The Terminator from X Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story
Elon Musk has claimed that AI is humanity's "biggest existential threat." Paradoxically, Musk is also working to create artificial intellige...
Radio and PodcastLive Radio & Podcasts
Storytelling
The Last Archive
The Last Archive is a show about the history of truth, and the historical context for our current fake news, post-truth moment. It’s a show about how we know what we know, and why it seems,...
Episodes
20 of 65 episodes
Body Snatchers from X Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story
In 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion, and renamed it X. When asked why he wanted to own the social media network, Musk talked a...
Baby X from X Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story
The science fiction that Silicon Valley techno-billionaires like Elon Musk adore concerns gleaming futures in which fantastically powerful,...
The Dogefather from X Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story
In 2021, Elon Musk started calling himself The Dogefather to signal his support for Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency based on a joke meme about a...
Iron Man from X Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story
In 2008 Tesla Motors launched its first car, the completely electric Roadster. Tesla was a great story — something genuinely new, an e...
Planet B from X Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story
Elon Musk is a rocket man. He wants humans to become 'a multi-planetary species' and talks about establishing human settlements on Mars. As...
Dimension X from X Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story
Elon Musk is reinventing himself as a kingmaker for the United States and the world. He wants to shape the future. But in this episode, Jill...
The Dark Knight from X Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story
Elon Musk's origin story keeps changing. First, he was Tony Stark, or Iron Man. Not too long ago, he compared himself to Batman. Arguments s...
John Birch vs. the PTA
In the 1960s, a right-wing organization led by a former candy tycoon rose to fame in America for their anti-communist campaigns. They called...
Part 2: Long Jump, Tall Tale
Jesse Owens spent the rest of his life retelling the story of the 1936 games and his encounter with Luz Long. We trace the evolution of a ta...
Part 1: The Jiggle & the Giddy Up
The most famous athlete in 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany was the American sprinter Jesse Owens, and one of the most famous stories from thos...
70 Years of Brown v. Board of Education
Jill Lepore returns to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the ruling in Brown v. Board of Education with a special episode of The Last Archiv...
The Returns: A Conversation with Jill Lepore
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 an...
The Returns: Epiphany
Each week on ‘The Returns,’ we pull a different episode from our own archive to help put our present politics into historical context. This...
The Returns: Hush Rush
Each week on ‘The Returns,’ we pull a different episode from our archive to help put our present politics into historical context. In the 19...
The Returns: Project X
Each week on ‘The Returns,’ we pull a different episode from our archive to put our present politics into historical context. The election o...
The Returns: An Election Mini-Series from The Last Archive
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 draw...
The Unmarked Graveyard from Radio Diaries
This is the first episode in Radio Diaries’ new series The Unmarked Graveyard, untangling mysteries from America’s largest public cemetery....
The Krononauts
In our season finale, we travel through time.
Callings
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...