Nostalgia Trap

On Episode 6 of NAM-TV, we cover events in 1964 and 1965, as American involvement in Vietnam finally made the move from distant meddling into a full-blown military invasion. We trace a direct line from Lyndon Johnson's disturbing sociopathic fantasies and stunning political cynicism to the sickening acceleration of violence unleashed in late 1964, after a questionable series of events in the Gulf...

Who are "the people"? Erik Baker joins us to discuss his latest piece in n+1 , a review of Thomas Frank's 2020 book The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism . Baker takes on Frank's New Deal nostalgia and romantic vision of a monolithic, left-leaning American working class, a set of distorted perspectives that still hold weight for a significant portion of the (extremely online) left. In t...

Full episode: patreon.com/nostalgiatrap . Kyle Riismandel returns to the Trap to discuss the abysmal HBO documentary Woodstock '99: Peace, Love, and Rage , a film that, despite its shortcomings, gives us plenty to chew on about a weird era in American cultural politics. From Alanis Morrissette to Kid Rock, from Girls Gone Wild to Monica Lewinsky, we talk about the jarring social landscape of third...

What do Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy, and the rest of the gang have to tell us about the staggering loneliness at the heart of the American experience? Blake Scott Ball is a professor of history at Huntingdon College and the author of Charlie Brown's America: The Popular Politics of Peanuts . In this conversation, we trace the history of Charles Schulz's iconic comic strip alongside the history of...

Kyle Riismandel, author of Neighborhood of Fear: The Suburban Crisis in American Culture, 1975-2001 , returns to talk about the idea of generations, both as useful historical dividers and as complicated, constructed cultural identities. Are you Gen X? Boomer? Millennial? Zoomer? Does any of this shit matter? In this conversation, we reflect on what makes this generational stuff so powerful (hint:...

On Episode 5, we take a look at the period 1956-1963, when the United States attempted to create an anti-communist state called South Vietnam, with a well-connected Catholic-Confucian politician named Ngo Dinh Diem as its president. When JFK takes over in 1961, Diem's violent repression of the Vietnamese population accelerates, and a homegrown resistance called the National Liberation Front begins...

Elizabeth Becker is an award-winning author and journalist; her latest book, You Don't Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War (2021), profiles three journalists whose groundbreaking work rearranged the history of the Vietnam War. In this conversation, Becker explains how Kate Webb, Catherine Leroy, and Frances Fitzgerald each developed critical journalistic practices that brought ne...

Donald Borenstein is a freelance video director, editor, and one of my favorite online friends, whose posts on politics, culture, and media have been a highlight of my feed for years. This week we finally get to meet face to face (on Zoom) and talk about two of our respective favorite films, Lizzie Borden's Born in Flames (1983) and Slava Tsukerman's Liquid Sky (1982), both of which are essential...

On this week's episode we explore the world of CIA spookery unleashed in Vietnam as the French exited the region and the United States began escalating its involvement in Vietnamese affairs. From the gangster-style machinations of the Dulles brothers to the psychological warfare practiced by characters like Edward Lansdale and Dr. Tom Dooley, this is the story of America's covert war to manipulate...

The kids are crazy for Columbo! This week our friend Bill Black drops by to talk about the long-running detective show starring Peter Falk that's seen an unlikely resurgence in the COVID era. From its weird class dynamics and parade of villainous guest stars to Falk's truly iconic performance, we explore what makes Columbo 's stories, characters, and rhythms so different from the binge-watchable c...

Allan Cooper is a professor of political science at North Carolina Central University. He joins us to discuss his latest book, Africa and the Global System of Capital Accumulation , which describes the strategic role Africa plays in the global capitalist economy, where exploitation of labor and resources sustains the world's middle class and consolidates state authority. In this conversation, we e...

On this week's episode of NAM-TV, we continue our story with a look at the First Indochina War (1946-1954), in which France attempted to reconquer Vietnam by fighting the Viet Minh, Ho Chi Minh's increasingly powerful revolutionary movement. With the United States secretly funding the French side, and the rest of the world more or less staying out of it, the war culminates (spoiler alert!) in a st...

Aaron Lecklider is a professor of American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston and the author of Love's Next Meeting: The Forgotten History of Homosexuality and the Left in American Culture . In this conversation, we talk about the intersection of sexuality and radical politics in the pre-Stonewall era, from 1920-1960, as we explore queer liberation's complicated place in the history...

This week Claudia and I continue our movie series with two 1980s Hollywood comedies about the lives of working class women, Pretty in Pink (1986) and Working Girl (1988). Our conversation explores how each film reflects a pre-"Lean In" pop feminism, with central characters that seek class mobility and romantic independence in the context of a vapid, wealth-obsessed 1980s culture. Subscribe for ful...

Here's a quick look at Episode 2 of NAM-TV, our new video lecture series on the Vietnam War and American historical memory. Available now for subscribers at patreon.com/nostalgiatrap , with new episodes dropping regularly throughout the summer. 

A quick clip from this week's livestream with Justin Rogers-Cooper providing some historical context and analysis to ongoing horrors in Ethiopia, Myanmar, Colombia, and Belarus. Subscribe for the full episode: patreon.com/nostalgiatrap .

Kyle Riismandel teaches American history at the New Jersey Institute of Technology/Rutgers-Newark, and is the author of Neighborhood of Fear: The Suburban Crisis in American Culture, 1975-2001 . He joins us to explain how fear became an organizing ideological principle of the American suburbs in the post-Vietnam era, as hysteria about crime, sexual deviance, drugs, and Satan himself drove suburban...

This week we talk about the political and social economy of "first person shooter" video games with Danny Bessner, whose recent piece in The Drift investigates the deep cultural contradictions at play in the enormously popular Call of Duty franchise. With armies of alienated young men casting themselves as protagonists in deeply distorted narratives of 20th century history, we explore the lines be...

Alex Vitale is a professor of sociology and Coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College. His 2017 book, The End of Policing , has received significant attention in the wake of the George Floyd protests and a wider public discourse about the history, ideology, and practice of American policing. In this conversation, Vitale explains how policing and incarceration becam...

Here's a quick look at our new video lecture series NAM-TV, our new video lecture series on the Vietnam War and American historical memory. Episode One is available now for subscribers at patreon.com/nostalgiatrap , with new episodes dropping regularly throughout the summer. 

Katrinell Davis is an associate professor of sociology at Florida State University and the author of two incredible books: Hard Work is Not Enough: Gender and Racial Inequality in an Urban Workspace (2016) and Tainted Tap: Flint's Journey from Crisis to Recovery (2021). In this conversation, we explore how different populations, from Black women bus drivers in San Francisco to the working class re...

Abraham Lincoln: Working class hero? Holy Angel of Liberation? Capitalist collaborator? Matthew Stanley has some ideas for us. As an associate professor of history at Albany State University, his work focuses on how we remember the Civil War, and why that matters. In this conversation we discuss his latest book, Grand Army of Labor: Workers, Veterans, and the Meaning of the Civil War , which explo...

This week Justin and I watch the HBO documentary Q: Into the Storm , and share our ideas about the QAnon phenomenon, from the sewers of 8chan to the hordes of Q-Tubers amplifying its ideas, paying special attention to the malevolent father-son duo Jim and Ron Watkins, who hijacked the brain of an American president. What is this new technological/psychological terrain we inhabit? And where is the...

What does it mean to "eat like a man"? This week's guest, Emily J.H. Contois, is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Tulsa and the author of Diners, Dudes, and Diets: How Gender and Power Collide in Food Media and Culture . In this conversation, she explains how the concept of "dude food" became a powerful branding strategy in Great Recession America, as food production an...

This week Claudia joins us to survey two of Martin Scorsese's earliest films, Mean Streets (1973) and Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974), both of which express the lived experiences of working class Americans in often surprising ways. We talk about how these films depict class mobility and ethnic tribalism, violence (both economic and domestic), the multidimensional traps of gender,  and the s...