Nostalgia Trap

A recent law school event featuring former L.A. County District Attorney Jackie Lacey  honestly blew my mind, and made me think a lot about the intersection of crime, law enforcement, reform movements, and political violence. I try to put those ideas together alongside the current culture of J6 pardons and Luigi mania, as we fall further into a chaotic and vengeful national mindset. Subscribe to t...

There are currently too many news stories to fit into the "ominous portents of a dark future" file, so I've chosen a few of the most flagrant examples of Trump/Musk savagery to share, along with some reflections on how to fight for our minds and for each other as the world heads down the toilet. Check out our Patreon for more: patreon.com/nostalgiatrap    

I got my first job when I was 15 years old, working at a Pumpkin Patch on a local farm, and it's been all downhill from there. I'm partly joking, but the working world has never been a place of maximum success and happiness for me, and in this episode I try to come to terms with my own job history as a way of exploring the pressures that consume many of us: bosses, bills, weird co-workers, and the...

The haunting documentary All I Can Say , which chronicles a few vibrant years in the life of Shannon Hoon, the lead singer of 90s grunge rock band Blind Melon, is a slice of deep 90s nostalgia shot on camcorder by Hoon himself before he died of a drug overdose in October 1995. In this conversation, Justin Rogers-Cooper joins me to reflect on Hoon's complicated legacy, the strange power of his inti...

I started teaching college history courses in 2005 when I was a graduate student at the City University of New York. Looking back at those early years, I can hardly believe how little I knew about how to teach college courses. As I mark my 20th year of teaching, I thought I would reflect on everything I've learned from two decades of serving as an adjunct professor at a wide range of institutions,...

David Lynch died earlier this month, and like many others I've been reflecting on his legacy, not only in the wider culture but in my own personal trajectory and identity. In this episode, I focus on the latter. Rather than trying to analyze the larger meaning of Lynch's filmography, I wanted to sort out how his work intervened on my life, in particular considering how ideas of dark magic, synchro...

The politics of rebuilding Los Angeles after the fires, tech maneuvering for Trump juice, social media outrage missing the mark, Elon's Nazi salute masking something darker, a new Gilded Age comes into view, what's at risk with global capital behaving like a caged animal. This is a short clip from a full episode, which you can hear by subscribing to our Patreon. Subscibers get access to all of our...

Ross Barkan is a political writer and novelist whose Substack is one of our favorite places for thoughtful takes on the current political and cultural landscape. He joins me this week to survey the landscape with Trump taking office again, as we consider the tech world's shifting allegiances and cultural power, the exhaustion with #resistance outrage and performative politics, the online popularit...

This week I'm joined by Evan Friss, author of the current New York Times bestseller The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore , which traces the development of bookshops as integral, often paradoxical, spaces within the landscape of American consumer culture. What is a bookshop? And what makes it different from literally any other place you can visit? In this conversation, Evan shares some...

Fires in Los Angeles unleash a wave of online hate from the left and right. What chance do we have to mitigate the coming climate change disasters if the population's reactions are driven by algorithms that massage and indulge our worst impulses? This is a short clip from a full-length episode for Nostalgia Trap subscribers, sign up for a FREE 7-day trial to listen to the whole thing, plus gain ac...

This week I talk with David Humphries, a professor of English at Queensborough Community College in New York City, about his excellent project Happy Nostalgia: Making Connections with the Music of the '90s , which collects essays from CUNY scholars on the last "analog" moment of music fandom, the beautiful and tragic 1990s. We get a chance to trade nostalgic stories about our own music obsessions...

A critical but often overlooked chapter in American labor history, the animator's strike that shook the Walt Disney Corporation in 1941 was part of a wave of labor struggle in World War II era Hollywood. Jake S. Friedman's book  The Disney Revolt: The Great Labor War of Animation's Golden Age chronicles the strike in colorful detail, and includes plenty of eye-popping images of the strike's partic...

This week we watched the excellent Apple TV series Severance and put it in conversation with Naomi Klein's latest book Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World . Both texts explore how the concept of "doubles" plays out in capitalist culture, and we have fun talking about the ways they did (and didn't) blow our minds. From Klein's refreshing take on the left's severe mistakes of the COVID era (a...

A United Healthcare CEO is assassinated and the world laughs, fitness and nutrition culture goes fascist, Europe in collapse while China salivates, Trump's tariffs portend new global shockwaves. To hear the whole episode, subscribe for a FREE 7 day trial: https://www.patreon.com/posts/117457956?pr=true&forSale=true

It's Black Friday, so between insane binges of online shopping, Justin and I sat down to record a conversation about the Netflix documentary The Antisocial Network: From Memes to Mayhem , as we consider the path from Occupy Wall Street and Bernie Sanders to 1/6 and Donald Trump's triumph in the 2024 election. What role has internet culture played in shaping our current reality, and what can we exp...

Musk's endgame on environmental regulations, universities bracing for a war on DEI and critical race theory, Houthi pirates drawn to their deaths in Ukraine, national economies bracing for world war. Happy Thanksgiving! Subscribe to access our entire library of bonus content, including weekly News Trap updates: patreon.com/nostalgiatrap

Tim Keogh is an Associate Professor of History at the Queensborough Community College in New York City. His book In Levittown's Shadow: Poverty in America's Wealthiest Postwar Suburb turns a common American story on its head, giving us a picture of life at the economic bottom of the postwar suburban housing boom. This conversation features challenges to political orthodoxies of the right and left,...

This week I'm joined by my good friend Peter Sabatino for a conversation all about Vincent Van Gogh's personal and artistic legacy. We both read the book Van Gogh: The Life by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith , a gigantic magisterial biography that affected us both in surprising ways. While Van Gogh embodies the archetypal image of the "tortured artist," there's so much more to his story, and...

Armed militias roam the hurricane ravaged wastelands of North Carolina, no one wants children and it's not because of the economy, Apple's Vision Pro is a massive failure, we're stepping off the ship of rational discourse and entering the wonderland of feelings as facts. Don't miss any of our News Trap updates, subscribe and ride the snake: patreon.com/nostalgiatrap  

Jack Reid is an American historian and the author of  Roadside Americans: The Rise and Fall of Hitchhiking in a Changing Nation (UNC Press, 2020). In this conversation, we talk about the specific culture, between the 1930s and 1970s, that produced hitchhiking as a common social experience, when ordinary Americans would travel with strangers they met on the road. What happened to hitchhiking? And w...

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Joseph M. Thompson is assistant professor of history at Mississippi State University, and the author of Cold War Country: How Nashville's Music Row and the Pentagon Created the Sound of American Patriotis m (UNC Press, 2024). Thompson's history tracks the deep connections between country music and the U.S. military, uncovering a concerted effort by government officials and cultural creators to cem...

Andrew C. McKevitt is John D. Winters Endowed Professor of History at Louisiana Tech University. His latest book, Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America , explores how guns came to occupy a curious place between "constitutional right" and "consumer good," as the Cold War provided a cultural, political, and material framework by which guns could become the hottest ite...

R.E.M. is one of the most influential rock bands in American music history, with a legendary arc that took them from college radio punks in the early 80s to critical darlings and arena rockers with multiple smash albums throughout the 90s. But what happened after that? This week Justin shares a thesis about the final phase of R.E.M.'s career, during which the band signed an $80 million contract wi...

Anti-immigration politics are winning the moment, the market for testosterone replacement therapy is booming, child labor is on the horizon, and United Health EATS PEOPLE. And so ends this week's FREE PREVIEW for News Trap. Subscribe to continue the News Trap journey and keep up with all new episodes next week and beyond:  https://www.patreon.com/collection/520366?view=expanded