Introducing The Last Archive

The Last Archive​:​ a new podcast about the history of evidence written and hosted by New Yorker writer, author, and celebrated historian Jill Lepore.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. A strange thing happened to me in the library
a while back. I needed to pick up a few books.
This was before the quarantine. A question was nagging me.
It had been nagging me for a long time. Who
killed truth? This truth problem? It isn't just bad, it's deadly.

(00:38):
It's also way older than it might seem. This mystery,
it's historical. I'm Jillipoor, and I'm a historian at Harvard
and a staff writer at the New Yorker. I spent
a lot of time I'm trying to solve mysteries like
this one. So anyway, I was at the library. At first,
everything seemed normal. Oh hum. I swiped my card, took

(00:59):
the elevator down to the basement, and started pulling volumes
off the shelves. And then I saw it something I'd
never seen before. Down here, at the end of the row,
half hidden in the shadows, a dark green door. There
was a sign on the door, a tarnished brass plate.

(01:20):
I could only barely make out the words he read
the last archive. I've listened to everybody on TV and radio.
I've tried, but I'm still confused. Hello, who's right? What's right?

(01:41):
What should I believe? Hello? Who who are you? No
one's there. It's just a voice from the past, voices
the Women's libration root in a New York City And
we discovered that by just talking about our on experience

(02:03):
entire world. Herald is the discovery which assured an end
one of mankind's great disease. And here cheez long before coronavirus,
a congressional debate about the government's role in developing a vaccine.
Is there any other term for it? Then? As socialized medicine,
old horror movies. They're in here too, punch cards from

(02:27):
the forgotten history of the National Data Center, the Network,
and it is referred to as the Network is now
in operation, and records of records of bird songs considered
America's foremost songbird is a hermit thrush. All these voices
from the past, sounds nobody has heard for decades. Maybe
somewhere in this vast last archive, this corridor of the mind,

(02:49):
I could find what I'm looking for, an answer to
that question who killed Truth? So I decided to start
a podcast. It's called The Last Archive. I'll tell ten
stories from the last hundred years, a history of America
and of our arguments about truth and evidence. If you
want to hear what a found me me back here.

(03:11):
I'll leave the door unlocked. The last archive coming soon.
Brought to you by Pushkin Industries