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Speaker 1: Pushkin. There's a place in our world where the doubtful

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Speaker 1: things go. Lies and hoaxes and conspiracy theories. Boxes of

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Speaker 1: this stuff, tottering, stacks of files full of dubious claims

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Speaker 1: and facts that don't check. This spring, in the second

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Speaker 1: season of my podcast, The Last Archive, I'm heading down there.

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Speaker 1: My name is Jill Lapour. I'm a historian at Harvard

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Speaker 1: and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Over the

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Speaker 1: last few years, I've been troubled by some pretty big

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Speaker 1: questions about our present. Why is it so hard for

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Speaker 1: us to agree on what's true? Why does it feel

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Speaker 1: so impossible to know anything anymore? So I started this podcast,

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Speaker 1: The Last Archive to find answers to trace a history.

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Speaker 1: Last season, the podcast took the form of a murder

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Speaker 1: her mystery, Who Done It? An investigation into the question

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Speaker 1: who killed truth. A lot of history has happened since then,

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Speaker 1: twenty twenty the year to end all years, and now

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Speaker 1: twenty twenty one, with an insurrection and impeachment and a

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Speaker 1: mass vaccination campaign. Everything just keeps seeming so unbelievable. So

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Speaker 1: this season, I'm taking on a new mystery. I'm investigating

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Speaker 1: the rise of doubt over the last hundred years of

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Speaker 1: American history, starting with the Scoops Monkey Trial in nineteen

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Speaker 1: twenty five, all the way down to now. We'll meet

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Speaker 1: hypnotists and parapsychologists, Nazis and Soviet propagandists, and voices too

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Speaker 1: of reason. Come by and knock on the door of

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Speaker 1: the last archive. You can find it anywhere you get

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Speaker 1: your podcasts. Just past the shadow of a doubt,