Nostalgia Trap

Nostalgia Trap AM/FM:  It's the end of the world and you know it.

Nostalgia Trap AM/FM:  Real conversations about history, politics, and culture, remixed for an apocalyptic era. Coming soon.

Michael Busch is a senior editor at Warscapes , an online magazine that features writing, art, photography and other media from war-torn regions around the globe. Michael talks with me about his youth and world travels, his time studying international organized crime at the CUNY Graduate Center, and the values and ideas behind his work at  Warscapes.

L.A. Kauffman is a longtime organizer and historian whose new book, Direct Action:  Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism  traces the history of the left in the post 1960s era. She spoke with me about some of the major successes and failures of direct action campaigns in recent decades. In the age of a reawakened U.S. left, what can we learn about the tactics and strategies developed...

Daniel Pinchbeck's bestselling 2002 book  Breaking Open the Head:  A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism  had a profound effect on me when I read it in my early twenties. Along with the work of Noam Chomsky and Terence McKenna, Pinchbeck's writing definitely shaped the way I interpreted the fallout after 9/11 and the cascade of horror that was the Bush years. Here Pinchbec...

Will Menaker is one of the hosts of Chapo Trap House, a fierce and funny podcast that took the media world by storm during Election 2016. Here Will makes a triumphant return to the Nostalgia Trap, discussing Chapo's insane rise during the Democratic primaries, the depressing state of liberal "comedy," and how the show might evolve during the impending Trump era.

Felix Biederman is one of the hosts of Chapo Trap House, a podcast that mixes relentless satire with incisive political analysis. In this conversation, recorded less than 24 hours after Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, Felix dissects his feelings about this surreal moment, tells me about his youth in Hyde Park, Chicago, and shares his perspectives on war, th...

Matt Christman is one third of the wildly popular podcast  Chapo Trap House , a show that takes left political satire to a brutal, hilarious, and altogether new place. He talked with me about his youth in Wisconsin, his adventures on Twitter, and the abysmal state of American political discourse. 

Myq Kaplan is a very funny stand-up comedian whose material often touches on cultural issues like veganism, polyamory, and psychedelic drugs. I talked to him about his work in linguistics at Boston University, his early years as a musician, and his evolution as a comic. The "Hitler/time travel" bit discussed on this episode is featured in Myq's stand-up special,  Small, Dork, and Handsome , curren...

Thaddeus Russell is a professor of history and writer whose book  A Renegade History of the United States  presents a striking counter-narrative to popular interpretations of the American experience. In this conversation, he tells me about a childhood spent surrounded by the Berkeley political world of the 1960s and 70s, and traces his unique path through the often rigid culture of academia.

Nathan Cedric Tankus is a young scholar studying American economics during the antebellum period. He talked with me about his research, his personal background, and the future of left/right politics.

Dahlia Elsayed is a visual artist, writer, and professor at LaGuardia Community College. She told me all about her youth in New Jersey during the Reagan years, her take on the punks vs. hippies rivalry, and the philosophy behind her striking visual style.

Johanna Fernandez is a professor of history at CUNY's Baruch College. We had a great talk about her childhood in the Bronx, her path in higher education, her development as an activist, and her friendship with imprisoned radical Mumia Abu-Jamal .

Freddie deBoer is an academic and writer with a talent for provocation. He joins me to discuss his family's roots on the left, his engagement with the politics of higher education, and the impetus behind his polemical blog, fredrikdeboer.com . 

Sarah Leonard, a senior editor and writer at  The Nation , talks about her new book, The Future We Want: Radical Ideas for the New Century , and shares her thoughts on what this wacky primary season portends.

Corey Robin, professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College, shares his thoughts on the punishing 2016 presidential primary season. Trump, Sanders, Hillary:  what does it all mean? 

Professor Eric Foner is a leading contemporary historian, whose work focuses on American political history, shifting notions of freedom and liberty, and (perhaps most famously) on the period of post-Civil War Reconstruction. He spoke about growing up in a politically-active family (both his father and uncle were blacklisted American historians), and told me about his encounters and interactions wi...

David Nasaw is a historian and writer whose recent work has produced a series of magisterial biographies of some of the most towering figures in American history ( William Randolph Hearst , Andrew Carnegie , and Joseph Kennedy ). He discusses his graduate years at Columbia University during the political chaos of the late 1960s, and how his "bottom up" approach to historical scholarship has evolve...

Justin Rogers-Cooper is a professor of English at  LaGuardia Community College , as well as one of the best friends I made while studying at the CUNY Graduate Center through the Bush and Obama years. Justin always impresses me with his uncanny ability to synthesize complicated historical and political ideas into an understandable, compelling, often disturbing super-narrative. Our conversation in t...

Frederik Logevall is a professor of history and one of the foremost American scholars of the Vietnam War. His most recent book,  Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam  won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize. We sat down at the American Historical Association's 2015 Annual Meeting and talked about French imperialism, LBJ's stubborn personality, the "handcuff" of domestic pol...

Liza Featherstone is a journalist and professor whose book  Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers' Rights at Wal-Mart  covered one of the largest class-action lawsuits in American history. We had a great talk about growing up in an activist family, the weirdness of the "trigger warning" movement on college campuses, and how Wal-Mart became such a monstrously influential force in sha...

Owen Powell is a retired military police sergeant, former Marine, and Iraq combat veteran whose experiences in war have been chronicled in the New York Times , on NPR , and perhaps most prominently in Doonesbury artist Garry Trudeau's remarkable collection The Sandbox: Dispatches from Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan . In this conversation he tells me about growing up the child of a U.S. combat vete...

Minerva Ahumada is a professor of philosophy at LaGuardia Community College . In this episode, we talk about her youth in Mexico, her unexpected move to the United States, and how a Japanese version of "The Little Mermaid"  (with a radically different story than the U.S. version) helped reify her interest in narrative ethics, philosophy, feminism, and radical politics.

Doug Henwood's recent   Harper's cover story about Hillary Clinton  (the title: "Stop Hillary!") has ruffled the feathers of the Democratic Party establishment,   and I can only guess how much this pleases Doug. We had a great conversation about his brief early attraction to the ideas of William F. Buckley and Milton Friedman, how and why his politics moved to the left, and how   today's economic...

Moustafa Bayoumi is an associate professor of English at Brooklyn College and the author of How Does it Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America  (2009). In this conversation, we talk about his graduate years working with Edward Said; his development as a scholar of postcolonial literature and theory; his extraordinary article " Disco Inferno ," which chronicles the use of American po...