Episodes
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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 going to be bringing you one of those essays each week. And then, at the end of each essay, Ben Naddaff-Hafrey will interview Jill about her craft and the themes of her essays.
Remember when DVDs had special features? This would be the best of the special features.
You can purchase the full collection at: https://www.pushkin.fm/audiobooks/the-deadline-essays
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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 investigates.
Listen to “The Curious Case of Columbo’s Message to Romania Part 2” on Decoder Ring’s feed and follow to never miss an episode: https://slate.com/podcasts/decoder-ring.
This podcast was written by Willa Paskin, who produces Decoder Ring with Katie Shepherd. This episode was edited by Joel Meyer. Derek John is Slate’s executive producer of narrative podcasts. Merritt Jacob is senior technical director.
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Missing episodes?
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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.
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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 listeners down the winding path from the little-known Iron Mountain hoax of the late 1960s to the Capitol insurrection on January 6th, 2021.
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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 staple of the modern right. Then, the left joined the fray. This week: partisan loudmouth versus partisan loudmouth, and the shifting media landscape that helped create modern political warfare.
This episode first ran in June, 2021.
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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 American presidential candidate. And on election night, CBS News premiered the first computer to predict an American election — the UNIVAC. Safe to say, that part didn’t go according to plan. But election night 1952 is ground zero for our current, political post-truth moment. If a computer and a targeted advertisement can both use heaps of data to predict every citizen’s every decision, can voters really know things for themselves after all?
This episode first ran in the summer of 2020.
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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. This series contains episodes from our original seasons alongside new material. Coming next week.
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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 debut episode goes back to a few years ago, when a young man who called himself Stephen became a fixture in Manhattan’s Riverside Park. Locals started noticing him sitting on the same park bench day after day. He said little and asked for nothing.
When Stephen’s body was found in 2017, the police were unable to identify him, and he was buried on Hart Island. Then, one day, a woman who knew him from the park stumbled upon his true identity, and his backstory came to light.
Listen to new episodes of The Unmarked Graveyard from Radio Diaries every week, wherever you get your podcasts.
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In our season finale, we travel through time.
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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 phone.
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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 school's most famous inmate: Ella Fitzgerald.
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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.
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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 fiction. This episode: That story and the moral stakes of imagining the past and the future.
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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.
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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 impossible to know anything at all? Host emeritus Jill Lepore passes the torch to producer Ben Naddaff-Hafrey for six gripping stories about the history of truth.
The Last Archive Season 4 launches on June 22nd with new episodes out weekly. Subscribe to Pushkin+ to hear the whole season at once, ad-free. Find Pushkin+ on the Last Archive showpage in Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin.fm/plus.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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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 theaters, and co-host writer and director Em Weinstein, ask what is it about Shakespeare that’s given him a continuous afterlife in all sorts of unexpected ways? You’ll hear Shakespeare doing rehabilitative work in a maximum security prison, helping autistic children to communicate, in the mouths of U.S. presidents, and even at the center of a deadly riot in New York City. In this episode, Barry and Em take us back in time to 1849 – a riot at a Shakespearean theater has left dozens of people dead. But as it always is with the Bard, there's more here than meets the eye. Why did some people think Shakespeare was important enough to die for? How did the work of one man writing in Victorian England capture the tensions brewing in a newly independent America? And who, if anyone, is Shakespeare really for?
Hear the full episode, and more from Where There’s a Will, at https://podcasts.pushkin.fm/wtaw?sid=tla.
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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.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/click-here/id1225077306
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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.
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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.
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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.
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