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 driven by host Jill Lepore’s work as a historian, uncovering the secrets of the past the way a detective might. iHeartMedia is the exclusive podcast partner of Pushkin Industries. 

History
Society & Culture
1
Revisiting Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis
15 min
2
Call The Last Archive
Deep down in the archive, we’re working hard on the new season of the podcast. But we need your help.
1 min
3
Miracle And Wonder: Conversations With Paul Simon
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.
32 min
4
The Evening Rocket: Robin Hood
At the start of 2021, Elon Musk briefly became the richest man in the world.
28 min
5
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.
27 min
6
The Evening Rocket: Iron Man
How Silicon Valley capitalism is as much about narrative as the bottom line.
28 min
7
The Evening Rocket: Planet B
Why does Elon Musk believe he can save the world by colonizing Mars?
28 min
8
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.
29 min
9
The Last Archive Presents: The Evening Rocket
1 min
10
Revisionist History Takes Down The Little Mermaid
This week, we're presenting something fun from Malcolm Gladwell, co-founder of Pushkin.
4 min
11
HISTORY This Week: The Fairness Doctrine
Presenting an episode from another podcast we think you’ll like, called HISTORY This Week.
28 min
12
Epiphany
This season has chronicled a long, dark century of lies, fakes, frauds, and hoaxes. In the season 2 finale, Jill Lepore draws that history all the way down to the Capitol insurrection.
44 min
13
Hush Rush
In the 1980s, Rush Limbaugh transformed talk radio. In the process, he radicalized his listeners and the conservative movement.
47 min
14
Children of Zorin
In the 1970s, a Soviet journalist named Valentin Zorin made a series of documentary films about the United States. He was on a quest to unmask the United States by spreading doubt, conspiracy theories, and a strange cocktail of truth and misinformation.
48 min
15
It Came From Outer Space
In this episode, Jill Lepore follows the trail of disease conspiracies from Apollo 11 to COVID-19. In part two of our series about the moon landing: Apollo’s splashdown, and the tidal wave of doubt it set off.
46 min
16
Remote Control
In 1961, President Kennedy announced that the United States would go to the moon. Eight years later, the Apollo 11 astronauts set foot upon its surface. Millions of Americans watched live on their televisions as it happened, but somehow the pinnacle of man’s achievement became a wellspring of conspiracy theories.
47 min
17
Repeat After Me
One night in 1952, a Coloradan businessman hypnotized a local housewife. Under his spell, she began to recount her past life as a 19th-century Irish woman. He caught it on tape.
47 min
18
The Inner Front
During World War II, Nazi radio broadcast the voice of an American woman who came to be known as Axis Sally. She spoke, via shortwave radio, to American women, attempting to turn them against their country and the American war effort.
40 min
19
Believe It
Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! was one of the most popular radio shows of the 1930s, and for good reason: Early radio, not unlike the Internet of nearly a century later, was obsessed with doubt about belief.
45 min
20
Monkey Business
In 1925, John Scopes, a high school teacher from Dayton, Tennessee, was put on trial for teaching evolution. It came to be called the "monkey trial," a landmark in the history of doubt.
46 min
21
Coming Soon: Season Two
Coming Soon: the second season of The Last Archive, a podcast about the history of truth and the shadow of doubt written and hosted by New Yorker writer and celebrated historian Jill Lepore.
1 min
22
Election Special
We're back with a special, election-themed episode of The Last Archive!
24 min
23
Tomorrowland
Who killed truth?
48 min
24
For the Birds
What can the evidence of birds tell us about climate change?
46 min
25
She Said, She Said
In 1969, radical feminists gathered in a church in Greenwich Village to speak about their experiences with abortion.
41 min