Jill Lepore: The Artificial State

TPL and Toronto Metropolitan University present Pulitzer-Prize winning historian Jill Lepore in conversation with Sanjay Ruparelia at the Toronto Reference Library's Appel Salon.

As Professor of American History at Harvard University and Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, Jill Lepore brings her rare gift for narrative history to one of the most urgent questions of our time: has democracy already been quietly replaced by rule of a different kind, one governed not by citizens, but by machines owned by corporations?

In her new book The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, Lepore traces our increasing dependence on and strangulation by data. Framing the book as a successor to Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, Lepore shares a new history for our twenty-first century.

What does it mean when the era of the liberal nation-state seems to be giving way to the rule of artificial intelligence? Lepore insists history is driven not by machines but by individuals, societies, cultures, and ideas, and that the architects of the Artificial State drew their governing philosophy not from science, but from science fiction.

Can what has been built be undone? And what would it take to reimagine a genuinely democratic relationship between technology and self-governance, one where humans, not machines, remain accountable to one another?

Join one of America's most celebrated historians, fresh from her bestselling We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution, for an essential conversation about power, technology, and the fight to reclaim democratic life from the architects of an artificial future.

DATE: Thursday, October 1, 2026
TIME: 7:00 PM - 8:30 PM  EST
LOCATION: Appel Salon, Toronto Reference Library