Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Jill Lepore’s New Podcast Is a Murder Mystery: Who Killed Truth?

In “The Last Archive,” Lepore mixes history and 1930s-style radio drama to solve a timely whodunit.

These days, truth can seem as dead as a woman who was murdered in Vermont in 1919. The Harvard historian Jill Lepore is on both cases.Credit...Kayana Szymczak for The New York Times

In 1919, a woman was found dead in a park in a small town in Vermont. She had been bound and gagged and stripped naked except for her gray-blue stockings. Her glasses were caught in her hair.

The investigation and trial that followed became rich fodder for the newspapers. But for the historian Jill Lepore, the body is also the first clue in a much bigger mystery: Who killed truth?

That’s the question animating “The Last Archive,” a new podcast that releases the first episode of its 10-part season on May 14. Lepore starts in that park in Barre, Vt., before taking listeners on a decade-by-decade tour of the rise and fall of the fact across the past century, looking at how we know what we know — and how it can seem lately, as she puts it, “as if we don’t know anything at all.”

The podcast, produced by Pushkin Industries, was inspired in part by a class on the history of evidence that Lepore teaches at Harvard Law School. Which might sound awfully dry, but she approaches the subject like an old-fashioned gumshoe, diving into the archives and bringing her case studies to life in a style that’s more “War of the Worlds” than PBS.

“I’ve always loved old radio, and listen to a fair amount of it,” Lepore said. “The podcast is about marrying this deep love for and giddy fascination with classic radio drama with this very present-day dilemma and deep question.”

The episodes, which will be released weekly, feature plenty of the kind of intellectual surprise twists familiar from Lepore’s articles in The New Yorker, where she is a staff writer. (What does an early-19th-century novelty attraction called the Invisible Lady have to do with Emily Dickinson, the evolving law of privacy, the rise of radio and Amazon’s Alexa? Episode 3 tries to explain.)

Image
Jill Lepore in the Vermont State Archives, where she researched a 1919 murder case featured in her new podcast, “The Last Archive.”Credit...Ben Naddaff-Hafrey

There’s an unexpectedly timely episode on the polio epidemic the 1950s, and the eerily familiar political debates it spawned. And the final episode takes the story to our own troubled era of algorithms and Big Data, (the subject, it so happens, of her next book, “If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future,” out in September). It’s one, she argues, that may have more in common with the pre-scientific age of mystery than we’d like to admit.

“That sense of the looming uncertainty of the world, pre- and post-Covid-19, is partly because the scale of information is beyond the capacity of any human to comprehend,” Lepore said. “It’s like we’re being ruled by gods on Mount Olympus or something.”

I spoke with Lepore about the podcast, our post-truth moment and her childhood fascination with “The Invisible Man.” The following are edited excerpts from the conversation.

The podcast digs into a wide variety of stories, some of them seemingly very idiosyncratic. What is the larger story you want to tell?

As a teacher, I find the thing young people really struggle with is, How do we actually know anything? That’s what led me to develop the class. I wanted to ask, what are the medieval rules of evidence, in courts of law? How did the scientific method come to be developed? When did it borrow from the law, and when did it invent new rules? What are the laws of journalism, and where do those laws of evidence come from? Who decided?

One of the larger arguments for the whole season is that the history of evidence reveals that the elemental unit of knowledge changes over time. At first, it was the mystery — the idea that only God knows things. Historically, the evolution that the podcast traces is from the fact to the number to data.

Why the title “The Last Archive”? That sounds a little doom-filled.

The idea that the past keeps disappearing behind us is a sensibility of postmodernity. So the Last Archive is like this place where the last things we know got put. But mostly it’s just supposed to sound a little spooky. Have you ever seen the Simpsons’ bit, “The Scary Door”? It’s a spoof of the “The Twilight Zone.” We did worry it would sound a little like a spoof of a spoof.

Your episode about the polio crusade of the 1950s, and Jonas Salk’s discovery of a vaccine, now seems very timely. How does it fit into your larger story about the killing of truth?

We think of the polio crusade as a public health triumph, and rightly so. But I was really interested in another aspect of it that is not as well told, which I think of as the anti-vaxxer angle. There had been an anti-vaxxer movement in the United States since the beginning of the 20th century, and it was largely associated with opposition to national health insurance.

That episode includes a dramatization of the congressional hearings over the conduct of Oveta Hobby, President Eisenhower’s secretary of health, education and welfare, whose opposition to government involvement in health care, you argue, contributed to deaths and paralysis from a botched batch of vaccine. It’s a story few people know. What else did you uncover in researching that episode?

My favorite piece of audio from the whole story is of Hubert Humphrey in 1946 — he was the mayor of Minneapolis at the time — would go to the radio station and read the Sunday funnies over the radio. There was a polio outbreak and kids were not allowed to leave the house, but you needed to keep them entertained.

I found it beautiful and wonderful to listen to him trying to be silly on the radio. But it also shows a kind of past to people making sacrifices and being quarantined that we don’t have immediately at our disposal. With viruses, there’s a weird sort of forgetting.

Image
In one episode, “Unseen,” Lepore (shown here as a young girl dressed like “The Invisible Man”) examines the problem of obtaining knowledge about things we can’t see.Credit...Jill Lepore

One episode, called “Unseen,” looks at the problem of forming knowledge about things we can’t see. In it, you mention your childhood fascination with “The Invisible Man.” What was that about?

For some reason I was very captivated by Claude Rains in “The Invisible Man,” and I would dress up like him. Which is troubling, since he’s a psychopath and a murderer. Maybe it’s a gender thing. There’s a certain type of girl who would rather not be seen, because to be in a body is to always be seen as a girl. All the comment about you is about your girl-ness: isn’t she cute, that’s so pretty. In my kidlike, proto-Harriet the Spy way, I thought if I just put on this hat, you just won’t see me.

In the first episode, about the murdered woman, you say that “silenced women” bother you. In a later episode, called “She Said, She Said,” you look at the idea of “embodied knowledge,” and what you call the liberal and conservative roots of the idea of “speaking your truth.” What impact has the #MeToo movement had on our ideas of evidence and truth?

It’s complicated to explain the episode, which revolves around some incredible archival tape we found from 1969. I’ll just leave that out there as a teaser.

I find a lot of the rhetoric of the #MeToo movement incredibly troubling, which is not to undermine that sexual violence, sexual assault and sexual harassment are terrible and we fail to prosecute them effectively. But the evidentiary claim of the #MeToo — that there’s an asymmetry in the law, that we’ve always just believed men, and therefore should just believe women — there’s a thousand ways I disagree with that.

I am, at the end of the day, an empiricist. I understand we don’t have an equal playing field in a court of law or a police department. But to give up on rules of evidence, or to devise special rules, is to turn one injustice into another.

So: Who killed truth? Do you solve the mystery?

We got to the last episode and said, “Goddamit, why did we start with this crazy question we can’t answer?” I do offer an answer. I eliminate a lot of prime suspects. I indict some co-conspirators. It’s not like the end of an episode of “Scooby-Doo,” but the argument comes to a close.

Jennifer Schuessler is a culture reporter covering intellectual life and the world of ideas. She is based in New York. More about Jennifer Schuessler

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: The Sound Of Curiosity Draws You In. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT