Publications

2024
2023
Lepore, Jill. 2023. “The World According to Elon Musk's Grandfather.” The New Yorker, September 19, 2023. Article
Lepore, Jill. 2023. “The X-Man: How Elon Musk went from superhero to supervillain.” The New Yorker, September 11, 2023. Article
The Everyman Library
Lepore, Jill. 2023. “The Everyman Library.” The New York Review of Books, August 27, 2023. Article
Lepore, Jill. 2023. “Watching Childhood End in My Backyard.” The New Yorker, August 26, 2023. Article
Lepore, Jill. 2023. “The Bear in Your Backyard.” The New Yorker, July 24, 2023. Article
Lepore, Jill. 2023. “What We Owe Our Trees.” The New Yorker, May 22, 2023. Article
Lepore, Jill. 2023. “The View from Inside Beatlemania.” The New Yorker, June 10, 2023. Article
Lepore, Jill. 2023. “How to Stave Off Constitutional Extinction.” The New York Times. Publisher's Version
Lepore, Jill. 2023. “Data Driven: What's It All For?” The New Yorker. Article
Who Killed Truth? A History of Evidence (an audiobook)

Many historians and cultural observers argue we live in a post-truth world—but if truth is dead, who killed it? And how did it die? Join celebrated historian Jill Lepore as she cracks the case by examining key moments in the history of truth, doubt, and evidence across the last century.

 

In Who Killed Truth? acclaimed Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore traces the origins of our current post-truth crisis. In a series of spellbinding stories, Lepore investigates murders, hoaxes, lies and delusions to reckon with the instability of truth and fiction in the twenty-first century. Listeners will follow Lepore through a fascinating, erudite, and antic journey through the thorny problem of how we know what we know, and why it seems sometimes as if we don't know anything at all anymore. 

 

Revisiting key moments in U.S. history--from the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925 to the 1977 National Women’s Convention to the first election predicted by computer, and more--Lepore uncovers the secrets of the past the way a detective might, hot on the trail of the killer of truth.

 

Please note: This collection includes content that has been previously released in The Last Archive podcast.

The American Beast: Essays on Politics, 2012-2022
Lepore, Jill. 2023. The American Beast: Essays on Politics, 2012-2022. London: John Murray.
Lepore, Jill. 2023. “Pay Dirt: What we learn from seed catalogs.” The New Yorker, March 13, 2023. Article
These Truths: A History of the United States. Inquiry Edition
The United States was founded on a set of “self-evident” truths: political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. But how well has the nation—from its revolutionary birth to our fractious present—lived up to these founding ideals? In an absorbing, character-driven narrative, acclaimed historian Jill Lepore engages this urgent question. Now expanded into a two-volume textbook, the Inquiry Edition is a new kind of history text—one that highlights the importance of analyzing evidence and practicing historical inquiry to help students develop civic skills relevant to their lives far beyond the course.
Introduction: Beatleland.
Lepore, Jill. 2023. “Introduction: Beatleland.” Paul McCartney, 1964: Eyes of the Storm. London and New York: Penguin and Norton.
Lepore, Jill. 2023. “What the January Sixth Report is Missing.” The New Yorker, January 16, 2023. Article
The Deadline: Essays
Lepore, Jill. 2023. The Deadline: Essays. New York: W.W. Norton. Publisher's Version Abstract
A book to be read and kept for posterity, The Deadline is the art of the essay at its best.
 

Few, if any, historians have brought such insight, wisdom, and empathy to public discourse as Jill Lepore. Arriving at The New Yorker in 2005, Lepore, with her panoptical range and razor-sharp style, brought a transporting freshness and a literary vivacity to everything from profiles of long-dead writers to urgent constitutional analysis to an unsparing scrutiny of the woeful affairs of the nation itself. The astonishing essays collected in The Deadline offer a prismatic portrait of Americans’ techno-utopianism, frantic fractiousness, and unprecedented—but armed—aimlessness. From lockdowns and race commissions to Bratz dolls and bicycles, to the losses that haunt Lepore’s life, these essays again and again cross what she calls the deadline, the “river of time that divides the quick from the dead.” Echoing Gore Vidal’s United States in its massive intellectual erudition, The Deadline, with its remarkable juxtaposition of the political and the personal, challenges the very nature of the essay—and of history—itself.

2022
Lepore, Jill. 2022. “Parent Trap.” The New Yorker, March 14, 2022. Article
Lepore, Jill. 2022. “Why There Are No Women in the Constitution.” The New Yorker, May 4, 2022. Article

Pages