the instability of truth and fiction in the twenty-first century. Listeners will follow Lepore through a fascinating, erudite, and antic journey through the thorny problem of how we know what we know, and why it seems sometimes as if we don’t know anything at all anymore.
Revisiting key moments in U.S. history—from the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925 to the 1977 National Women’s Convention to the first election predicted by computer, and more—Lepore uncovers the secrets of the past the way a detective might, hot on the trail of the killer of truth.
The Deadline: Essays
JILL LEPOREWinner of the 2024 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.
A book to be listened to and kept for posterity, The Deadline is the art of the essay at its best.
“Lepore brings her vibrant curiosity and wide-ranging erudition to a host of topics . . . ‘All historians are coroners,’ she remarks, explaining her deft dissection of past lives, but not all bring to their writing Lepore’s grace, precision, and deep humanity. A noteworthy collection from an indispensable writer and thinker.”―Kirkus Reviews, starred review
Few, if any, historians have brought such insight, wisdom, and empathy to public discourse as Jill Lepore. Arriving at The New Yorker in 2005, Lepore, with her panoptical range and razor-sharp style, brought a transporting freshness and a literary vivacity to everything from profiles of long-dead writers to urgent constitutional analysis to an unsparing scrutiny of the woeful affairs of the nation itself. The astonishing essays collected in The Deadline offer a prismatic portrait of Americans’ techno-utopianism, frantic fractiousness, and unprecedented—but armed—aimlessness. From lockdowns and race commissions to Bratz dolls and bicycles, to the losses that haunt Lepore’s life, these essays again and again cross what she calls the deadline, the “river of time that divides the quick from the dead.” Echoing Gore Vidal’s United States in its massive intellectual erudition, The Deadline, with its remarkable juxtaposition of the political and the personal, challenges the very nature of the essay—and of history—itself.
This America
JILL LEPORE
From the best-selling author of These Truths, a work that examines the dilemma of nationalism and the erosion of liberalism in the twenty-first century.
At a time of much despair over the future of liberal democracy, Harvard historian Jill Lepore makes a stirring case for the nation in This America. Since the end of the Cold War, Lepore writes, American historians have largely retreated from the idea of "the nation," in part because postmodernism has corroded faith in grand narratives, and in part because the rise of political nationalism has rendered it suspect and unpalatable. Bucking this trend, however, Lepore argues forcefully that the nation demands scrutiny. Without an honest reckoning with America's collective past, we will be at the mercy of unscrupulous demagogues who spin their own version of the national story for their own purposes. "When serious historians abandon the study of the nation," Lepore tellingly writes, "nationalism doesn't die. Instead, it eats liberalism." A trenchant work of political philosophy as well as a reclamation of America's national history, This America asks us to look our nation's sovereign past square in the eye to reveal not only a history of contradictions, but a path of promise for the future.