TICKETED: Jill Lepore, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and author of The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, in conversation with James O’Donnell [09/29/26]

Porter Square Books is thrilled to welcome Jill Lepore for the release of her latest book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State. James O’Donnell will join Lepore in conversation.

This event will take place OFFSITE at First Parish in Cambridge (1446 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA 02138). Doors will open at 6:30 pm.

TICKETS

This event is TICKETED. There are two ticket types.

1) Option 1 includes admission for 1 person to the event, as well as one signed copy of The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State. If you want a signed copy of the book, please select this ticket option. There will be no personalizations.

2) Option 2 includes A LIMITED SUPPLY OF admission only for 1 person. This ticket does not include a copy of the book. If we sell out, please purchase a ticket that includes a copy of the book.

Additional copies of The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State as well as previous books by Jill Lepore will also be available for purchase at the event.

Please note that there is no book signing after the event. Personalizations are not possible. Books included with tickets will be pre-signed.

PARKING

We recommend taking public transit due to the limited parking in Cambridge. However, if you plan to drive, there are a few paid parking garages nearby: Church Street Lot at 41 Church Street, University Place Garage at 124 Mt. Auburn Street, and Charles Square Garage at the Charles Hotel (5 Bennett Street).

Give yourself plenty of time to find parking, as traffic can be heavy during evening rush hour.

ABOUT THE RISE AND FALL OF THE ARTIFICIAL STATE

“Much in history is headlong but few grand transformations have been more precipitate or more heedless than the rise of . . . the Artificial State,” writes Jill Lepore in this passionate account of how rule by machine has ravaged the world.

Inspired by Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, which argued in 1951 that the machinery of modern life was reshaping the very fundamentals of human existence, Lepore, profoundly disturbed by the technology revolution and by the soulless inundation of artificial intelligence, unfurls a new history for our own twenty-first century.

Building on an essay in The New Yorker in 2024, Lepore’s clarion call traces our increasing dependence on and strangulation by data. Political campaigns, awash in an avalanche of fake bots, have been reduced to attention-mining algorithms, while multinational media corporations dictate public discourse, and the era of the liberal nation-state seems to be coming to a rapid end, replaced by billionaire technocrats reliant on autocracy and the tools of AI.

With Orwellian overtones, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State demonstrates how technology has corroded global democracy, leading to the destruction of both human community and capacity for self-government, creating a new form of AI government, a digital citizen’s assembly, where AI will recommend the course of action to humans in place of human-run legislatures. Especially sobering with this proliferation of “dizzying, ever-changing schemes, prophesies, and predictions” is that the Artificial State has come at the expense of the natural world, leading to catastrophic loss of wildlife habitat and biodiversity.

Deliberately alarming, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, despite its abundance of dire facts, is not a funeral dirge; rather, it’s an inspiring wake-up call, written in Lepore’s typically elegiac prose, which demonstrates that nothing about the Artificial State was inevitable, for it is a “government without consent, even government without humans.” It can, Lepore asserts, be dismantled. Other heinous systems, like feudalism, fascism, and slavery, have also been dismantled, but disassembly requires identifying the parts, tracing the sources. It requires telling a new history. This is the purpose of The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University, professor of law at Harvard Law School, and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her many books include the New York Times bestsellers These Truths and We the People. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

James O’Donnell is a senior reporter for MIT Technology Review, where he writes about artificial intelligence. His stories have also appeared in The Washington Post, FRONTLINE PBS, ProPublica, The New Republic, and other outlets. His reporting examines how AI is reshaping high-stakes fields like policing and warfare, as well as its broader social consequences. His investigation into AI’s energy footprint was a recent finalist for a National Magazine Award. He lives outside Boston.

TICKETED: Jill Lepore, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and author of The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, in conversation with James O’Donnell

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