PODCAST · history
The Last Archive
by Pushkin Industries
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.
Episodes
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Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State | A Preview of Michael Lewis's New Audiobook
Here's a preview of a new audiobook we think you'll enjoy, Blockers: an inside look at the early days of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, as told by the public servants it targeted and Michael Lewis, one of America’s best storytellers. Blockers. It wasn’t a compliment. In the new...
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The Staten Island Problem - Part 5: Revenge of the Forgotten Borough
Election night 1993 meets election night 2016. The fate of the island and the country converge in the figure of one man: Rudy Giuliani. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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The Staten Island Problem - Part 4: Wu-Tang vs. Shaolin
At the height of the secession movement, the Wu-Tang Clan forms on Staten Island. We take a tour of early 1990s hip-hop and reveal the hidden history of the group. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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The Staten Island Problem - Part 3: The Tuvalu Effect
A group on Staten Island tries to stop secession, squaring off against the secessionists in a heated set of debates and meetings recorded on never-before-seen archival tapes. A set of debates best understood via a detour into the history of a remote Polynesian island. See omnystudio.com/listener...
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The Staten Island Problem - Part 2: A New Map
After the Supreme Court takes a close look at New York City government, Staten Island comes out the loser. A local artist begins organizing for secession. We take a deep dive into the psychology of the island, which has a lot to do with the largest garbage dump in the world. See...
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The Staten Island Problem | New Series from Ben
Ben Naddaff-Hafrey has a new show out! On the 250th anniversary of the United States, he investigates the story of what was, at the time, the biggest secession movement in the U.S. since the Civil War. From Revisionist History, The Staten Island Problem reconstructs the battle for New York City...
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From First America: Merciless Indian Savages
We have been told the Revolution was fought over taxation and representation. But what the founders were most angry about in our country’s most famous document was Indian affairs. How did generations of Americans miss this? Hosted and reported by Indigenous author Rebecca Nagle and featuring...
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Introducing Drilled: Carbon Cowboys
Drilled is a true-crime climate change podcast exposing how corporate corruption and political operatives built decades of climate denial and delay. Hosted and reported by award-winning investigative climate journalists, led by Amy Westervelt, each season unravels new evidence of deception,...
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The Terminator from X Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story
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...
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Body Snatchers from X Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story
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...
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Baby X from X Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story
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...
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The Dogefather from X Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story
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...
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Iron Man from X Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story
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’.…
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Planet B from X Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story
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…
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Dimension X from X Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story
Elon Musk is reinventing himself as a kingmaker for the United States and the world. He wants to shape the future. But in this episode, Jill Lepore goes back to his past — to his childhood, his strange family history, and his fascination with Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.…
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The Dark Knight from X Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story
Elon Musk’s origin story keeps changing. First, he was Tony Stark, or Iron Man. Not too long ago, he compared himself to Batman. Arguments started online over whether or not Musk is a real-life Bruce Wayne. In this episode, Jill Lepore looks at the original ‘Caped Crusader’, created back in 1939....
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John Birch vs. the PTA
In the 1960s, a right-wing organization led by a former candy tycoon rose to fame in America for their anti-communist campaigns. They called themselves the John Birch Society. Then, they tried to take over the Parent-Teacher Association. This week, what the battle between the two organizations...
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Part 2: Long Jump, Tall Tale
Jesse Owens spent the rest of his life retelling the story of the 1936 games and his encounter with Luz Long. We trace the evolution of a tall tale, discovering the hidden life of one of America’s iconic sports heroes. This is part two of a two-part crossover from Revisionist History’s ‘Hitler’s...
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Part 1: The Jiggle & the Giddy Up
The most famous athlete in 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany was the American sprinter Jesse Owens, and one of the most famous stories from those Games was the unexpected, heartwarming encounter Owens had with the German long jumper Luz Long. The friendship between the two athletes would serve as a...
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70 Years of Brown v. Board of Education
Jill Lepore returns to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the ruling in Brown v. Board of Education with a special episode of The Last Archive. She and Ben Naddaff-Hafrey explore the amazing new AI-powered recreation of the Brown v. Board cases over at the Oyez project. Then, Kenneth W. Mack, the...
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The Returns: A Conversation with Jill Lepore
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.
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The Returns: Epiphany
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 hoaxes. In this episode, Jill Lepore takes...
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The Returns: Hush Rush
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 movement. Limbaugh’s talk radio style became a...
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The Returns: Project X
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 the first television ads to feature an…
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The Returns: An Election Mini-Series from The Last Archive
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 moment in the history that brought us here....
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The Unmarked Graveyard from Radio Diaries
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 lived, and the people they left behind. This...
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The Krononauts
In our season finale, we travel through time. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Callings
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 spirituality reveal about how we understand the...
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Acting Out
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 know now in part from the story of the...
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Parakeet Panic
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 privacy information.
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The Word For Man Is Ishi
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 a strange turn, the history of science...
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Player Piano
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.
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Coming Soon: Season 4
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 does it feel like sometimes it’s…
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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 one of the country’s leading Shakespeare...
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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 and out of the former Soviet Union — with music....
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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.
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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 to control the weather. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy...
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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 privacy information.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 political ad is true enough to be posted to social media? See...
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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.
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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 know what we know and why it seems lately as if we...
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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 Archivist, a series of conversations between historian...
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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 down. As Musk, Bezos, Gates and others jockeyed for first place in the world’s...
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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 at the science fiction that’s...
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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 CEO was an even better story. He had already...
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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 also began talking about very big plans for the future of humanity....
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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 that come from science...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
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.
HOSTED BY
Pushkin Industries
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does The Last Archive have?
The Last Archive currently has 65 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is 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 written & hosted by Ben Naddaff-Hafrey,...
How often does The Last Archive release new episodes?
The Last Archive has 65 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to The Last Archive?
You can listen to The Last Archive on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts The Last Archive?
The Last Archive is created and hosted by Pushkin Industries.
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