About the Author
Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She is also a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her books include We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution, which won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for history and was long-listed for the 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction; The Name of War, which won a Bancroft Prize; New York Burning, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for history; Book of Ages, a finalist for the National Book Award; The Secret History of Wonder Woman; the international best-seller These Truths: A History of the United States; and The Deadline, which received a PEN America award for the art of the essay. She is the host of the podcast “The Last Archive” and of the BBC Radio 4 program “X-Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story.”
“The Artificial State is the factory farming of humans, the sorting and segmenting, the isolation and alienation, the destruction of both human community and the capacity for self-government, the replacement of rule of, by, and for the people with the rule of machines owned by corporations. Within the Artificial State, humans become to machines what animals have been to humans.” —Jill Lepore
About the Moderator
Kevin Sack is a veteran journalist who has written broadly about national affairs for more than four decades and has shared in three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church, which explores the 200-year history of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC, before and after the 2015 massacre of nine parishioners by a young white supremacist. The book was honored as one of three finalists for the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. A native of Jacksonville, Florida, and a graduate of Duke University, he spent thirty years on the staff of The New York Times, where he specialized in writing long-form narrative and investigative reports, often related to race. He also has written for the Los Angeles Times and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and his work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine. He was a 2019 Emerson Collective Fellow at New America.