Nostalgia Trap

The online culture of memes, shitposting, and irony found on Twitter and other places is deeply entwined with the rise of millennial socialism and the larger landscape of 21st century politics. On this episode we explore the twisted path of the extremely online, as guest @CapitlsmDislikr shows us a world of grad school dead ends, crushing student loan debt, thankless adjunct teaching, satanic inst...

Justin and David were mere children in the 1990s, the hellish decade that spawned much of the political and cultural landscape we currently inhabit. In this episode we talk about pop-culture: from Friends to Seinfeld , Good Will Hunting to The Big Lebowski, Kurt Cobain to Tupac, we attempt to draw a historical line from the 60s to the 90s to the Trump era. What do some of our favorite (and not so...

Timothy J. Lombardo is a historian who teaches at the University of South Alabama, and whose recent book Blue Collar Conservatism: Frank Rizzo's Philadelphia and Populist Politics   covers critical territory for those seeking to understand the Trump era. Using Rizzo's political career as a jumping off point for a wider discussion of race, class, and identity, Lombardo's work complicates some deepl...

Justin Rogers-Cooper is here to explain how the robber barons of the 19th century stack up against the current crop of capitalist megalomaniacs in Silicon Valley and beyond. In the process, we talk about Marx's labor theory of value, the shift from control of resources to control of debt, the colonization of the human soul as the final frontier of profitability, and the specific function of monopo...

Before the Nostalgia Trap , David hosted a show called Topical Fever , which took on specific subjects from the worlds of politics, history and media. Sounds familiar, right? To mark the 20th anniversary since the premiere of The Sopranos , we're sharing this Topical Fever episode from the vaults, featuring a conversation with professor of English Jeremey Cagle on the show's relationship to anothe...

Maximillian Alvarez returns to the Trap to talk about his terrific new podcast Working People , a show that features deep conversations about life, labor, politics, and everything in between, from the perspective of working class people. He joins us to describe his latest series about General Motors and the social costs of the long decline of industrial manufacturing. Along the way, we chat about...

Justin Rogers-Cooper stops by to talk about Amazon's impending invasion of Long Island City, Queens , where he works as a professor of English at LaGuardia Community College. Our conversation explores the psychotic evil of Jeff Bezos, the corrupt city leaders who are laying out a $3 billion red carpet for him, the larger structures of capitalism and consumerism driving Amazon's power, and what all...

Jason Wilson is a writer for The Guardian whose work often covers the far right of American political culture. From Milo to the Proud Boys, Alex Jones to Glenn Beck, Wilson details the internal drama, street fights, and larger context of right-wing movements in the 21st century. In this episode, we catch up with his latest reporting on "deplatforming" and explore the role social media plays in spr...

Conner Habib is the host of Against Everyone w/ Conner Habib , a podcast about subjects that often fall outside the range of typical "left" discussions — things like radical philosophy, the occult, psychoanalysis, sexuality, porn, and much more. In this conversation, he explains how the concept of desire permeates our politics, present in everything from sex work and surveillance to academia and t...

Brooke Newman is a professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University and the author of A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica , a book that traces the evolution of racial definitions and sexual practices in one of 18th century Britain's most valuable colonies . In this conversation, Newman discusses how notions of race and nation interacted with sex, gender, and class...

TEASER: On this week's bonus episode, Justin Rogers-Cooper joins us to talk about the structural connections between California wildfires and a recent spate of mass shootings, understanding them as part of how corporations from energy to guns socialize losses while privatizing profits. We also deconstruct the Tucker Carlson media outrage in the context of capitalism's increasing encroachment into...

Daegan Miller is a writer whose recent book, This Radical Land: A Natural History of American Dissent , presents an intellectual history of how different Americans have resisted capitalism's ravaging of the natural environment. From black antislavery radicals in the Adirondack wilderness of upstate New York to utopian anarchists in California's sequoias, Miller's narrative reveals a throughline of...

Justin Rogers-Cooper returns to the Nostalgia Trap to break down the political and social significance of NBC's The Office , positioning the show within the larger context of 21st century neoliberal capitalism. How does the evolving sitcom form reflect changing attitudes about labor, patriarchy, and other structures of oppression? And what does it mean for the future of work?  

Kate Aronoff is a writer whose work appears in The Intercept , Dissent , In These Times , and a number of other fine left publications. In this conversation, we talk about the media's framing of the recent IPCC report's dire prognosis for the planet, the pitfalls of climate nihilism, and the politics of saving the world.

Malcolm Harris is a freelance writer and the author of Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials , a book that explores how the structure of American society is rigged against young people . Despite the stereotype of apathetic, entitled youth wasting away in their parents' basements, Harris shows us a generation locked in by the horrific social, economic, and cultural realities...

Daniel Bessner is a historian with a particular focus on American foreign policy. His book Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual mixes biography with a striking analysis of Cold War policy-making. In this conversation, Bessner expands on the ideas he presented in a recent New York Times op-ed , in which he argues that the left needs a more focused and practical p...

Nathan J. Robinson is the creator and editor-in-chief of Current Affairs , one of the left's most consistently valuable and readable publications. In this conversation, Robinson talks about honing his skills at political argument in the high school debate club, explains how a British accent can be an asset in American media, and describes his vision for the future of Current Affairs and the larger...

Eileen Jones is a film critic and professor whose biting, polemical movie reviews are featured in Jacobin and a number of other publications. Her recent book Filmsuck, USA investigates the persistently horrific state of American cinema, while outlining Jones' vision of a liberatory movie culture that honors the medium's working class roots. In this conversation, she explains how her early experien...

Keri Leigh Merritt is a historian of American class, race, and inequality, with a particular focus on the South during and after the Civil War. Her book Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South deftly navigates discourses on race, power, and capitalism, telling us what happens to "excess labor" under a slave economy. In this conversation, she talks about the South's influenc...

George Ciccariello-Maher is a political scientist and activist whose work focuses on the historical and current landscape of insurgent politics and anti-capitalism. As an outspoken left academic, Ciccariello-Maher is a favorite target of white supremacists and other right-wing extremists, whose threats and harassment led to his resignation from Drexel University in 2017. In this conversation, he t...

Daniel Traber is a professor of English at Texas A & M University at Galveston. His work focuses on the intersection of culture and politics, with a particular emphasis on musical subcultures like punk and ska, a favorite Nostalgia Trap subject. In this conversation, he talks about getting into punk as a white suburban teen in Galveston, Texas in the 1980s, and how expressions of subversive identi...

Shuja Haider is a writer and editor for a number of left publications (check out his work in  Popula   and  Viewpoint ). In this conversation, we talk about historical cycles of generational politics, the weird road from 60s counterculture to "conservatism is the new punk rock," and the growth of left/right radicalism among young people in the Trump era.

Matthew Stanley is a historian and professor whose latest book, The Loyal West: Civil War and Reunion in Middle America explores how the politics of the Civil War moved through the regions of the Lower Middle West. His work shows us how ideologies evolve through space and time, and how the Civil War in particular has served as a container for American social and political attitudes well into the 2...

Micah Uetricht is managing editor at Jacobin Magazine and the author of Strike for America: Chicago Teachers Against Austerity . Like many of us, he's watching with a combination of delight and disbelief as left-of-liberal ideas enjoy a rare moment in the mainstream spotlight, from the 1950s-style red-baiting of Fox News to Stephen Colbert's recent declaration that "God is a socialist."  Even the...

Nate Bethea is co-host of the podcast A Hell of a Way to Die , a funny, often bracing show about the intersection of leftist politics and American military culture. While serving as an infantry officer in the U.S. Army from 2007-2014, and deploying to Afghanistan in 2009-2010, Bethea reports that he "lived the Army values so hard that I became a socialist." In this conversation, he discusses the h...