In the forty-ninth episode of GREAT PODVERSATIONS, Author, American Historian and Journalist JILL LEPORE discusses her book, The Deadline: Essays, with CONGRESSMAN JAMIE RASKIN.

Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History and Affiliate Professor of Law at Harvard University. She is also a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her many books include These Truths: A History of the United States (2018), an international bestseller, named one of Time magazine’s top ten non-fiction books of the decade. She is currently working on a long-term research project called Amend, an NEH-funded data collection of attempts to amend the U.S. Constitution.

Lepore’s The Deadline: Essays collects forty-six of her essays written over the last decade — including three unpublished ones – that offer a prismatic portrait of Americans’ techno-utopianism, frantic fractiousness, and unprecedented yet armed aimlessness.

Lepore has been contributing to The New Yorker since 2005, writing about American history, law, literature, and politics. Her essays and reviews have also appeared in The New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement, the Journal of American History, Foreign Affairs, the Yale Law Journal, American Scholar, and the American Quarterly; have been translated into many languages; and have been widely anthologized, including in collections of the best legal writing and the best technology writing. Her most recent book, IF THEN: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future, was longlisted for the National Book Award.

Congressman Jamie Raskin is the U.S. Representative for Maryland’s 8th Congressional District. He serves as the Ranking Member on the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability. He served as the Lead House Manager in the second Senate impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump, which ended with a 57-43 vote to convict the president for inciting a violent insurrection against the government to overthrow the 2020 presidential election. Raskin also served on the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol and served three terms on the House Judiciary, Oversight and Administration Committees. He served two terms on the Rules Committee. Prior to Congress, he was a three-term State Senator in Maryland and a professor of constitutional law for more than a quarter-century at American University Washington College of Law.

Raskin has authored several books, including We the Students, and The Washington Post best-seller Overruling Democracy: The Supreme Court versus the American People. Last year he was a guest of Kentucky Author Forum and discussed his New York Times #1 best-seller Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth and the Trials of American Democracy. The Great Conversations telecast of that event won a Silver Telly Award, which honors excellence in television and video.

The Deadline: Essays by Jill Lepore

These Truths: A History of the United States by Jill Lepore

IF THEN: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future by Jill Lepore

Overruling Democracy: The Supreme Court versus the American People by Congressman Jamie Raskin

Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth and the Trials of American Democracy by Congressman Jamie Raskin

Original air date: 10/13/2023

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