Nostalgia Trap

In 2004, when he was executive officer of the CUNY Graduate Center 's department of history, Professor Joshua Freeman  was my first contact and mentor in the early years of grad school. His expertise and generosity helped me and many others in our transition to a rigorous Ph. D. program. He is now a Distinguished Professor at the GC and teaches at CUNY's Queens College , sharing his deep knowledge...

Ammiel Alcalay  is a poet, writer, critic, translator, archivist, and much more. As a professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center , he is known as much for his scholarship as for his generosity: with his time, with his attention to student's work, and with his talents as editor and writer. Ammiel recently visited my apartment for a conversation about his youth in Boston growing up around poet...

My friend Justin Rogers-Cooper , a professor of English at LaGuardia Community College  in Queens, New York, recently invited me to campus to record a "live" podcast with his students. The course was designed to help students consider, and prepare for possible participation in, the profession of teaching. Talking to bright young undergraduates about the "nuts and bolts" of pedagogy was a fascinati...

I've gotten to know Christopher Silsby  through our work together at the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute  at Baruch College . Christopher's particular take  on the role of technology in education is one that continues to provoke engaging conversations at the Institute and beyond. It was a pleasure to sit down with him to hear about his upbringing in Kansas, his thoughts on education, a...

As the main adviser on my dissertation, Josh Brown  was and continues to be an important figure in the development of my own thoughts and ideas about American history. Active in the Vietnam antiwar movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Josh's vision of the historical discipline's social and political value is in part drawn from his experiences during that tumultuous era. We sat down to a great conversa...

I first met Barbara Garson while researching the GI coffeehouse movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which aimed to open antiwar, counterculture coffeehouses in small towns outside military bases, as part of a larger movement to end the war in Vietnam. Barbara's time spent working at such a coffeehouse in Tacoma, Washington was one part of a long career of writing and activism. Her controversial play...

Lavelle Porter is a writer with a fascinating set of interests, ranging from poetry and science fiction to racial politics, sexual identity, and the structures of higher education itself. His recent blog post, " More Thoughts on Graduate School ," resonated with anyone who's ever agonized over grad school-related decisions in their life, capturing some of the ambivalence that often accompanies the...

Why is the minimum wage so ridiculously low in 21st century America? My guests today (Eljeer Hawkins, Cora Bergantinos, and James Hoff) are part of the 15Now  movement, which is seeking to drastically shift the conversation about the minimum wage in cities across the U.S. In Seattle, the movement recently achieved a major victory , in part due to the leadership of Kshama Sawant , a city council me...

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.