The Last Archive

In our season finale, we travel through time.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In the 1940s, a freelance wiretapper named Big Jim Vaus got mixed up with the cops, the mob, and the most famous evangelist in America. This week on The Last Archive: The ballad of Big Jim and what the intersections of telephone history and American spirituality reveal about how we understand the phone. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In the 1930s, at a women's reformatory in upstate New York, an upstart social scientist made a study that launched the field of social network analysis. It was revolutionary, but missed something happening at the same time at the same school, something we know now in part from the story of the school's most famous inmate: Ella Fitzgerald.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When invasive parakeets began to spread in New York City in the 1970s, the government decided it needed to kill them all. Today: The offbeat panic about wild parrots, and a history of anxieties about population growth.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In 1911, a Native American man, the only member of his community to survive a genocide, encountered the new Anthropology department at The University of California, Berkeley. What happened next helped to define the ethical quandaries of the field and, in a strange turn, the history of science fiction. This episode: That story and the moral stakes of imagining the past and the future.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week on The Last Archive, the story of the composer Raymond Scott’s lifelong quest to build an automatic songwriting machine, and what it means for our own AI-addled, ChatGPT world.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This upcoming season on The Last Archive: early artificial intelligence, the forgotten origins of social network theory, invasive species panics, freelance wiretappers, time travelers, and science fiction family histories. How do we know what we know? Why does it feel like sometimes it’s impossible to know anything at all? Host emeritus Jill Lepore passes the torch to producer Ben Naddaff-Hafrey for six gripping stories about the history of truth. The Last Archive Season 4 launches on June 22nd with new episodes out weekly. Subscribe to Pushkin+ to hear the whole season at once, ad-free. Find Pushkin+ on the Last Archive showpage in Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin.fm/plus.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We’re bringing you an episode of a new Pushkin podcast we’re enjoying and think you will, too. Where There’s a Will: Finding Shakespeare searches for the surprising places Shakespeare shows up outside the theater. Host Barry Edelstein, artistic director at one of the country’s leading Shakespeare theaters, and co-host writer and director Em Weinstein, ask what is it about Shakespeare that’s given him a continuous afterlife in all sorts of unexpected ways? You’ll hear Shakespeare doing rehabilitative work in a maximum security prison, helping autistic children to communicate, in the mouths of U.S. presidents, and even at the center of a deadly riot in New York City. In this episode, Barry and Em take us back in time to 1849 – a riot at a Shakespearean theater has left dozens of people dead. But as it always is with the Bard, there's more here than meets the eye. Why did some people think Shakespeare was important enough to die for? How did the work of one man writing in Victorian England capture the tensions brewing in a newly independent America? And who, if anyone, is Shakespeare really for? Hear the full episode, and more from Where There’s a Will, at https://podcasts.pushkin.fm/wtaw?sid=tla. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

From Click Here, a podcast about the world of cyber and intelligence.  As Vladimir Putin attempts to redraw the Iron Curtain, we take a trip back to 1985 to tell the story of four American musicians who smuggled messages in and out of the former Soviet Union — with music. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/click-here/id1225077306See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Jill Lepore goes back to her first archive — the public library in the town where she grew up. In this season finale, old books, hot dogs, and a town hidden beneath a lake.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.