Nostalgia Trap

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...

Kyle Burke is an assistant professor of history and Co-Coordinator of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at Hartwick College. In this conversation, he discusses his book Revolutionaries for the Right: Anticommunist Internationalism and Paramilitary Warfare in the Cold War , which explores how an international network of right-wing individuals and organizations supported anticommunist guerrilla...

Karina Moreno is an associate professor in the department of urban policy and planning at Hunter College. She joins us to discuss her latest piece in Jacobin , which surveys the Biden administration's "new" immigration policies, finding continuity with decades of criminalization and militarization along the Southern border. With an immigration system designed entirely to serve the needs of capital...

This week, Claudia and I talk about 3 of our favorite films, the "acid noirs": The Long Goodbye (1973), The Big Lebowski (1998), and Inherent Vice (2014). United in theme and tone, the films explore the history of post-1960s Los Angeles by both indulging and subverting the tropes of noir detective stories. Our conversation focuses on how the films' central character(s), Philip Marlowe (Elliot Goul...

Anne Balay is the author of two extraordinary works of social history: Steel Closets: Voices of Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Steelworkers and Semi Queer: Inside the World of Gay, Trans, and Black Truck Drivers . Her work investigates the intersection of queer and working class identities, and shows us how industrial, blue collar working environments are undergoing profound structural and social tr...

Justin Rogers-Cooper helps us takes a deep dive into the aesthetic and political legacy of Kurt Cobain, who died of suicide 25 years ago this month. Cobain is an iconic pop cultural figure for a number of reasons, but this conversation focuses on his personal politics, and how his band Nirvana expressed an organic, biologically-obsessed form of anti-capitalism. Emerging from the working class hell...

This week's guest runs the website and podcast The Blockchain Socialist , which seeks to investigate the intersection of blockchain technology and left politics. In this conversation, we talk about the basics of blockchain, crypto, and NFTs, and try to imagine if/how these tools might be used to create a more democratic political and economic system. For full episode, go to patreon.com/nostalgiatr...

Joe Clark (author of News Parade: The American Newsreel and the World as Spectacle ) returns to the show to talk about the ugly elephant in the room for young academics: the total collapse of full-time teaching jobs at the university. In this conversation, we take on some undeniably depressing realities, but wait! It's not all doom and gloom. Joe offers a number of different ideas and scenarios fo...

Courtenay Stallings is a writer, historian, and the author of Laura's Ghost: Women Speak about Twin Peaks . The book explores how Laura Palmer, whose death lies at the center of David Lynch's epic television series Twin Peaks , became an icon of strength and hope for women who have experienced similar abuse and trauma. In this conversation, Stallings discusses the origins of the project, why Laura...

Tom O'Neill's mind-blowing book CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties sent me down so many unbelievable rabbit holes, made me feel so paranoid and obsessed, that I absolutely had to hear what my friend Justin Rogers-Cooper thought about it. Having now finished the book, he joins us this week for an exploration of O'Neill's twisted story, as we consider both the cont...

Reality Bites (dir. Ben Stiller, 1994) is a film that attempts to condense the entirety of the Gen X experience into a 100 minute romantic comedy in which Winona Ryder faces the unfortunate predicament of simultaneously dating Ben Stiller and Ethan Hawke. Our good friends KJ Shepherd and Bill Black join us to discuss what Reality Bites is really saying about its cultural moment, and how the film's...

This week Claudia and I watched American Beauty (dir. Sam Mendes, 1999), a film that had a major cultural impact upon its release but hits significantly different in 2021. From the awkward screen presence of Kevin Spacey to the endless permutations of middle class suburban ennui, we explore how American Beauty 's story and characters reflect the zeitgeist of a very specific political and economic...

Richard Kent Evans is the author of MOVE: An American Religion , a groundbreaking history of the MOVE organization, a black radical group whose founding members were killed alongside their children when the Philadelphia police, working alongside federal agents, attacked their headquarters in 1985. What was MOVE? What were its founding principles? And why were state authorities so intent on violent...

Eric Nusbaum is the author of Stealing Home: Los Angeles, the Dodgers, and the Lives Caught in Between , which tells the story of a neighborhood's struggle to maintain their community against the tidal wave of powerful forces aligned to seize it from them. In this conversation, Nusbaum explains how the construction of Dodger Stadium in the late 1950s somehow encompassed the entirety of Los Angeles...

Tyler Scruggs returns for a talk about the movie adaptation of Nico Walker's novel Cherry , which follows a young man's nightmarish evolution from lovestruck college student to opiate-addicted Iraq War veteran and serial bank robber. With Spiderman's Tom Holland in the central role, and Marvel dudes (the Russo brothers) directing, the film has a jarringly different tone and effect than the book, a...

Joe Clark is the author of News Parade: The American Newsreel and the World as Spectacle (University of Minnesota Press, 2020). In this conversation, he tells us how the newsreel developed in the 1930s and 1940s as both an aesthetic object and consumer product, as figures like Charles Lindbergh became focal points of an immense transformation in the relationship between current events, entertainme...

This week Claudia joins us to consider the magical cinematic collaborations of John Carpenter and Kurt Russell. We discuss The Thing (1982), Big Trouble in Little China (1986), and Escape from L.A. (1996) alongside a host of other sci-fi/action films of the era. Beyond just gushing about our favorite scenes/lines/moments, we try to articulate what makes Carpenter's films so insanely rewarding, and...

Alicia Puglionesi is a writer and historian whose book Common Phantoms: An American History of Psychic Science tells the story of how researchers in the late 19th and early 20th century attempted to engage the outer limits of human consciousness, and how their efforts were written out of "legitimate" academic discourse. In this conversation, she explains how this lost history of psychic experiment...

Sam Adler-Bell is a writer and host of the excellent podcast Know Your Enemy . In this conversation, we discuss his recent piece in The Drift , "Doctor Do-Little: The Case Against Anthony Fauci ," which takes aim at the political practice and philosophies of a figure who has become, for better or worse, the public face of America's pandemic response. Along the way, we examine Fauci's role in the A...