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
critics deeply few gaze paranoid politics
Weirdly, there have been a lot of critics of conservatism, but very few critics of innovation. As a culture, we are deeply paranoid about politics, but we gaze upon innovation with rapturous adulation.
bad good
Well-reported news is a public good; bad news is bad for everyone.
choices republican democrat
Republicans were more pro-choice than Democrats up until the late 1980s.
saved
Disrupt, and you will be saved.
thinking hands personality
We have hands that must work, brains that must think, and personalities that must be developed.
book sleep written
Reviewing a book written by someone you're living with and sleeping with is, needless to say, wrong.
four pages facts
A great deal of what many Americans hold dear is nowhere written on those four pages of parchment, or in any of the amendments. What has made the Constitution durable is the same as what makes it demanding: the fact that so much was left out.
beautiful men ugly-man
Why do beautiful women love ugly men?
interesting long argument
History is a long and endlessly interesting argument, where evidence is everything and storytelling is everything else.
epidemiology disease sides
Germ theory, which secularized infectious disease, had a side effect: it sacralized epidemiology.
loyalty mother determination
My mother married my father in 1956. She was twenty-eight, and he was thirty-one. She loved him with a fierce steadiness borne of loyalty, determination, and an unyielding dignity.
epidemics patterns disease
Epidemics follow patterns because diseases follow patterns. Viruses spread; they reproduce; they die.
generations mouths down-and
Folklore used to be passed by word of mouth, from one generation to the next; thats what makes it folklore, as opposed to, say, history, which is written down and stored in an archive.
order epidemics stories
Epidemiologists study patterns in order to combat infection. Stories about epidemics follow patterns, too. Stories arent often deadly, but they can be virulent: spreading fast, weakening resistance, wreaking havoc.