The Last Archive

Each week on ‘The Returns,’ we pull a different episode from our archive to put our present politics into historical context.

The election of 1952 brought all kinds of new technology into the political sphere. The Eisenhower campaign experimented with the first television ads to feature an American presidential candidate. And on election night, CBS News premiered the first computer to predict an American election — the UNIVAC. Safe to say, that part didn’t go according to plan...

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.

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This is the first episode in Radio Diaries’ new series The Unmarked Graveyard, untangling mysteries from America’s largest public cemetery. Each week, they’re bringing you stories of how people ended up on New York City's Hart Island, the lives they lived, and the people they left behind.

This debut episode goes back to a few years ago, when a young man who called himself Stephen became a fixture in Manhattan’s Riverside Park...

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.

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What’s Paul McCartney, a Liverpudlian, doing writing about the Soviet Union in 1968? Turns out McCartney was doing a little Chuck Berry, a bit of The Beach Boys, some pastiche and a lot of subversion. Opening “The White Album”, “Back in the U.S.S.R.” raised some eyebrows. And because of The Beatles’ evolving position within the former Eastern Bloc the song has over the years taken on a life of its own, following the trajectory of the West’s often fraught relationship with the region...

As businesses adopt AI, a new era of problem-solving, innovation, and creative decision making can be brought to scale. In this episode of Smart Talks with IBM, Malcolm Gladwell and Jacob Goldstein explore the future of AI for business with Kareem Yusuf, Senior Vice President of Product Management and Growth for IBM Software...

In the battles over gun rights, a shadowy English nobleman from the 17th century has unexpectedly taken center stage. Who was he? What did he do that has — 300 years later — endeared him to a generation of legal scholars? Revisionist History explores the cult of personality around the mysterious Sir John Knight. Enjoy this episode from Revisionist History, another Pushkin Industries podcast.

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In our season finale, we travel through time.

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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. 

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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.

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