Jill Lepore
Jill Lepore
Jill Leporeis an American historian. She is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University. and a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she has contributed since 2005. She writes about American history, law, literature, and politics...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionHistorian
CountryUnited States of America
harbor nations offers olympics parade peace relief strife
The Olympics is an imperfect interregnum, the parade of nations a fantasy about a peace never won. It offers little relief from strife and no harbor from terror.
people types
Some people will always think they know how to make other people's marriages better, and, after a while, they'll get to cudgeling you or selling you something; the really entrepreneurial types will sell you the cudgel.
defense emergence exposure historical matter relationship secrecy stated
As a matter of historical analysis, the relationship between secrecy and privacy can be stated in an axiom: the defense of privacy follows, and never precedes, the emergence of new technologies for the exposure of secrets.
becoming came colonies debtors europeans paid passage three
As many as two out of every three Europeans who came to the colonies were debtors on arrival: they paid for their passage by becoming indentured servants.
board bought game life mess playing quite remembered seemed sure
One day, I was playing 'The Game of Life,' the board game, with a mess of kids, and I wasn't quite sure how, but it seemed different than the game I remembered playing as a kid. So I bought an old game, from 1960, and it was different.
leads sentiments stirring voters
A problem with a president who leads by stirring the moral sentiments of voters is that he has got to keep stirring them.
accurate management promised replace rules scientific thumb
Scientific management promised to replace rules of thumb with accurate measurements.
biography nature
Presidential biography is, by its nature, out of scale; no character is bigger, no action greater, than the person and the doings of the American president.
date fiction modern plots press science stories
The stories about epidemics that are told in the American press - their plots and tropes - date to the nineteen-twenties, when modern research science, science journalism, and science fiction were born.
consistent dictated elites following follows likely mass partisan party
Political elites vote in a more partisan fashion than the mass public; this tendency, too, follows a curve. The more you know, the more likely you are to vote in an ideologically consistent way, not just following your party but following a set of constraints dictated by a political ideology.
eighteenth took
One thing that always frustrated me was that, while Benjamin Franklin's was the best-known face of the eighteenth century, no one ever took his sister's likeness.
affairs became bound government mysterious private process programs secrecy secret
Secret government programs that pry into people's private affairs are bound up with ideas about secrecy and privacy that arose during the process by which the mysterious became secular.
Secrecy is what is known, but not to everyone. Privacy is what allows us to keep what we know to ourselves.
since wrote
Since childhood, I wrote a lot of fiction, a lot of stories, but I most loved writing essays.