Who killed truth? That’s the question historian and author Jill Lepore will explore in a new podcast.
Lepore’s The Last Archive, billed as “a show about how we know what we know and why it seems, lately, as if we don’t know anything at all,” will debut later this spring.
The first season “begins with a murder in northern Vermont in 1919, and ends in Silicon Valley in 2020,” according to the podcast website. The producers say that it is modeled after 1930s radio dramas, of which Lepore is a longtime fan.
Lepore, a Harvard history professor and New Yorker staff writer, is the author of several critically acclaimed books, including The Secret History of Wonder Woman and These Truths. Her latest book, If Then: How Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future, is slated for publication in September.
In a preview of the podcast, Lepore says she’s been trying to discover “who killed truth.”
“I considered the usual suspects,” she says. “Donald Trump, Mark Zuckerberg, postmodernism. But it turns out it’s not that simple. This mystery, it’s historical. To solve it, I decided to make a podcast…It’s not your ordinary podcast. The last archive, it’s a place, an evidence room. It’s also a corridor of the mind along the passage of time.”
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
