Nostalgia Trap

This week Justin and I talk about the fight between labor, management, unions, and the state now being waged in the railroad industry, and trace the longer history of rail and transport as central spaces for navigating the class violence bubbling under the surface of the American economy. Plus, Christmas nostalgia for all the boys and girls! Full episode: patreon.com/posts/livestream-12-2-75429714...

This week Yasmin and I watch Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968) and Birth (Jonathan Glazer, 2004),   two films about trapped women, pixie haircuts, beautiful New York apartments, stifling bourgeois social norms, and creepy children born of Satan. There's plenty for us to chew on here—from architecture and occult power to deeply unsettling notions of childhood, death, and sexuality—as we consid...

Chad E. Pearson is a labor historian and writer whose work focuses on ruling class organizations and violence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this episode we discuss his latest book, Capital's Terrorists: Klansmen, Lawmen, and Employers in the Long Nineteenth Century (UNC Press, 2022), which explores how elite capitalists evolved new strategies of violence and repression d...

This week Justin and I consider the possibility that news of Twitter's imminent demise may be premature, which leads to a discussion of tech bro culture's connection to the wider history of consumer capitalism and the series of swaggering men who promise utopian escapes from the very nightmare they've created, producing an endless cycle of technological baubles that attempt to remove us from linea...

Shane Burley returns to the Trap for a challenging conversation about Stanley Kubrick's 1987 Vietnam war mindfuck Full Metal Jacket , a film that asks deep, dark questions about violence, masculinity, racial imperialism, and other persistent features of human history. From its prolonged opening training sequence of horrific, hilariously choreographed ritual abuse to the oddly staged final battle s...

On this installment of Housing Trap, Andrew Schustek talks with Benjamin Teresa, a professor in the Urban and Regional Studies and Planning program at the Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs at UVA. In this conversation, Teresa explains the role of finance and real estate in shaping the possibilities and limits of housing policy, and offers some ideas on how community engagement might o...

The livestream returns to a week full of exciting collapses: MAGA, Twitter, Meta, all run by men who talk a big game but suddenly can't seal the deal. Is this a temporary blip, "something that happens to all guys sometimes," or are the big swingers of the digital era reaching their limits? Join the Nostalgia Trap Patreon and listen to the whole episode

This week Ryan and I watch an incendiary viral TikTok and debate the idea of "third places" – those special spaces where a human being can be a human being, around other human beings. Does such a space exist anymore? Who knows! But it seems like the degradation of public space in the past few decades just MIGHT have something to do with the decline of liberal social values – or is it the other way...

Andrew Schustek and Samuel Stein continue their conversation on the inner workings of American housing policy, this time focusing on subsidies, affordable housing, and signs of weakness/vulnerability in the "real estate state."  Subscribe to listen to the whole episode

Nostalgia Trap fellow traveler and guest host Andrew Schustek continues our series of conversations on the political economy of housing in the 21st century. This week, Andrew talks with geographer, urban planner and housing policy analyst Samuel Stein, whose book Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State is already a classic of modern urban studies and required reading for anyone inte...

This week Justin and I watch the first few episodes of Adam Curtis' latest documentary provocation, Russia 1985–1999: TraumaZone , as we consider the different ways to imagine "collapse," both ideologically and aesthetically.  Listen to the whole episode

Do you need a college degree in order to understand T.S. Eliot poems? Does subjecting a work of art or literature to academic analysis ruin our enjoyment of said work? This week Ryan and I talk about the "point" of a humanities education in a technocratic neoliberal world, and reflect on the increasingly dominant view of college as a transaction rather than an education. How do we put the heart ba...

Shane Burley is a writer and filmmaker whose work explores the contours of 21st century fascist movements. His latest book, Why We Fight: Essays on Fascism, Resistance, and Surviving the Apocalypse (AK Press, 2021) , covers the rapid shift in organizing tactics on the right and left in the years since the 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right rally. In this conversation we reflect on the fascist, a...

This week Justin and I talk about the UFO documentary Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind: Contact Has Begun (2020), and get into the multiple UFO narratives currently circulating in online/media/state intelligence discourse. As always, we apply the Trap method of entertaining many different layered truths (an ecology of realities is one way to put it), but also tell some stories about our own "con...

This week Yasmin and I endure Andrew Dominik's much over-hyped Netflix #content Blonde , a fictional passion play "about" Marilyn Monroe, based on the novel by Joyce Carol Oates. Our reactions are analytical and emotional, and we work out the intense feelings about celebrity, power, and gender brought up by the film's often absurd provocations. And by the way, what are the gender dynamics at work...

Is the era of tech utopianism over? Does anyone believe that Zuckerberg's Hail Mary plan to trap us all in some nightmarish alternate digital reality is actually going to work? This week Justin and I consider the social and cultural elements of tech as a driver of the US economy, and wonder if virtual reality is really the future, or the dead end of Silicon Valley's grip on the popular imagination...

Historian and author Jason Vuic returns to the Trap to talk about his book The Yucks: Two Years in Tampa with the Losingest Team in NFL History , which tells the incredible story of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers' disastrous, legendary first season as a professional football organization. Marked by appalling working conditions, a colorfully brutal head coach, a penny-pinching owner, and a winking gay pi...

As we continue into the "wormhole" opened up by COVID and Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Justin and I consider the positions of those "behind the wall" of empire. How will we experience the future shocks now coming more clearly into view?  Subscribe to listen to all our livestreams whenever you want

How much American bootstrap ideology are we obligated to deliver to students? This week Ryan Boyd and I take a look at some "practical advice" about "surviving college" from a couple of recent popular books on the subject, and we discover a disturbing strain of self-help/New Age/Protestant work ethic/grindset philosophy that, perhaps unsurprisingly, fails to acknowledge structural and material bar...

This week on the livestream we continue our discussion with Justin Rogers-Cooper on the end of the neoliberal order in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the "wormhole" we're entering. Justin offers some context and insights from environmental historian Jason W. Moore's Capitalism in the Web of Life (Verso, 2015), and we listen to some groovy stuff from JPW's excellent new album Somethin...

Aaron and Carlee from the 90s movie podcast Hit Factory join us for a conversation about Oliver Stone's 1994 maximalist murder-fest Natural Born Killers . Is this a masterpiece of postmodern satire, or a mindlessly self-indulgent pastiche? As we discover together, this movie is trickier than its cartoonish surface, painting  a disturbing vision of American violence and celebrity that, nearly thirt...

The world is filled with Pete Campbells – people whose wealthy families and social connections allow them to coast through life, easily opening doors that are locked tight for the rest of us. Doesn't that just burn you up? On this week's Gender Trap, Yasmin Nair and I talk about Episode 4 of Mad Men ("New Amsterdam"), in which we are forced to come to terms with the archetypal privileged son, and...

We're back on the livestream circuit with Justin Rogers-Cooper, talking about the fragile set of historical circumstances upon which the neoliberal era was built, and how those circumstances are rapidly deteriorating/disappearing into an era of pandemic, imperial war, energy depletion, and planetary emergency. Buckle up, motherfuckers: the age of neoliberalism is dying, and something new is being...

Amanda Klein is a professor of Film Studies at East Carolina University and the author of a number of works on American media and society. Her latest book, Millennials Killed the Video Star: MTV's Transition to Reality Programming , is a detailed history of MTV's abrupt evolution from music-centered content to non-stop reality programs in the late 90s and early 2000s. In this conversation, Klein d...

This week Justin and I consider the life and career of David Bowie , casting him as a master practitioner of pop magick, who harnessed the occult energies of art and celebrity to implant himself permanently in our cultural DNA. Nothing in Bowie's work expresses this more clearly than his final album, Blackstar , released on his 69th birthday and two days before his death from liver cancer in Janua...