Nostalgia Trap

The Trap Livestream returns, as Justin Rogers-Cooper joins me for a live conversation about the insane wormhole we seem to be entering: Russia's invasion of Ukraine, gangster capitalism, Nazis, nuclear brinksmanship--plus the Saudis like China more than us now?! Let's get a hold of some narrative threads as the global system unravels/reorders/implodes. Full episode here: patreon.com/posts/livestre...

What is "apocalypse" and is it always a bad thing?  This week we talk with Aaron Thorpe of the Trillbilly Worker's Party podcast about maintaining a positive vision of the future despite all signs to the contrary. In addition to reflecting on apocalyptic fiction like Children of Men and Station Eleven , we consider how the "end of the world" shapes our vision of what's possible. Listen to the full...

Ryan Boyd teaches in the Writing Program at the University of Southern California. His website collects much of his excellent writing, including a number of pieces on pedagogy and the state of higher education that we discuss in this episode. From crippling student loans and shitty mask policies to racist administrations and right-wing censorship, Ryan helps us explore what's wrong, what can be do...

Historian Henry Maar's new book Freeze! The Grassroots Movement to Halt the Arms Race and End the Cold War examines the ways in which ordinary people confronted the horrors of nuclear war, with a specific focus on the extraordinary Nuclear Freeze campaign of the 1980s. In this conversation, Maar explains the roots of anti-nuclear activism in the United States, and tells us how Ronald Reagan's aggr...

The always engaging Yasmin Nair returns to continue our survey of how COVID is fucking us up on multiple channels: politically, economically, and spiritually. From liberals cheering on the deaths of the unvaxxed to celebrities spinning off into NFT land—all while the Biden administration tells us to "Google it"—things are looking pretty grim. How do we find hope in this degraded social landscape?...

Neil Young occupies god-tier status on Nostalgia Trap, so it's no mystery who we're supporting in his fight with Spotify and Joe Rogan. But this seemed like a good opportunity to talk in more detail about the connections between art and politics, particularly in the context of "the sixties," and our friend Justin Farrar has done a lot of thinking on the subject.  Justin joins us this week to talk...

Remember when oil explained everything ? Sean from the Antifada podcast joins us for a conversation about the film Syriana (2005) and the politics of oil in the 90s and 2000s. From peak oil theories and endless oil documentaries to the "No Blood for Oil" chants of the anti-Iraq War movement, we explore the history of fossil fuel's slippery place within the larger left.

Am I "queer" because I listen to Belle and Sebastian? Good question! Trap favorite KJ Shepherd joins me for a conversation about masculinity in American pop culture, and that weird line between "hipster" and "queer." Are these identities actually subversive, or are we fooling ourselves? Listen to the whole episode on our Patreon page: patreon.com/posts/episode-311-as-w-61332587

Bill Watterson's extraordinary comic strip Calvin and Hobbes made a huge cultural impact in the 80s and 90s, and remains an all-time favorite for both me and Justin. In this conversation, we talk about what makes Calvin and Hobbes so unique, how it connects to other 20th century comic projects from Peanuts to South Park , and how Watterson's one man crusade against corporate tyranny pre-figured th...

Is there a deeper, more powerful nostalgia trap than the Christmas season? In this conversation, Yasmin Nair helps me work out my mixed emotions about the holidays, as we watch the Billy Wilder movie The Apartment (1960) and consider how its dark vision of philandering married men and "other women" in mid-century New York City shows us the Christmas season as a theater of sexual pathos, performati...

Our epic trilogy on the life, work, and legacy of Howard Zinn concludes with a conversation about Zinn's place in the wider history of the American left. Was Zinn a communist, an anarchist, or what? Justin Rogers-Cooper joins us in reading through some of Zinn's later work for clues, as we consider how his internationalism and pacifism figured into a global vision of socialist solidarity that hold...

KJ Shepherd joins us to talk about the #FreeBritney moment and the wider phenomenon of diva worship. What makes a diva? And more importantly, how is celebrity fandom entangled with capitalism and queerness? Subscribe for access to bonus episodes and other fantastic treats: patreon.com/nostalgiatrap .

Our series on the life, work, and legacy of Howard Zinn continues with a detailed conversation about the book that made Zinn famous, A People's History of the United States . Published in 1980, A People's History has sold more than 2 million copies, and its bold retelling of major American events and characters remains a lightning rod for both the left and right. Justin Rogers-Cooper joins us to t...

In Part One of our series on the life, work, and legacy of Howard Zinn, Justin Rogers-Cooper and I read Zinn's 1994 memoir You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train and extract some of the juiciest bits of an extraordinary life: Zinn's Dickensian childhood and seething class rage, his teenage experience with communists and police in 1930s New York City, his participation in World War II bombing raids...

Rax King returns to the Trap to tell us all about her new book Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer , which surveys the wreckage of 21st century American pop culture and finds much to salvage, and even to (gasp) love. From Creed and Jersey Shore to Hot Topic and The Cheesecake Factory, this conversation explores how the line between good and bad taste is often blurrier than we...

Sam Stein is a housing policy analyst and advocate in New York City; his book Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State reveals the horrifying machinations of real estate developers and the neoliberal state, who build massive luxury towers for billionaires while the city's middle and working class citizens deal with skyrocketing rents, housing shortages, and rampant homelessness. How...

What is "trauma porn" and what role does it play on the left? Yasmin Nair joins us to discuss her recent piece, " AOC and the Weaponization of Trauma, " which explores the uncomfortable dynamics of race, gender and class at play in the public thirst for graphic stories of trauma, abuse, and suffering, and the toxic place that "trauma" holds in American political culture.   

As he approaches a major personal milestone, our good friend and Nostalgia Trap producer Peter Sabatino joins me for an honest conversation about the role alcohol has played in our respective lives. From the roaring 20s of college-age binge drinking to the high-octane craft IPA world of the hipster dad, we explore how drugs and alcohol become entangled with one's sense of self, an element of ident...

Max Chafkin, author of The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power (see Episode 294 ), returns for a conversation all about SpaceX cowboy Elon Musk. Is this guy a tech genius saving the planet from climate change and launching us into a beautiful robotic future, or a capitalist huckster whose only talent is convincing authoritarian states and a loyal fanbase of angry bros to...

Could a Red Hot Chili Peppers song from 1999 hold the key to understanding the political economy of 21st century tech culture and the globalization of Hollywood's vampiric vision of human nature? As Justin Roger-Cooper explains on our 300th (!!!) episode, sure, why not?  

This week Freddie deBoer joins me to talk about his recent Substack piece "Smoking Weed Doesn't Feel Good for Me Anymore, and It Hasn't for a Long Time," exploring how cannabis legalization, stronger weed, and just plain getting older have caused us both to interrogate our personal weed consumption and stoner identities. This conversation touches on the politics of criminalization, peer pressure,...

Part Two of our conversation with Yasmin Nair on death and grief in the COVID era. Check out Yasmin's incredible archive of writing, including many of the pieces discussed in this episode, here: yasminnair.com .

Andrew Schustek joins us to discuss the extraordinary Japanese horror film Cure (1997), one of a number of unbelievably prescient works directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa that take on the nightmarish social and political reality of Japan's "lost decades." In this conversation, we explain why Cure stands alone, as both a unique piece of horror craftsmanship and an endlessly frightening exploration of the...

The one and only Yasmin Nair joins us this week for a wide-ranging discussion on a topic near and dear to all of us: death. In Part One of our conversation, we talk about how the politics of COVID have created a cruel public theater that showcases American culture's deeply weird, and deeply disturbing, attitudes about death, grief, and what we owe to each other. This two-parter is quite openly a N...

Max Chafkin is an editor at Bloomberg Businessweek whose new book, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power tells the unbelievable true story of Peter Thiel's rise to power through strategic investment and control over massive tech firms. From his assassination of Gawker (remember the Hulk Hogan lawsuit? Thiel funded it.) to his manipulation of Mark Zuckerberg and the Face...