Nostalgia Trap

Why are sitcoms like  Small Wonder  so haunting to some of us? My guest, Bridget McGovern, a writer and managing editor at sci-fi/fantasy site  tor.com , sheds some light on this subject and many others as we delve into the pop cultural universe, sharing stories about coming of age during an era of often strange, sometimes inspiring, always memorable cultural production. From The Golden Girls  and...

What does is it mean to be "conservative" in America? My guest on this episode, professor and writer Corey Robin, has spent a great deal of his career thinking about conservatism and its particular influence in the U.S. His most recent book, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin , investigates the consistent themes and ideologies underlying this movement, and offers s...

I first became aware of James Hoff as the editor of the student newspaper, the Advocate , at the CUNY Graduate Center  while both of us were working on our degrees in the mid-oughts. James shepherded the paper through a turbulent moment at CUNY, maintaining a radical voice that tirelessly defended the mainly working class student body against an often appalling administration. In this conversation...

As we continue our journey through the halls of LaGuardia Community College  in Queens, New York, I stop to talk with Christine Marks, a professor of English whose work focuses on intimate structures like identity, gender, food, and the body. Our conversation includes Christine's less-than-ideal experience as a high school exchange student from Germany, her eventual return to the United States, an...

Stafford Gregoire wasn't always a professor of English at CUNY's LaGuardia Community College . His past as a bike messenger in New York City during the early 1980s, riding the streets and avenues with a cast of characters out of a Hubert Selby, Jr.  novel, set him on an intellectual journey that continues now in the halls of higher education. Stafford's stories touch on racial identity, gentrifica...

On Episode Two of The Nostalgia Trap, I finally get the opportunity to meet and chat with Laura Tanenbaum, a professor of English at LaGuardia Community College whose work I've enjoyed on Jacobin , her own blog  The Golden Notebooks , and in some of the most rewarding Facebook political battles of the past year. Laura and I talk about her years growing up in Chicago among a science-oriented family...

On the first episode of The Nostalgia Trap, I sit down to a conversation with writer and editor Connor Kilpatrick of Jacobin  magazine. Connor and I talk about his childhood in Texas, his surprisingly apolitical college years, and the "moment of clarity" after Obama's election that led him to the optimistic brand of left politics he embraces today.