Nostalgia Trap

As we continue our series on 90s L.A. movies, we arrive at the 1995 high school classic Clueless (dir. Amy Heckerling), one of a number of Jane Austen adaptations that dominated 1990s pop culture. Danny Bessner and Courtney Rawlings join us for an exploration of this sunny, satirical vision of affluent teen culture, and we discover that Clueless is a more complicated take on feminism, consumerism,...

Jared Yates Sexton is a professor and political analyst whose latest book American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed its People takes on some of the big foundational myths of American history, viewing them through the lens of an increasingly dark, apocalyptic 21st century. In this conversation, we talk about the toxic stew of capitalism, racism, power, and domination that have shap...

Our journey through 90s Los Angeles with Danny Bessner continues with an exploration of the Jon Favreau/Vince Vaughn indie bromance Swingers (1996). We talk about the film's depiction of pre-gentrification Hollywood, when non-rich people could still afford a social life (or at least a beer and a burger), and analyze the wider historical forces that produced the somewhat bizarre mid-decade pop cult...

Why are noir detective stories such fitting containers for exploring the greed, corruption, and violence of Los Angeles? As we continue our series with Danny Bessner on 90s L.A. cinema, Will Menaker of Chapo Trap House joins us for a conversation about Curtis Hanson's 1997 neo-noir Hollywood masterpiece L.A. Confidential . Since Will and Danny are confessed James Ellroy fanatics, they explain how...

Are we as trapped by the future as we are by the past? Continuing our exploration of fascism and resistance in the 20th and 21st centuries, Justin Rogers-Cooper returns to offer his insights on the history of Belarus from World War II to the present. We begin with the 1985 Soviet film Come and See , using director Elem Klimov's searing take on Belarus' experience of Nazi occupation to frame our di...

Rick Perlstein is a historian and the author of a series of bestselling, massively entertaining books on the rise of American conservatism in the late 20th century. His 2008 book Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America sharpened his mega-thesis about the historical significance of "the Sixties" in the American political imagination, demonstrating how Nixon and other conser...

The 1993 film Falling Down , starring Michael Douglas and directed by Joel Schumacher, divided audiences and critics with a story of a man's descent into vigilante violence on a hot Los Angeles day. Viewed from 2020, the film shows us something deep and dark about American social reality in the years immediately following the end of the Cold War. Danny Bessner joins us for a detailed analysis of a...

Jon Wiener is an American historian and co-author, along with Mike Davis, of the extraordinary book Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties . In this conversation, Wiener explains why it's so vital, particularly in 2020, to recover L.A.'s radical history, and explains the process behind communicating a complicated movement narrative to a broad audience. We also hear bits from Wiener's incredibl...

Daegan Miller's first appearance on Nostalgia Trap, in which he discussed both his painful exit from academia and his stunning book This Radical Land: A Natural History of American Dissent , remains one of our most popular episodes. From the outskirts of a tiny town in rural Massachusetts, Miller returns to update us on his life outside the tortured confines of the university. In this conversation...

What happened to the world of independently-operated head shops, feminist and black-owned bookstores, and health food markets that blossomed in the 1960s and 1970s? Josh Davis, professor of history and author of From Head Shops to Whole Foods: The Rise and Fall of Activist Entrepreneurs , joins us to explain how a movement to change the world was slowly subsumed into the neoliberal hellscape of co...

Stuart Schrader is a Lecturer and Assistant Research Scientist in Sociology at Johns Hopkins University, and the author of Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing . In this conversation, he shares details from the book about the Office of Public Safety, a 1960s American Cold War project that gave U.S. aid to counter-revolutionary police forces around the...

Sean Lawrence works as a bartender and manager at a couple of the most popular eating and drinking establishments in downtown Ventura, California. In this conversation, he shares amazing stories from the world of restaurants and bars during the pandemic, from fights with MAGA trolls and the anti-mask crowd, to the agony of layoffs and closings, to the continued suffocating fear of catching COVID,...

Kristin Kobes Du Mez is a professor of history at Calvin University whose work focuses on the intersection of religion, gender, and politics in American life. Her new book Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation traces the development of a white, militant, patriarchal Christian culture in the decades since the 1960s, when the rise of feminism and the c...

Eddie Pepitone is an actor and comedian whose latest standup special For the Masses captures the visceral hell of life in late capitalism. In this conversation, he talks about his path in comedy, the development of a "working class" voice, why he avoids trite topics like dating and pizza, and how his left-wing politics and Eastern spirituality find their way into his material. 

How does the way we live reflect all the traps of American ideology? This week, one of our favorites, writer and activist Yasmin Nair ,  joins us for a wide-ranging conversation on the historical, social, and economic dimensions of U.S. housing policy. From current debates around gentrification and rent strikes to the romanticized image of suburban nuclear families in pop culture, we explore how i...

Since his first appearance on the Nostalgia Trap in 2016, Nathan Tankus has gained a devoted following for his ideas on politics, economics, and global finance. His newsletter, Notes on the Crises , is closely watched by journalists, politicians, and economists, particularly after publishing a remarkable set of pieces on COVID-19 and the Federal Reserve in early 2020. In this conversation, he disc...

This week Justin Rogers-Cooper joins us to celebrate our 200th episode with a deep dive into the political, economic, and cultural significance of the "Joker" character. What are the origins of the Joker image and mythology? How has the character evolved over time? And what does this archetype's ubiquitous presence tell us about our historical moment? This episode is dedicated in loving, living me...

Asad Haider is a founding editor at Viewpoint Magazine and the author of Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump . In this conversation he explains how the history of anti-racist struggle in the United States provides a compelling set of ideas for a dynamic, anti-capitalist emancipatory practice. Along the way, we discuss the value of reading Marx in 2020, our distorted view of 1960s...

Paul Renfro is a professor of history at Florida State University and the author of Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State . In this conversation he explains how fears of child abduction fueled a hysterical campaign in the 1970s and 1980s that produced a wave of new laws, structures of punishment, and ideas about family, security, and sexuality that continue to...

Ken Layne is the creator of Desert Oracle , a magazine and radio show/podcast all about the strange inhabitants and culture of the Mojave Desert. Layne's trajectory through the world of alternative media winds through the 1990s and 2000s, when he was present at the creation of the Gawker media empire and subsequently took the reins of their influential politics outlet Wonkette . In this conversati...

Our series on the rapidly evolving politics of COVID-19 continues this week, with Justin Rogers-Cooper warning that the logic of finance capital may force a premature "re-opening" on the American public in the summer of 2020. In this conversation we talk about recent armed anti-lockdown protests, the movie Parasite as a window into the cultural zeitgeist around class inequality, and the potential...

Arash Azizi is a writer and scholar currently completing a Ph. D. in History and Middle Eastern Studies at NYU; his work focuses on the left in Iran and in the wider Islamic world. In this conversation, making frequent reference to cinema and pop culture, he discusses the global dimensions of anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements, tracing a narrative from the Cold War to the 21st century.

Drew Morton is an Assistant Professor of Mass Communication at Texas A&M University-Texarkana. He is the co-editor and co-founder of [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies , the first peer-reviewed academic journal focused on the visual essay, drawn from a wide range of scholars (including Drew himself). In this conversation he describes his education in film, both a...

Yasmin Nair returns to the Trap for a deep dive into the film Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), a conversation that helps us frame ideas about prison abolition, animal rights, environmentalism, pandemics, and the tactical elements of a grassroots revolution. 

As we continue our series on the politics of COVID-19, Justin Rogers-Cooper takes aim at the absurd ideology of "sacrifice," as we explore how American sentimental mythology allows us to justify capitalism's indifference to deaths of its "essential" workers.