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FROM THE ATTIC: For a Kinder, Cooler America
CAMBRIDGE, MA — APRIL 2020 — As the world locks down, a door opens. Click! Footsteps on a stair. And eerie, Twilight Zone music. A female voice echoes.
“There’s a place in the world where the known things go. . .”
Podcasts are the soundtrack of our time. Chattering hosts and somber pundits struggle to focus our scattershot minds on minutiae. But when Jill Lepore added a podcast to her busy life, as Harvard professor and New Yorker staffer, she did not traffic in the trivial. She went straight for the question haunting our era.
Lepore had spent a lifetime preparing. During a bookish childhood near Worcester, MA, she “just always wanted to be a writer.” College steered her from a math major to English. Two years as a secretary at Harvard Business School taught her the politics of the workplace, and sent her on to grad school in American Studies at Yale.
