Podcast appearances and mentions of Jill Lepore

This week, with the military deployed to LA and readying to parade in DC, Jon is joined by Jill Lepore, Professor of History and Law at Harvard University, and Kevin M. Kruse, Professor of History at Princeton University. Together, they consider what history reveals about moments when presidential power tests democratic limits, and discuss ways that institutions might resist. Plus, hear new insights on the Trump vs Musk quarrel, as well as surprising parallels between Jurassic Park and Trump's first 100 days. This podcast episode is brought to you by: GROUND NEWS - Go to https://groundnews.com/stewart to see how any news story is being framed by news outlets around the world and across the political spectrum. Use the link to get 40% off unlimited access with the Vantage Subscription. Follow The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart on social media for more:  > YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@weeklyshowpodcast > Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/weeklyshowpodcast> TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@weeklyshowpodcast  > X: https://x.com/weeklyshowpod   > BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/theweeklyshowpodcast.com Host/Executive Producer – Jon Stewart Executive Producer – James Dixon Executive Producer – Chris McShane Executive Producer – Caity Gray Lead Producer – Lauren Walker Producer – Brittany Mehmedovic  Video Editor & Engineer – Rob Vitolo Audio Editor & Engineer – Nicole Boyce Researcher & Associate Producer – Gillian Spear Music by Hansdle Hsu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello Interactors,I was in Santa Barbara recently having dinner on a friend's deck when a rocket's contrail streaked the sky. “Another one from Vandenberg,” he said. “Wait a couple minutes — you'll hear it.” And we did. “They've gotten really annoying,” he added. He's not wrong. In early 2024, SpaceX launched seven times more tonnage into space than the rest of the world combined, much of it from Vandenberg Space Force Base (renamed from Air Force Base in 2021). They've already been approved to fly 12,000 Starlink satellites, with filings for 30,000 more.This isn't just future space junk — it's infrastructure. And it's not just in orbit. What Musk is doing in the sky is tied to what he's building on the ground. Not in Vandenberg, where regulation still exists, but in Starbase, Texas, where the law doesn't resist — it assists. There, Musk is testing how much sovereignty one man can claim under the banner of “innovation” — and how little we'll do to stop him.TOWNS TO THRUST AND THRONEMusk isn't just defying gravity — he's defying law. In South Texas, a place called Starbase has taken shape along the Gulf Coast, hugging the edge of SpaceX's rocket launch site. What looks like a town is really something else: a launchpad not just for spacecraft, but for a new form of privatized sovereignty.VIDEO: Time compresses at the edge of Starbase: a slow-built frontier where launch infrastructure rises faster than oversight. Source: Google EarthThis isn't unprecedented. The United States has a long lineage of company towns — places where corporations controlled land, housing, labor, and local government. Pullman, Illinois is the most famous. But while labor historians and economic geographers have documented their economic and social impact, few have examined them as legal structures of power.That's the gap legal scholar Brian Highsmith identifies in Governing the Company Town. That omission matters — because these places aren't just undemocratic. They often function as quasi-sovereign legal shells, designed to serve capital, not people.Incorporation is the trick. In Texas, any area with at least 201 residents can petition to become a general-law municipality. That's exactly what Musk has done. In a recent vote (212 to 6) residents approved the creation of an official town — Starbase. Most of those residents are SpaceX employees living on company-owned land…with a Tesla in the driveway. The result is a legally recognized town, politically constructed. SpaceX controls the housing, the workforce, and now, the electorate. Even the mayor is a SpaceX affiliate. With zoning powers and taxing authority, Musk now holds tools usually reserved for public governments — and he's using them to build for rockets, not residents…unless they're employees.VIDEO: Starbase expands frame by frame, not just as a company town, but as a legal experiment — where land, labor, and law are reassembled to serve orbit over ordinance. Source: Google EarthQuinn Slobodian, a historian of neoliberalism and global capitalism, shows how powerful companies and individuals increasingly use legal tools to redesign borders and jurisdictions to their advantage. In his book, Cracked Up Capitalism, he shows how jurisdiction becomes the secret weapon of the capitalist state around the world. I wrote about a techno-optimist fantasy state on the island of Roatán, part of the Bay Islands in Honduras a couple years ago. It isn't new. Disney used the same playbook in 1967 with Florida's Reedy Creek District — deeding slivers of land to employees to meet incorporation rules, then governing without real opposition. Highsmith draws a straight line to Musk: both use municipal law not to serve the public, but to avoid it. In Texas, beach access is often blocked near Starbase — even when rockets aren't launching. A proposed bill would make ignoring an evacuation order a Class B misdemeanor, punishable by jail.Even if Starbase never fully resembles a traditional town, that's beside the point. What Musk is really revealing isn't some urban design oasis but how municipal frameworks can still be weaponized for private control. Through zoning laws, incorporation statutes, and infrastructure deals, corporations can shape legal entities that resemble cities but function more like logistical regimes.And yet, this tactic draws little sustained scrutiny. As Highsmith reminds us, legal scholarship has largely ignored how municipal tools are deployed to consolidate corporate power. That silence matters — because what looks like a sleepy launch site in Texas may be something much larger: a new form of rule disguised as infrastructure.ABOVE THE LAW, BELOW THE LANDElon Musk isn't just shaping towns — he's engineering systems. His tunnels, satellites, and rockets stretch across and beyond traditional borders. These aren't just feats of engineering. They're tools of control designed to bypass civic oversight and relocate governance into private hands. He doesn't need to overthrow the state to escape regulation. He simply builds around it…and in the case of Texas, with it.Architect and theorist Keller Easterling, whose work examines how infrastructure quietly shapes political life, argues that these systems are not just supports for power — they are power. Infrastructure itself is a kind of operating system for shaping the city, states, countries…and now space.Starlink, SpaceX's satellite constellation, provides internet access to users around the world. In Ukraine, it became a vital communications network after Russian attacks on local infrastructure. Musk enabled access — then later restricted it. He made decisions with real geopolitical consequences. No president. No Congress. Just a private executive shaping war from orbit.And it's not just Ukraine. Starlink is now active in dozens of countries, often without formal agreements from national regulators. It bypasses local telecom laws, surveillance rules, and data protections. For authoritarian regimes, that makes it dangerous. But for democracies, it raises a deeper question: who governs the sky?Right now, the answer is: no one. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 assumes that nation-states, not corporations, are the primary actors in orbit. But Starlink functions in a legal grey zone, using low Earth orbit as a loophole in international law…aided and abetted by the U.S. defense department.VIDEO: Thousands of Starlink satellites, visualized in low Earth orbit, encircle the planet like a privatized exosphere—reshaping global communication while raising questions of governance, visibility, and control. Source: StarlinkThe result is a telecom empire without borders. Musk commands a growing share of orbital infrastructure but answers to no global regulator. The International Telecommunication Union can coordinate satellite spectrum, but it can't enforce ethical or geopolitical standards. Musk alone decides whether Starlink aids governments, rebels, or armies. As Quinn Slobodian might put it, this is exception-making on a planetary scale.Now let's go underground. The Boring Company digs high-speed tunnels beneath cities like Las Vegas, sidestepping standard planning processes. These projects often exclude transit agencies and ignore public engagement. They're built for select users, not the public at large. Local governments, eager for tech-driven investment, offer permits and partnerships — even if it means circumventing democratic procedures.Taken together — Starlink above, Boring Company below, Tesla charging networks on the ground — Musk's empire moves through multiple layers of infrastructure, each reshaping civic life without formal accountability. His systems carry people, data, and energy — but not through the public channels meant to regulate them. They're not overseen by voters. They're not authorized by democratic mandate. Yet they profoundly shape how people move, communicate, and live.Geographer Deborah Cowen, whose research focuses on the global logistics industry, argues that infrastructure like ports, fiber-optic cables, and pipelines have become tools of geopolitical strategy. Logistics as a form of war by other means. Brian Highsmith argues this is a form of “functional fragmentation” — breaking governance into layers and loopholes that allow corporations to sidestep collective control. These aren't mere workarounds. They signal a deeper shift in how power is organized — not just across space, but through it.This kind of sovereignty is easy to miss because it doesn't always resemble government. But when a private actor controls transit systems, communication networks, and even military connectivity — across borders, beneath cities, and in orbit — we're not just dealing with infrastructure. We're dealing with rule.And, just like with company towns, the legal scholarship is struggling to catch up. These layered, mobile, and non-territorial regimes challenge our categories of law and space alike. What these fantastical projects inspire is often awe. But what they should require is law.AMNESIA AIDS THE AMBITIOUSElon Musk may dazzle with dreams full-blown, but the roots of his power are not his own. The United States has a long tradition of private actors ruling like governments — with public blessing. These aren't outliers. They're part of a national pattern, deeply embedded in our legal geography: public authority outsourced to private ambition.The details vary, but the logic repeats. Whether it's early colonial charters, speculative land empires, company towns, or special districts carved for tech campuses, American history is full of projects where law becomes a scaffold for private sovereignty. Rather than recount every episode, let's just say from John Winthrop to George Washington to Walt Disney to Elon Musk, America has always made room for men who rule through charters, not elections.Yet despite the frequency of these arrangements, the scholarship has been oddly selective.According to Highsmith, legal academia has largely ignored the institutional architecture that makes company towns possible in the first place: incorporation laws, zoning frameworks, municipal codes, and districting rules. These aren't neutral bureaucratic instruments. They're jurisdictional design tools, capable of reshaping sovereignty at the micro-scale. And when used strategically, they can be wielded by corporations to create functional states-within-a-state — governing without elections, taxing without consent, and shaping public life through private vision.From a critical geography perspective, the problem is just as stark. Scholars have long studied the uneven production of space — how capital reshapes landscapes to serve accumulation. But here, space isn't just produced — it's governed. And it's governed through techniques of legal enclosure, where a patch of land becomes a jurisdictional exception, and a logistics hub or tech campus becomes a mini-regime.Starbase, Snailbrook, Reedy Creek, and even Google's Sidewalk Labs are not just spatial projects — they're sovereign experiments in spatial governance, where control is layered through contracts, tax breaks, and municipal proxies.But these arrangements don't arise in a vacuum. Cities often aren't choosing between public and private control — they're choosing between austerity and access to cash. In the United States, local governments are revenue-starved by design. Most lack control over income taxes or resource royalties, and depend heavily on sales taxes, property taxes, and development fees. This creates a perverse incentive: to treat corporations not as entities to regulate, but as lifelines to recruit and appease.Desperate for jobs and investment, cities offer zoning concessions, infrastructure deals, and tax abatements, even when they come with little democratic oversight or long-term guarantees. Corporate actors understand this imbalance — and exploit it. The result is a form of urban hostage-taking, where governance is bartered piecemeal in exchange for the promise of economic survival.A more democratized fiscal structure — one that empowers cities through equitable revenue-sharing, progressive taxation, or greater control over land value capture — might reduce this dependency. It would make it possible for municipalities to plan with their citizens instead of negotiating against them. It would weaken the grip of corporate actors who leverage scarcity into sovereignty. But until then, as long as cities are backed into a fiscal corner, we shouldn't be surprised when they sell off their power — one plot or parking lot at a time.Highsmith argues that these structures demand scrutiny — not just for their economic impact, but for their democratic consequences. These aren't just quirks of local law. They are the fault lines of American federalism — where localism becomes a loophole, and fragmentation becomes a formula for private rule.And yet, these systems persist with minimal legal friction and even less public awareness. Because they don't always look like sovereignty. Sometimes they look like a housing deal. A fast-tracked zoning change. A development district with deferred taxes. A campus with private shuttles and subsidized utilities. They don't announce themselves as secessions — but they function that way.We've been trained to see these projects as innovation, not governance. As entrepreneurship, not policy. But when a company owns the homes, builds the roads, controls the data, and sets the rules, it's not just offering services — it's exercising control. As political theorist Wendy Brown has argued, neoliberalism reshapes civic life around the image of the entrepreneur, replacing democratic participation with market performance.That shift plays out everywhere: universities run like corporations, cities managed like startups. Musk isn't the exception — he's the clearest expression of a culture that mistakes private ambition for public good. Musk once tweeted, “If you must know, I am a utopian anarchist of the kind best described by Iain Banks.” In a New York Times article, Jill Lepore quoted Banks as saying his science fiction books were about “'hippy commies with hyper-weapons and a deep distrust of both Marketolatry and Greedism.' He also expressed astonishment that anyone could read his books as promoting free-market libertarianism, asking, ‘Which bit of not having private property and the absence of money in the Culture novels have these people missed?'”The issue isn't just that we've allowed these takeovers — it's that we've ignored the tools enabling them: incorporation, annexation, zoning, and special districts. As Brian Highsmith notes, this quiet shift in power might not have surprised one of our constitution authors, James Madison, but it would have troubled him. In Federalist No. 10, Madison warned not of monarchs, but of factions — small, organized interests capturing government for their own ends. His solution was restraint through scaling oppositional voices. “The inference to which we are brought is, that the causes of faction cannot be removed...and that relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its effects.”— James Madison, Federalist No. 10 (1787)Today, the structure meant to restrain factions has become their playbook. These actors don't run for office — they arrive with charters, contracts, and capital. They govern not in the name of the people, but of “efficiency” and “innovation.” And they don't need to control a nation when a zoning board will do.Unchecked, we risk mistaking corporate control for civic order — and repeating a pattern we've barely begun to name.We were told, sold, and promised a universe of shared governance — political, spatial, even orbital. But Madison didn't trust promises. He trusted structure. He feared what happens when small governments fall to powerful interests — when law becomes a lever for private gain. That fear now lives in legal districts, rocket towns, and infrastructure built to rule. Thousands of satellites orbit the Earth, not launched by publics, but by one man with tools once reserved for states. What was once called infrastructure now governs. What was once geography now obeys.Our maps may still show roads and rails and pipes and ports — but not the fictions beneath them, or the factions they support.References:Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism's stealth revolution. Zone Books.Cowen, D. (2014). The deadly life of logistics: Mapping violence in global trade. University of Minnesota Press.Easterling, K. (2014). Extrastatecraft: The power of infrastructure space. Verso Books.Highsmith, B. (2022). Governing the company town: How employers use local government to seize political power. Yale Law Journal.Madison, J. (1787). Federalist No. 10. In A. Hamilton, J. Madison, & J. Jay, The Federalist Papers. Bantam Books (2003 edition).Slobodian, Q. (2023). Crack-Up Capitalism: Market radicals and the dream of a world without democracy. Metropolitan Books. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

In 1816, 18-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (later Shelley) birthed science fiction during a rainy vacation on Lake Geneva. Inspired by a vision of a man crouched beside the corpse he reanimated, Frankenstein warned of what happens when man tries to play God. Two centuries later, the monsters are real, and they're called Musk, Altman, and Zuckerberg. Today's tech titans, like Frankenstein's Victor, race to build superintelligent machines in their image: soulless wannabe-gods with devastating reach. Gil Duran, of the Nerd Reich newsletter, connects this to A.I. worship, quoting a billionaire obsessed with “creating God” through algorithms. M.I.T.'s annotated Frankenstein likens Victor's horror to Oppenheimer's nuclear regret. We've entered a new atomic age, but instead of bombs, it's information weapons and hacked minds. As Pulitzer-nominated journalist Carole Cadwalladr warns, this is what a digital coup looks like. A.I. is trained to replace journalists, strip away privacy, and deepen inequality, just as Gaslit Nation has warned since 2018. What's the answer? Community. Skill-sharing. Nature. The real world. Jack Welch, once worshipped like Musk is today, gutted G.E. with fear-based leadership. Now he's a cautionary tale. So will today's tech gods be. Mary Shelley saw it coming. “Frightful must it be,” she wrote. We agree. But there's power in human connection, in rejecting the machine's illusions. Frankenstein's monster was abandoned. Let's not abandon each other. Join our resilience salons. Find your people. Build the future together. Want to enjoy Gaslit Nation ad-free? Join our community of listeners for bonus shows, ad-free episodes, exclusive Q&A sessions, our group chat, invites to live events like our Monday political salons at 4pm ET over Zoom, and more! Sign up at Patreon.com/Gaslit! Show Notes   The song you heard in this week's episode is “Unspoken Word” by Evrette Allen: https://soundcloud.com/user-726164627/unspoken-word-mix-13/s-GEvlnfQnmh4?si=954f31de09d644948d51a225224bd7ba&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing   Nerd Reich: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/12/the-strange-and-twisted-life-of-frankenstein   After two hundred years, are we ready for the truth about Mary Shelley's novel? https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/12/the-strange-and-twisted-life-of-frankenstein   Astronomers have determined the exact hour that Mary Shelley thought of Frankenstein. https://lithub.com/astronomers-have-determined-the-exact-hour-that-mary-shelley-thought-of-frankenstein/   AI's Energy Demands Are Out of Control. Welcome to the Internet's Hyper-Consumption Era Generative artificial intelligence tools, now part of the everyday user experience online, are causing stress on local power grids and mass water evaporation. https://www.wired.com/story/ai-energy-demands-water-impact-internet-hyper-consumption-era/   Short-term profits and long-term consequences — did Jack Welch break capitalism? https://www.npr.org/2022/06/01/1101505691/short-term-profits-and-long-term-consequences-did-jack-welch-break-capitalism   Carole Cadwalladr TED Talk: This Is What a Digital Coup Looks Like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZOoT8AbkNE   Self-styled prophets are claiming they have "awakened" chatbots and accessed the secrets of the universe through ChatGPT https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spiritual-delusions-destroying-human-relationships-1235330175/

The first 100 days of the Trump administration have been deemed chaotic and overzealous, even by Americans, with multiple polls this week showing the President's approval rating underwater, even on his signature issues like the economy and mass deportations. There is an uneasy feeling that Trump is pushing America and the world away from democratic norms by stretching the limits of executive power. Christiane speaks with historians Jill Lepore from Harvard University and Timoth Garten Ash from Oxford University about America's illiberal turn under Trump 2.0 and the deep-seated roots of that illiberalism. Then, as President Trump pressures Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum to take decisive action against her country's cartels,  CNN's Isobel Yeung went there to investigate what the crackdown looks like first-hand in Sinaloa. Also, as sirens sounded across Israel this week to honor those lost to terror and war, while Israel's total siege on Gaza enters its third month, Christiane talks to bereaved Israeli and Palestinian fathers, Rami Elhanan and Bassam Aramin who've channeled their grief and pain into friendship and a joint struggle for peace. To mark 50 years since the chaotic end of the Vietnam War, from her archives, Christiane pays a tribute to the famous wartime photographer Eddie Adams who captured some of the worst moments of the war and with his camera, helped change hearts and minds and ultimately, shaped government policy.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For more than 100 days, President Trump has tested the very limits of executive power by defying the courts, pressuring universities and law firms, and deporting people to foreign prisons. It is prompting some soul searching abroad and at home: what exactly does America now represent on the world stage? Two leading historians - Jill Lepore and Timothy Garton Ash – join the show to discuss.  Also on today's show: an in-depth discussion of Mexico's drug crackdown; author Elie Mystal (“Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America”)  **As the Trump administration's battle with the courts escalates, one legal expert is taking a step back to re-imagine what a more representative US legal system could look like. Bestselling author Elie Mystal tells Hari Sreenivasan about his unconventional theory explored in his latest work.    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sinners is the fifth feature film written and directed by Ryan Coogler and starring Michael B. Jordan. (Coogler has never made a feature without Jordan.) After years of sequels and Marvel movies, it’s Coogler’s first wholly original movie based on no other source material whatsoever. Sinners is a sexy Southern musical horror gangster thriller set in 1932 in the Mississippi Delta. With vampires. And it’s the No. 1 movie in the country. Plus: We read Jill Lepore’s New Yorker piece about reading a Penguin Classic on each of the first 100 days of President Trump’s second term. And then a Vox piece about giving up Spotify. And we started thinking about the ways that we’re all consuming culture — avoiding or giving up some things, immersing ourselves in other things, etc. — in these, let’s say, anxious times. GUESTS: Raquel Benedict: The most dangerous woman in speculative fiction; she’s the host of the Rite Gud podcast Shawn Murray: A stand-up comedian, writer, and the host of the Nobody Asked Shawn podcast Brian Slattery: A journalist and musician The Colin McEnroe Show is available as a podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, TuneIn, Listen Notes, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe and never miss an episode! Subscribe to The Noseletter, an email compendium of merriment, secrets, and ancient wisdom brought to you by The Colin McEnroe Show. Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter. Colin McEnroe and Dylan Reyes contributed to this show.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Elon Musk, who's taking his chainsaw to the federal government, is not merely a chaos agent, as he is sometimes described. Jill Lepore, the best-selling author of “These Truths” and other books, says that Musk is animated by obsessions and a sense of mission he acquired through reading, and misreading, science fiction. “When he keeps saying, you know, ‘We're at a fork in the road. The future of human civilization depends on this election,' he means SpaceX,” she tells David Remnick. “He means . . . ‘I need to take these rockets to colonize Mars and that's only going to happen through Trump.' ” The massive-scale reduction in social services he is enacting through DOGE, Lepore thinks, is tied to this objective. “Although there may be billions of [people] suffering here on planet Earth today, those are miniscule compared to the calculation of the needs of the billions of humans that will one day ever live if we can gain escape velocity from planet Earth. . . . That is, in fact, the math that lies behind DOGE.”  Lepore's BBC radio series on the SpaceX C.E.O. is called “X-Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story.” Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Elon Musk, who's chainsawing the federal government, is not merely a chaos agent, as he is sometimes described. Jill Lepore, the best-selling author of “These Truths” and other books, says that Musk is animated by obsessions and a sense of mission he acquired through reading, and misreading, science fiction. “When he keeps saying, you know, ‘We're at a fork in the road. The future of human civilization depends on this election,' he means SpaceX,” she tells David Remnick. “He means . . . ‘I need to take these rockets to colonize Mars and that's only going to happen through Trump.' ” The massive-scale reduction in social services he is enacting through DOGE, Lepore thinks, is tied to this objective. “Although there may be billions of [people] suffering here on planet Earth today, those are miniscule compared to the calculation of the needs of the billions of humans that will one day ever live if we can gain escape velocity from planet Earth. . . . That is, in fact, the math that lies behind DOGE.” Lepore's BBC radio series on the SpaceX C.E.O. is called “X-Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story.” Plus, an organizer of the grassroots anti-Musk effort TeslaTakedown speaks with the Radio Hour about how she got involved, and the risks  involved in doing so. that poses. “It's a scary place we all find ourselves in,” Patty Hoyt tells the New Yorker Radio Hour producer Adam Howard. “And I won't stop. But I am afraid.”

While Trump's attacks on the universities have broadened, and while Columbia is submitting to his requirements, Harvard's president has declared that Harvard will not comply with the Trump's demands in exchange for keeping its federal funding. David Cole comments - he recently stepped down as National Legal Director of the ACLU to return to teaching law at Georgetown.Also: Elon Musk's obsession with rockets and robots sounds futuristic, but “few figures in public life are more shackled to the past” – that's what Jill Lepore has found. His ideas at DOGE seem to come from his grandfather, a founder of the anti-democratic Technocracy movement of the 1930s. Jill Lepore teaches history and law at Harvard, and writes for The New Yorker.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

While Trump's attacks on the universities have broadened, and while Columbia is submitting to his requirements, Harvard's president has declared that Harvard will not comply with Trump's demands in exchange for keeping its federal funding. David Cole comments - he recently stepped down as National Legal Director of the ACLU to return to teaching law at Georgetown.Also: Elon Musk's obsession with rockets and robots sounds futuristic, but “few figures in public life are more shackled to the past” – that's what Jill Lepore has found. His ideas at DOGE seem to come from his grandfather, a founder of the anti-democratic Technocracy movement of the 1930s. Jill Lepore teaches history and law at Harvard, and writes for The New Yorker.

Reginald Dwayne Betts spent more than eight years in prison. Today he's a Yale Law graduate, a MacArthur Fellow, and a poet. His nonprofit works to build libraries in prisons so that more incarcerated people can find hope. SOURCES:Reginald Dwayne Betts, founder and director of Freedom Reads, award-winning poet, and lawyer. RESOURCES:Doggerel: Poems, by Reginald Dwayne Betts (2025).“The Poet Writing on Prison Underwear,” by Adam Iscoe (The New Yorker, 2023).The Voltage Effect, by John List (2022).“If We Truly Believe in Redemption and Second Chances, Parole Should Be Celebrated,” by Reginald Dwayne Betts (The Washington Post, 2021).Insurrections, by Rion Scott (2016).The Secret History of Wonder Woman, by Jill Lepore (2014).Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values, by Robert M. Pirsig (1974).The Black Poets, by Dudley Randall (1971).“For Freckle-Faced Gerald,” by Etheridge Knight (Poems from Prison, 1968).Felon: An America Washi Tale, by Reginald Dwayne Betts.Freedom Reads. EXTRAS:“Can a Moonshot Approach to Mental Health Work?” by People I (Mostly) Admire (2023).“Can Data Keep People Out of Prison?” by People I (Mostly) Admire (2023).“The Price of Doing Business with John List,” by People I (Mostly) Admire (2022).“Why Do Most Ideas Fail to Scale?” by Freakonomics Radio (2022).

What does Donald Trump's victory tell us about the state of the United States, and its future? Matt Galloway talks to historians Carol Anderson and Jill Lepore about how the economy, class, race and gender played into this election — and where things go from here. 

This episode is about two great films on the same dark theme: David talks to American historian Jill Lepore about Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove and Sidney Lumet's Fail Safe, which appeared within a few months of each other in 1964. Both films explore what might happen if America's nuclear defence system went rogue. One is grimly hilarious; the other is utterly terrifying. Which packs the biggest punch today?Looking for Christmas presents? We have a special Xmas gift offer: give a subscription to PPF+ and your recipient will also receive a personally inscribed copy of David's new book The History of Ideas. Find out more https://www.ppfideas.com/giftsNext time: The Battle of Algiers Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The business owner Martha Keith found her products being sold fraudulently online. She tells Nuala how she set about trying to take control of the situation. Last month Lloyds Bank warned of a huge rise in rogue retailers using fake websites to trick people into buying items that are never dispatched. To discuss Nuala is also joined by Katherine Hart, Lead Officer for Scams for the Chartered Trading Standards Institute and Emma Jones, founder of Enterprise Nation. With less than a week to go until the US Presidential election next Tuesday, how are the campaigns trying to appeal to male and female voters? Nuala speaks to Jill Lepore, Professor of American History at Harvard University, and Edward Luce, US National Editor at the Financial Times.The Taliban has announced new restrictions on women in Afghanistan, which mean women are not allowed to pray out loud or sing together. We hear more from the BBC's Shazia Haya and Fawzia Koofi, the former deputy speaker of parliament in Afghanistan, who was a member of the peace negotiations with the Taliban.Film historian Jennifer Smyth talks to Nuala about the life and legacy of the pioneering American screenwriter, Mary McCall Jr. The first woman president of the Screen Writers Guild in 1942, Mary was a key negotiator ensuring better rights and wages for all screenwriters in the film industry. But after years of standing up to male studio heads, she would be blacklisted and go from being one of the biggest earners in Hollywood to living on nickels and dimes.Presenter: Nuala McGovern Producer: Emma Pearce

Actors and comedians have usually played Donald Trump as larger than life, almost as a cartoon. In the new film “The Apprentice,” Sebastian Stan doesn't play for laughs. He stars as a very young Trump falling under the sway of Roy Cohn (played by Jeremy Strong)— the notorious, amoral lawyer and fixer.  “Cohn took Donald Trump under his wing when Donald was a nobody from the outer boroughs,” the film's writer and executive producer Gabriel Sherman tells David Remnick. He “taught him the dark arts of power brokering … [and] introduced him to New York society.” Sherman, a contributing editor to New York magazine, also chronicled Roger Ailes's rise to power at Fox News in “The Loudest Voice in the Room.” Sherman insists, though, that the film is not anti-Trump—or not exactly. “The movie got cast into this political left-right schema, and it's not that. It's a humanist work of drama,” in which the protégé eventually betrays his mentor. It almost goes without saying that Donald Trump has threatened to sue the producers of the film, and the major Hollywood studios wouldn't touch it.  Sherman talks with Remnick about how the film, which opens October 11th, came to be. Plus, Jill Lepore is a New Yorker staff writer, a professor of history at Harvard University, and the author of the best-seller “These Truths” as well as many other works of history. While her professional life is absorbed in the uniqueness of the American experience, she finds her relaxation across the pond, watching police procedurals from Britain. “There's not a lot of gun action,” she notes, “not the same kind of swagger.” She talks with David Remnick about three favorites: “Annika” and “The Magpie Murders,” on PBS Masterpiece; and “Karen Pirie,” on BritBox. And Remnick can't resist a digression to bring up their shared reverence for “Slow Horses,” a spy series on Apple TV+ that's based on books by Mick Herron, whom Lepore profiled for The New Yorker.

Jill Lepore is a Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker. A two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, her many books include the international bestseller "These Truths" and "If Then," which was longlisted for the National Book Award.

The Democratic National Convention is in full swing, but what influence does it have on the election? Once a hotbed of debate, drama, and actual decision-making, the DNC has transformed into a carefully choreographed media event where political insiders pretend to decide things they've already decided. So what are we doing here? This week, we dive into these questions with Zolan Kanno-Youngs, White House Correspondent with the New York Times and CNN political analyst, and Jill Lepore, Professor of History and Law at Harvard, staff writer at The New Yorker, and author of "The Deadline." Together, we discuss the happenings on the floor, explore how these political gatherings have evolved from smoke-filled rooms of party bosses to the spectacles of today, and examine how political messaging has adapted (or failed to adapt) to the ever-changing media landscape. Follow The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart on social media for more:  > YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@weeklyshowpodcast > Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/weeklyshowpodcast > TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@weeklyshowpodcast  > X: https://x.com/weeklyshowpod Host/Executive Producer – Jon Stewart Executive Producer – James Dixon Executive Producer – Chris McShane Executive Producer – Caity Gray Lead Producer – Lauren Walker Producer – Brittany Mehmedovic Video Editor & Engineer – Rob Vitolo Audio Editor & Engineer – Nicole Boyce Researcher/Associate Producer – Gillian Spear Music by Hansdle Hsu — This podcast is brought to you by: ZipRecruiter Try it for free at this exclusive web address: ziprecruiter.com/ZipWeekly Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week, we're rebroadcasting an episode from the Resources Radio archive while the team is on a break through the rest of August. We'll be back in September with new episodes; in the meantime, enjoy this throwback and poke around the archive at Resources.org for more topics you might be interested in. In this week's episode rerun, host Daniel Raimi talks with Kelly T. Sanders, an associate professor at the University of Southern California. With her coauthors, Sanders published a series of studies on air-conditioning use in southern California, with a focus on who does (and does not) have access to cooling on hot days. This work, which touches on issues of energy and environmental justice, has big implications for managing climate change in the decades to come. References and recommendations: “Utilizing smart-meter data to project impacts of urban warming on residential electricity use for vulnerable populations in Southern California” by Mo Chen, George A. Ban-Weiss, and Kelly T. Sanders; https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab6fbe/meta “Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities” by Vaclav Smil; https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/growth “These Truths: A History of the United States” by Jill Lepore; https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393357424

At the beginning of 2021, it seemed like America might be turning a new page; instead, the election of 2024 feels like a strange dream that we can't wake up from. Recently, David Remnick asked listeners what's still confounding and confusing about this Presidential election. Dozens of listeners wrote in from all over the country, and a crack team of political writers at The New Yorker came together to shed some light on those questions: Susan B. Glasser, Jill Lepore, Clare Malone, Andrew Marantz, Evan Osnos, Kelefa Sanneh, and Benjamin Wallace-Wells. Some years ago, the poet Ada Limón moved from New York City to Lexington, Kentucky. In a book called “Bright Dead Things,” she writes about adjusting to a new home, and the constant talk of thoroughbreds. “People always asking, ‘You have so many horses in your poems—what are they a metaphor for?' ” she told the Radio Hour. “I think they're not really a metaphor. Out here, they're just horses.” Limón, who's the current Poet Laureate of the United States, took us on a tour of Keeneland racecourse, in Lexington, and read her poem “How to Triumph Like a Girl.”This segment originally aired on April 13, 2018. 

At the beginning of 2021, it seemed like America might be turning a new page; instead, the election of 2024 feels like a strange dream that we can't wake up from. Recently, David Remnick asked listeners what's still confounding and confusing about this Presidential election. Dozens of listeners wrote in from all over the country, and a crack team of political writers at The New Yorker came together to shed some light on those questions: Susan B. Glasser, Jill Lepore, Clare Malone, Andrew Marantz, Evan Osnos, Kelefa Sanneh, and Benjamin Wallace-Wells.

Resources mentioned in this episode:This America: The Case for the Nation by Jill LeporeThe Triumph of the Therapeutic by Philip RieffThe Free Press

Jill Lepore returns to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the ruling in Brown v. Board of Education with a special episode of The Last Archive. She and Ben Naddaff-Hafrey explore the amazing new AI-powered recreation of the Brown v. Board cases over at the Oyez project. Then, Kenneth W. Mack, the Lawrence D. Biele Professor of Law at Harvard University, stops by to discuss the enduring significance of the case.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This episode features an essay from Jill Lepore's ‘The Deadline.' Why are there so many stories about the end of the world these days? Jill's essay “No, We Cannot,” elaborates a political theory of dystopian fiction. And then, after the essay, Jill and Ben talk about the use and misuse of the genre.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This episode features an essay from Jill Lepore's ‘The Deadline.' Today on the show, Jill and Ben travel back in time to the disrupt-or-die 2010s to revisit Jill's essay about the gospel of disruption. And afterwards, they talk about the consequences and challenges taking on controversial subjects, Ben's time as a media disruptor, and Jill's time as a temp worker.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Resources mentioned in this episode:This America: The Case for the Nation by Jill Lepore“Why This is a Mission of the Church Conversation” in Church Matters by Jonathan LeemanCity of God by St. Augustine

This episode features an essay from Jill Lepore's ‘The Deadline.' Why do we insist on misreading ‘Frankenstein?' Hardly a day goes by without someone comparing some new technology to Frankenstein's monster. But there's a much richer set of lessons to draw from Mary Shelley's book. Today on the show, Jill reads her essay “It's Still Alive.” And then afterwards, Jill and Ben talk about the meaning of the story, the biography of its author, and how what you read shapes who you are.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

(0:00) Intro.(1:12) About the podcast sponsor: The American College of Governance Counsel.(2:00) Start of interview.(3:10) Amy's "origin story." (6:23) Her time leading Comcast Ventures, and how Corporate Venture Capital (CVC) has evolved.(9:08) Why SF/Silicon Valley as a tech hub for Comcast Ventures.(11:19) Her first public company board experience (with Adobe).(13:15) Differences on serving on public and private (venture-backed) boards. "Much more hands-on in private companies."(15:27) Differences between young and old public companies. Her experience on the board of On Running. "[M]y one advice to future board members or existing board members is to learn how to listen. And you're listening for different things, again, depending on the stage of the company."(19:42) On "adversarial boards." (24:10) On OpenAI's board fiasco. Trust in CEOs and boardrooms. Private companies and founder misbehavior. "You never fire fast enough." "You know when things are off."(32:35) On the current AI investment cycle.(36:16) On the state of San Francisco as a city and tech hub.(39:35) On women sports, and her involvement with Bay FC, a pro women's soccer team based in SF/Bay Area.(43:09) Her thoughts on the debate and politicization of ESG and DEI.(46:41)  Books that have greatly influenced her life: The Innovator's Dilemma by Clay Christensen (1997)These Truths by Jill Lepore (2018)21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Harari (2018)(47:52) Her mentors: Ralph J. Roberts (founder of Comcast). (49:02) Quotes that she thinks of often or lives her life by: "Old men ought to be explorers" (T.S. Eliot) and "A house divided against itself cannot stand." (Abraham Lincoln)(50:20) An unusual habit or absurd thing that she loves.(51:07) The living person she most admires: Liz Cheney and Taylor Swift.Amy Banse is a Venture Partner at Mosaic General Partnership, a VC firm based in SF Bay Area. Amy has over 30 years of experience starting, investing in, and building businesses at Comcast and as a board member on numerous public and private companies, including Adobe, Clorox, On Running and Lennar Corporation.  You can follow Evan on social media at:Twitter: @evanepsteinLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/epsteinevan/ Substack: https://evanepstein.substack.com/__You can join as a Patron of the Boardroom Governance Podcast at:Patreon: patreon.com/BoardroomGovernancePod__Music/Soundtrack (found via Free Music Archive): Seeing The Future by Dexter Britain is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License

This episode features an essay from Jill Lepore's ‘The Deadline.' Jill reads her essay on the tangled history of Barbie. And then, after, Ben and Jill talk about how the film fits in with the core concerns of the essay — the tangled web of intellectual property, IP theft, and the relationship between corporations and feminism.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Last year, Jill Lepore published a book called The Deadline. It's a compilation of years worth of beautiful essays Jill has written on everything from the history of cryogenics to the Silicon Valley gospel of disruption. For the next six weeks, we're going to be bringing you one of those essays each week. And then, at the end of each essay, Ben Naddaff-Hafrey will interview Jill about her craft and the themes of her essays.  Remember when DVDs had special features? This would be the best of the special features. You can purchase the full collection at: https://www.pushkin.fm/audiobooks/the-deadline-essays  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In a special, all-new episode of ‘The Returns,' host emerita Jill Lepore returns to talk about the post-truth moment we find ourselves in and what it means for the 2024 election.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Each week on ‘The Returns,' we pull a different episode from our own archive to help put our present politics into historical context. This episode, Epiphany, first ran in 2021, as the finale to Season 2, which was all about lies, fakes, frauds, and hoaxes. In this episode, Jill Lepore takes listeners down the winding path from the little-known Iron Mountain hoax of the late 1960s to the Capitol insurrection on January 6th, 2021.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Forests have long occupied a fertile landscape in the human imagination. Places of mystery and magic – of wildness and wisdom – of vision and dreaming. Yet beyond mythic realms of imagination, we've largely treated forests as inert physical resources to satisfy human needs and desires. The main operative science behind this commodification has been market science – how to extract maximum resources and profits. Suzanne Simard is a revolutionary researcher who is transforming the science of forest ecology and coming full circle to the wisdom held by First Peoples and traditional land-based cultures from time immemorial. The story Simard is uncovering can change our story for how we live on Earth and with each other – for the long haul. Featuring Suzanne Simard, Professor of Forestry at the University of British Columbia, is an expert in the synergies and complexities of forests and the development of sustainable forest stewardship practices. Her groundbreaking research centers on the relationships between plants, microbes, soils, carbon, nutrients and water that underlie the adaptability of ecosystems, especially the below-ground fungal networks that connect trees and facilitate interplant communication. Learn more about Suzanne Simard and her work at her website. Explore More Dispatches From the Mother Trees, Suzanne Simard's keynote address to the 2021 Bioneers Conference, in which she discusses the dire global consequences of logging old-growth rainforests, and nature-based solutions that combine Western science and Indigenous knowledge for preserving and caring for these invaluable forest ecosystems for future generations. Lessons from the Underground, a panel discussion from the 2021 Bioneers Conference featuring Suzanne Simard as well as Anne Biklé and David R. Montgomery, a wife and husband team of scientific researchers whose groundbreaking work on the microbial life of soil has revealed its crucial importance to human wellbeing and survival. Moderated by Bioneers' Restorative Food Systems Director Arty Mangan.  Intelligence in Nature, a deep-dive resource featuring leading experts in this burgeoning field. What We Owe Our Trees, an article by Jill Lepore in the New Yorker. This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to learn more.

Election Year 2024 is upon us. And it promises to be a bit of a mess. But where did all this mess come from? In a 4-episode mini-series drawing from our own archive, Jill Lepore and Ben Naddaff-Hafrey investigate, situate, and contextualize our present moment in the history that brought us here. This series contains episodes from our original seasons alongside new material. Coming next week.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a case that has the potential to remove Donald Trump from the ballot in Colorado, and possibly across the country. At issue is the Fourteenth Amendment provision that prohibits the leader of an insurrection from holding office, and whether the clause can be applied to Trump's role in the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. The New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore, along with other notable historians, wrote an amicus brief that contextualizes the law. “This court has made momentous decisions in the last few years, certainly in the last two decades, in the name of an originalist interpretation of the Constitution,” she tells Tyler Foggatt. “And the only originalist interpretation of the Constitution available to them in this case is that Donald Trump cannot run for President of the United States.”

For this episode of Trump's Trials, NPR's Steve Inskeep speaks with historians Jill Lepore and David Blight. Lepore and Blight have submitted a friend of the court brief to the Supreme Court ahead of oral arguments on whether former President Donald Trump should remain on the Colorado ballot. Colorado's Supreme Court said Trump is not qualified for the presidency under the Constitution's 14th Amendment. Section 3 of that amendment says you can't serve in federal office if you once took an oath to support the United States and then engaged in an insurrection or rebellion. Both Lepore and Blight argue that Section three of the 14th amendment disqualifies Trump from serving again as president.Topics include:- Historical context of the 14th amendment - Historical intention of section three - What does it mean to have 'engaged in insurrection'- Interpreting the Constitution Follow the show on Apple Podcasts or Spotify for new episodes each Saturday.Sign up for sponsor-free episodes and support NPR's political journalism at plus.npr.org/trumpstrials.Email the show at trumpstrials@npr.org.

In the 1960s, Ursula K. le Guin represented a changing of the guard in science fiction literature. She was part of a generation of novelists who questioned the colonist mindset which had influenced American sci-fi for most of the 20th century. Le Guin came to this understanding not just as a moral stance or an intellectual exercise. Issues of racism and colonialism were personal to her. This episode, originally titled “The Word For Man Is Ishi,” comes from the podcast The Last Archive from Pushkin Industries hosted by Jill Lepore and Ben Naddaff-Hafrey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For our final show in 2023, enjoy these recent favorites: Andrew Seligsohn, president of Public Agenda, talks about his group's project to ensure participation in voting and restore trust in democracy ahead of the 2024 elections. Dave Isay, founder and president of StoryCorps, reflects on 20 years of stories produced by StoryCorps. Larry Buchanan, graphics editor and reporter at The New York Times, talks about the "extremely detailed map" he made of New York City neighborhoods, and what the map, neighborhood names and fuzzy (and sharp!) borders say about, as he writes, "gentrification, displacement, inequality, status." Jill Lepore, professor of American History at Harvard University, staff writer at The New Yorker, host of the podcasts The Last Archive and Elon Musk and the author of several books, including These Truths and her latest, The Deadline: Essays (Liveright, 2023), talks about her latest collection of essays, most of which focused on the relationship between America's past and its polarized present. Don't ask Lydia Polgreen, New York Times opinion columnist and co-host of the “Matter of Opinion” podcast, to go on a walk with you. In a column this autumn, she celebrated the "solitary amble" and laments the "social tyranny" of the walking date or meeting. Polgreen made her case, as listeners responded.   These interviews were lightly edited for time and clarity; the original web versions of the interviews are available through these links:  A Plan to Strengthen Democracy in 2024 (Nov. 9) Celebrating 20 Years of StoryCorps (Oct. 23) Where One Neighborhood Ends and Another Begins (Nov. 2) Jill Lepore on the Past and Present, the Personal and Political (Aug. 30) Take A Walk With Me? (Sep 21)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Poe (1809-1849), the American author who is famous for his Gothic tales of horror, madness and the dark interiors of the mind, such as The Fall of the House of Usher and The Tell-Tale Heart. As well as tapping at our deepest fears in poems such as The Raven, Poe pioneered detective fiction with his character C. Auguste Dupin in The Murders in the Rue Morgue. After his early death, a rival rushed out a biography to try to destroy Poe's reputation but he has only become more famous over the years as a cultural icon as well as an author.WithBridget Bennett Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of LeedsErin Forbes Senior Lecturer in 19th-century African American and US Literature at the University of BristolAndTom Wright Reader in Rhetoric at the University of SussexProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list: Peter Ackroyd, Poe: A Life Cut Short (Vintage, 2009)Amy Branam Armiento and Travis Montgomery (eds.), Poe and Women: Recognition and Revision (Lehigh University Press, 2023)Joan Dayan, Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe's Fiction (Oxford University Press, 1987)Erin Forbes, ‘Edgar Allan Poe in the Great Dismal Swamp' (Modern Philology, 2016)Kevin J. Hayes (ed.), Edgar Allan Poe in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2012) J. Gerald Kennedy and Scott Peeples (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe (Oxford University Press, 2018)Jill Lepore, 'The Humbug: Poe and the Economy of Horror' (The New Yorker, April 20, 2009)Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark (Vintage, 1993)Scott Peeples and Michelle Van Parys, The Man of the Crowd: Edgar Allan Poe and the City (Princeton University Press, 2020)Edgar Allan Poe, The Portable Edgar Allan Poe (Penguin, 2006)Shawn Rosenhelm and Stephen Rachman (eds.), The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Poe (1809-1849), the American author who is famous for his Gothic tales of horror, madness and the dark interiors of the mind, such as The Fall of the House of Usher and The Tell-Tale Heart. As well as tapping at our deepest fears in poems such as The Raven, Poe pioneered detective fiction with his character C. Auguste Dupin in The Murders in the Rue Morgue. After his early death, a rival rushed out a biography to try to destroy Poe's reputation but he has only become more famous over the years as a cultural icon as well as an author.WithBridget Bennett Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of LeedsErin Forbes Senior Lecturer in 19th-century African American and US Literature at the University of BristolAndTom Wright Reader in Rhetoric at the University of SussexProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list: Peter Ackroyd, Poe: A Life Cut Short (Vintage, 2009)Amy Branam Armiento and Travis Montgomery (eds.), Poe and Women: Recognition and Revision (Lehigh University Press, 2023)Joan Dayan, Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe's Fiction (Oxford University Press, 1987)Erin Forbes, ‘Edgar Allan Poe in the Great Dismal Swamp' (Modern Philology, 2016)Kevin J. Hayes (ed.), Edgar Allan Poe in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2012) J. Gerald Kennedy and Scott Peeples (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe (Oxford University Press, 2018)Jill Lepore, 'The Humbug: Poe and the Economy of Horror' (The New Yorker, April 20, 2009)Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark (Vintage, 1993)Scott Peeples and Michelle Van Parys, The Man of the Crowd: Edgar Allan Poe and the City (Princeton University Press, 2020)Edgar Allan Poe, The Portable Edgar Allan Poe (Penguin, 2006)Shawn Rosenhelm and Stephen Rachman (eds.), The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995)

Harvard Professor of American History and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore joins Preet to discuss what happened when the Department of Justice failed to prosecute Confederate President Jefferson Davis. They also talk about Lepore's new essay collection The Deadline and how on earth we can make sense of the intervening four years since Lepore last appeared on Stay Tuned.  Plus, could Ginni Thomas face legal peril due to her involvement in the Jan. 6 insurrection? And, entertaining a scenario where (1) Trump is convicted and (2) re-elected and attempts to overturn his conviction(s).  Don't miss the Insider bonus, where Preet asks Lepore about her aversion to the massively popular film Barbie. To listen, become a member of CAFE Insider for $1 for the first month. Head to cafe.com/insider.   For show notes and a transcript of the episode head to: cafe.com/stay-tuned/amending-history-with-jill-lepore/ Have a question for Preet? Ask @PreetBharara on Threads, or Twitter with the hashtag #AskPreet. Email us at staytuned@cafe.com, or call 669-247-7338 to leave a voicemail. Stay Tuned with Preet is brought to you by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Donald Trump may be the first former President to be indicted for a crime, but he is not the first to lead an insurrection and then attempt to dodge the consequences. More than a hundred and fifty years ago, the U.S. government set out to try Jefferson Davis, the former President of the Confederacy, for treason. Those efforts failed. In this week's New Yorker, Jill Lepore, a staff writer at the magazine and a historian at Harvard, writes an essay about the lasting consequences of that failure. There are many parallels between our current moment and the post-Civil War reunification era: the thorniness of prosecuting politicians, the fear of inciting more political violence, and questions about how best to move a bitterly divided country forward. Lepore joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the historical lessons of Jefferson Davis and the legal efforts to kick Trump off the ballot using the disqualification clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

We're in the midst of another election season, and yet again American democracy hangs in the balance, with a leading Presidential candidate who has threatened to suspend parts of the Constitution. How did the foundations of our political system become so shaky?  Jelani Cobb, the dean of the journalism school at Columbia University; Evan Osnos, a Washington correspondent for The New Yorker; and the best-selling author and historian Jill Lepore joined The New Yorker's Michael Luo for a discussion of that very existential question during the most recent New Yorker Festival. From Cobb's perspective, “it's not that complicated,” he notes, “If we went all the way back to the fundamental dichotomy of the people who founded this country and the way they subsidized their mission of liberty with the lives of slaves. So we've always been engaged in that dialectic.” Lepore argues that people on both sides of the political divide choose to embrace an account of the past that accords with their politics, something she considers “incredibly dangerous.” Osnos, who witnessed the upheaval of January 6th firsthand, thinks the deeper problem is disengagement from the country and the political system. “I was struck by how many of [the rioters] told me it was their first trip to Washington,” Osnos says. “They came to Washington to sack the Capitol.”CORRECTION: Jelani Cobb notes that Queens was at one time the second-whitest borough of New York City, and is the most diverse county in the United States. Measures of diversity vary; in some recent data, Queens ranks third among counties. 

We're in the midst of another election season, and yet again American democracy hangs in the balance, with a leading Presidential candidate who has threatened to suspend parts of the Constitution. How did the foundations of our political system become so shaky?  Jelani Cobb, the dean of the journalism school at Columbia University; Evan Osnos, a Washington correspondent for The New Yorker; and the best-selling author and historian Jill Lepore joined The New Yorker's Michael Luo for a discussion of that very existential question during the most recent New Yorker Festival. From Cobb's perspective, “it's not that complicated,” he notes, “If we went all the way back to the fundamental dichotomy of the people who founded this country and the way they subsidized their mission of liberty with the lives of slaves. So we've always been engaged in that dialectic.” Lepore argues that people on both sides of the political divide choose to embrace an account of the past that accords with their politics, something she considers “incredibly dangerous.” Osnos, who witnessed the upheaval of January 6th firsthand, thinks the deeper problem is disengagement from the country and the political system. “I was struck by how many of [the rioters] told me it was their first trip to Washington,” Osnos says. “They came to Washington to sack the Capitol.”CORRECTION: Jelani Cobb notes that Queens was at one time the second-whitest borough of New York City, and is the most diverse county in the United States. Measures of diversity vary; in some recent data, Queens ranks third among counties

In this episode, we are sharing some of the spice from our Atlanta live show. We inducted two new Flavor Town mayors and Jason Waterfalls joined Knox, Jamie, and Erin on stage for a Flavor Town Snake Draft.Heads up: Our full and fun show notes are at knoxandjamie.com/531 so click over to get all your relevant links.QUICK LINKSRevisit our most listened to episode: 478- Hallmark Movies ExplainedWe gotchu: We have a playlist of our holiday adjace episodes, Faith Adjacent made a holiday music playlist. See more at KnoxandJamie.com/spotify.Rewind: Flavor Town episodesReplay forever and always: Own our Austin livestream replay for $10 at knoxandjamie.com/replayGREEN LIGHTSJamie: documentary - The Lady Bird Diaries (Hulu) | book- The Deadline by Jill Lepore (see also: These Truths, This Secret History of Wonder Woman) Knox: movie- Please Don't Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain (Peacock)MOREOur Patreon supporters get full access to this week's The More You Know news segment. Become a partner. This week we discussed:Jamie's Enneagram cohort with Suzanne StabileFantastic 4 reboot castingHome Improvement spinoff and more! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today we're bringing back Jill Lepore with a chapter from her latest book The Deadline. The astonishing collection is the art of the essay at its best. Enjoy this chapter and purchase the audiobook here or wherever you get your audiobooks.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Three of our favorite segments from the week, in case you missed them. Jill Lepore on the Past and Present, the Personal and Political  (First) | NJ Attorney General Talks Parental Notification in Schools and More (Starts at 35:33) | The J'ouvert Experience (Starts at 1:20:59) If you don't subscribe to the Brian Lehrer Show on iTunes, you can do that here.

Jill Lepore, professor of American History at Harvard University, staff writer at The New Yorker, host of the podcasts The Last Archive and Elon Musk and the author of several books, including These Truths, talks about her new collection of essays, The Deadline (Liveright, 2023), most of which focused on the relationship between America's past and its polarized present, as well as the intersection of the personal and political.

Yevgeny Prigozhin's march on Moscow last weekend, which killed more than a dozen Russian soldiers, fizzled as quickly as it began, but its repercussions are just beginning. The Wagner Group commander issued a video from Belarus claiming that he did not attempt a coup against Putin but a protest against the Defense Ministry.  David Remnick talks with Masha Gessen and the contributor Joshua Yaffa, who has written on the Wagner Group, about what lies ahead in Russia. Both feel that by revealing the reality of the war to his own following—a Putin-loyal, nationalist audience—Prigozhin has seriously damaged the regime's credibility. If an uprising removes Putin from power, “there will be chaos,” Gessen notes. “Nobody knows what happens next. There's no succession plan.”  Plus, Jill Lepore on amending the Constitution: suggesting a constitutional amendment these days is so far-fetched, it's almost a punch line, but the Framers intended the document to be regularly amended, the historian Jill Lepore tells David Remnick. She argues that the failure to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment sank the country into a political quagmire from which it has not arisen, and her latest historial project brings awareness to the problem of amendability.

Today, more than 37 million Americans live in poverty. The problem has been addressed countless times since the nation's founding, but it persists, and for the poorest among us, it gets worse. America has not been able to find its way to a sustainable solution, because most of its citizens see the problem of poverty from a distance, through a distorted lens. So in 2016, we presented "Busted: America's Poverty Myths," a series exploring how our understanding of poverty is shaped not by facts, but by private presumptions, media narratives, and the tales of the American Dream. This week we're revisiting part of that series.  1. Matthew Desmond [@just_shelter], author of "Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City" and the new book "Poverty, by America," on the myriad factors that perpetuate wealth inequality and Jack Frech [@FrechJack], former Athens County Ohio Welfare Director, on how the media's short attention span for covering inequality stymies our discourse around poverty. Listen. 2. Jill Lepore, historian and staff writer for the New Yorker, on the long history of America's beloved "rags to riches" narrative and Natasha Boyer, a Ohio woman whose eviction was initially prevented thanks to a generous surprise from strangers, on the reality of living in poverty and the limitations of "random acts of kindness." Listen. 3. Brooke considers the myth of meritocracy and how it obscures the reality: that one's economic success is more due to luck than motivation. Listen. You can find all 5 episodes of the series on our website.   

Today, more than 37 million Americans live in poverty. The problem has been addressed countless times since the nation's founding, but it persists, and for the poorest among us, it gets worse. America has not been able to find its way to a sustainable solution, because most of its citizens see the problem of poverty from a distance, through a distorted lens. So in 2016, we presented "Busted: America's Poverty Myths," a series exploring how our understanding of poverty is shaped not by facts, but by private presumptions, media narratives, and the tales of the American Dream. This week we're revisiting part of that series.  1. Matthew Desmond [@just_shelter], author of "Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City" and the new book "Poverty, by America," on the myriad factors that perpetuate wealth inequality and Jack Frech [@FrechJack], former Athens County Ohio Welfare Director, on how the media's short attention span for covering inequality stymies our discourse around poverty. Listen. 2. Jill Lepore, historian and staff writer for the New Yorker, on the long history of America's beloved "rags to riches" narrative and Natasha Boyer, a Ohio woman whose eviction was initially prevented thanks to a generous surprise from strangers, on the reality of living in poverty and the limitations of "random acts of kindness." Listen. 3. Brooke considers the myth of meritocracy and how it obscures the reality: that one's economic success is more due to luck than motivation. Listen. You can find all 5 episodes of the series on our website.