Popular Culture

2023
Lepore, Jill. 2023. “The View from Inside Beatlemania.” The New Yorker, June 10, 2023. 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.

Introduction: Beatleland.
Lepore, Jill. 2023. “Introduction: Beatleland.” Paul McCartney, 1964: Eyes of the Storm. London and New York: Penguin and Norton.
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. “Easy Rider.” The New Yorker, May 23, 2022. Article
Lepore, Jill. 2022. “Moving Right Along.” The New Yorker, July 25, 2022. Article
Lepore, Jill. 2022. “Bringing Up Babies.” The New Yorker, August 15, 2022. Article
Lepore, Jill. 2022. “Squawk on the Wild Side.” The New Yorker, November 28, 2022. Article
2021
Lepore, Jill. 2021. “The Forest for the Trees.” The New Yorker, November 28, 2021. Article
2020
Lepore, Jill. 2020. “How "America the Beautiful" Was Born.” National Geographic, November 3, 2020. Article
Lepore, Jill. 2020. “Ruth Bader Ginsburg: The Great Equalizer.” newyorker.com, September 18, 2020. Article
Lepore, Jill. 2020. “These Four Walls: Living Indoors.” The New Yorker, September 7, 2020. Article
2018
2018. “The Attack on Democracy.” Morning Edition. NPR, Sep 12 2018. Audio
Lepore, Jill. 2018. “It's Alive: Two hundred years of Frankenstein.” The New Yorker, February 12, 2018. Article
Bibliography
Lepore, Jill. 2018. “Valley of the Dolls: Barbie, Bratz, and the end of originality.” The New Yorker, 1/22/18.
2017
Lepore, Jill. 2017. “Dead Weight: The burden of the corpse.” The New Yorker, October 16, 2017. Article
Lepore, Jill. 2017. “No,we cannot.” The New Yorker, June 5, 2017. Article
2016
Lepore, Jill. 2016. “Esme in Neverland: The film J.D. Salinger nearly made.” The New Yorker. Article
2014
Colbert, Stephen. 2014. “Interview with Jill Lepore.” The Colbert Report, October 29, 2014. Video
Lepore, Jill. 2014. “The Last Amazon: Wonder Woman returns.” The New Yorker, September 22, 2014. Article

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