Nostalgia Trap

A stunning new piece in The Atlantic   offers details on the fall of America as seen from Phoenix, Arizona. Folks, 2024 is gonna be a hell of year. This is FREE PREVIEW WEEK for News Trap, subscribe to hear 'em all: https://www.patreon.com/collection/520366?view=expanded

Today we take a detailed look at this incredible Wall Street Journal piece featuring text messages from Yahya Sinwar, Hamas leader and architect of 10/7. What's Sinwar's strategy? And how does it fit into an American antiwar movement's calculations? This week's episodes of News Trap are free for everyone but next week we're back to subscribers-only...so subscribe!  Here's the link: https://www.pat...

Nobody likes new cars, everyone loves old cars, Americans are on a spending spree while complaining about the economy, the anti-AI rebellion is growing. This is a free episode of News Trap, subscribe to our Patreon for access to daily episodes: https://www.patreon.com/collection/520366?view=expanded

This week Justin and I talk about the 2008 Coen brothers film Burn After Reading , another "acid take" on American politics and culture with uncanny implications for our 2024 carnival timeline.   Check out our daily News Trap updates to catch up on the "map of the future," in real time: https://www.patreon.com/collection/520366?view=expanded  

David Rensin is the author of more than a dozen books, five of them New York Times bestsellers. I was lucky enough to meet David through the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, and he joins me here for a conversation about his long, strange trip as a journalist and author, from writing for Rolling Stone and Playboy in the 1960s and 70s to co-authoring massively popular books with Tim Allen and Jeff...

"Everyday carry" and "prepper" culture, unsold Teslas piling up at dealerships, AI as the future of global capitalism, AI does not in fact work, Biden is not properly buying our votes. Follow all our News Trap episodes by subscribing to our Patreon feed, free with 7 day trial membership: https://www.patreon.com/collection/520366?view=expanded  

We've been posting daily news wrap-ups/freakouts every morning over at the Nostalgia Trap Patreon page for our subscribers. I'm posting today's episode on the main feed, hoping you'll subscribe. My goals with News Trap are to share perspectives on the big trends shaping our present and future, to fill in the gaps on stories you may have missed, or offer challenges to orthodoxies on the left and ri...

Trump can't control himself in court, food prices are gonna decide the election, Tik Tok is gearing up for a Supreme Court battle, the U.S. can't make enough weapons for both Israel AND Ukraine, and RFK, Jr. has a brain worm (no, literally). Stay informed! Subscribe so you won't miss all our News Trap updates:  https://www.patreon.com/posts/103876807?pr=true    

As campus protests against Israel's genocidal actions in Gaza continue, Justin and I pick up on our discussion from last week about the wider historical issues at play. This week we talk more about anti-apartheid campaigns of the 1980s, and consider the idea of "divestment" at elite colleges. The neoliberal, corporate university is having quite a moment – confronting the contradictions of its hype...

On today's News Trap I share some snippets about Chinese state capitalism, RFK's hilariously shitty presidential campaign, Elon Musk pulling the plug on everyone's dumb car chargers, the normalization of guns in schools and, of course, more on the campus protests against Israel's still unfolding genocide in Gaza. Subscribe for more: https://www.patreon.com/collection/520366?view=expanded Instagram...

This week Justin and I attempt to put the latest round of campus protests into historical context, both in the wider view (19th century abolitionism, Vietnam, South Africa) and in our specific moment (Occupy, Black Lives Matter, pandemic, Israel/Gaza). What are the students' demands, and how do we reconcile them with a popular  social movement that could actually win?  Subscribe to hear the full e...

It's been a minute since Justin and I have shared our takes on "the news," so this week we have a typically dark, unhinged conversation about what's coming for us in 2024, with an American population frothing at the mouth to BUILD THE WALL and weapons-crazy madmen lashing out around the globe. It's an incredible time to be alive.   Full episode: https://www.patreon.com/posts/102232361?pr=true

Conspiracy theories are a hell of a drug. Justin and I know this from experience, so watching the new Netflix documentary American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders brought up some deeply identifiable thoughts and emotions for both of us. Do you REALLY want to know the exact details of the dark forces at work within our most sacred institutions? As we discuss here, there's a heavy price to pay for t...

This is the first half of this week's episode, go to our Patreon page to listen to the whole thing! https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-386-of-98833719 It's Part Four of our six-part adventure through the history of American automaking and car culture, and we've finally reached the moment when everything starts to unravel: the 1970s. When Arab nations decide to flex their oil muscle against the...

In Part Three of our journey through the history of American car culture, we explore how the massive cultural and political shifts of the 1960s made an impact on American automaking. From the Chevrolet Corvair spinning out and making Ralph Nader a household name, to the Ford Mustang turning boring housewives and husbands into hip celebrities, this was a wild era. When Detroit takes a sinister turn...

As we continue our story of America's love affair with the automobile, it's time to look at the tailfin behemoths of the 1950s, the cars that look like "guns you can fuck." With the automakers morphing into weapons manufacturers to help Uncle Sam win World War II, the postwar consumer reaped the strange benefits of military technology and imperial ideology seeping into the design of his suburban l...

This week we watch Fast Five (2011), the fifth installment in the Fast and Furious franchise , and contemplate how these movies embed radical ideas about criminality, subversion, insurgency, and family in often goofy stories about driving really fast cars, furiously.  Full episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-383-fast-97420130 For more reflections on car culture, check out Part One...

The supreme object of the 20th century, the automobile's development as both transportation technology and cultural totem is literally the story of American capitalism. In the first episode of a six-part series, we examine the life and legacy of Henry Ford, whose Model T took the nation by storm after its debut in 1908. As Ford rises to an unprecedented position of wealth and power, his virulent a...

Our friend Andrew Schustek is back with an all-new Housing Trap conversation all about the unfolding crisis of housing in 21st century New York City and beyond. This time he talks with returning guest Samuel Stein, a geographer, urban planner and housing policy analyst whose book Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State is a must read for housing policy nerds (you know who you are)....

This week Justin and I discuss the 1989 tearjerker Field of Dreams , a film about ghosts playing baseball in some guy's backyard that endures as a beloved classic of American cinema. What's going on with  that? As a lifelong devotee of the film, Justin articulates why Field of Dreams hits so hard, as we explore how the secular religious magic of baseball and movies intermingle with dreams of capit...

Float Universe is an Instagram meme/troll account that's ostensibly focused on the intersection of floatation tanks and psychedelic culture. The account's creator joins me this week to explain how the floating experience mirrors the druggy rush of online dopamine adventures, as we explore how trolling and conspiracy theories are bending our everyday realities.  Sign up for a free 7 day trial of ou...

We simply did not cover enough topics in our first "2023 Year in Review" episode , so this week Justin is back to talk about some of the big trends looming on the horizon of 2024: another grim yet insanely consequential U.S. presidential election, rising anti-immigrant sentiment on both left and right, the ominous march of genocidal war in Gaza, and the accelerating violent race for resources to l...

Clay Routledge is a teacher, writer, and researcher in the field of existential psychology. His latest book, Past Forward: How Nostalgia Can Help You Live a More Meaningful Life explores a topic near and dear to our hearts: nostalgia and its power to shape the future. In this conversation, we talk about our own obsessions with specific pop cultural objects from our respective youths (video games,...

It's time to take a nostalgic look back at the past year, as we survey some of the big trends from 2023 that will inevitably fuck up our collective 2024. This year we end up talking a lot about tech's grip on our political and cultural imagination: labor strikes in Hollywood and the auto industry, the impact of AI, and the giant lie of green capitalism glimpsed in the debacle of electric vehicles....

Following last week's episode all about Elliott Smith , this week Justin and I continue our discussion of sad boys and bad dads with a conversation all about Stand By Me , the 1986 Stephen King/Rob Reiner nostalgia-fest about four boys journeying into the postwar American hinterlands to find a dead body (spoiler: the body is a metaphor). In this conversation, we explore how this movie's sentimenta...