Nostalgia Trap

In her incredible new book Paradoxes of Nostalgia: Cold War Triumphalism and Global Disorder Since 1989 , historian Penny Von Eschen identifies nostalgia as a corrosive, reactionary force in global politics and popular culture since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and explains how the lingering ghosts of the Cold War haunt our era. From George H.W. Bush hosting an official White House screening...

This week Ryan and I watch Wonder Boys (2000), starring Michael Douglas as a professor struggling to write a follow-up to his successful first novel while juggling personal relationships with students and faculty and ingesting massive amounts of drugs and alcohol. The movie depicts a romantic vision of campus life that seems miles away from our respective experiences in 21st century academia, whil...

Bret Easton Ellis' 1991 novel American Psycho , about a 1980s Wall Street serial killer, is one of the sickest acts of American satire I've read, and Mary Harron's 2000 movie adaptation starring Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman nails the book's tone while excising some of its most graphic violence. This week Yasmin and I ask: What is American Psycho really about? Is Bateman an aberration, or a pe...

Daniel Chard is a professor of history at Western Washington University and the author of Nixon's War at Home: The FBI, Leftist Guerillas, and the Origins of Counterterrorism . In this conversation, we both reflect on the different cultural and political forces that drew us to the American left in the 1990s, and how our politics have evolved in the decades since the heady days of freeganism, drum...

Jonathan Crary is a professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia University whose work examines the role of the human eye, aesthetics, and visual culture in modern history. His latest book, Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World , is a razor sharp critique of "digital capitalism" and the outsized role of the internet in our daily lives and the larger economy. Our conve...

Justin Farrar and I continue our conversation about rock music and the occult by watching the incredibly disturbing Paradise Lost documentary series, which details the case of three young men wrongfully accused of the grisly murders of three children in the town of West Memphis, Arkansas in 1993. With prosecutors (literally) presenting Metallica lyrics as evidence of murderous intent, the case was...

On the third and final installment of our series on the life, work, and legacy of Noam Chomsky, Justin and I talk about Chomsky the Doomer: between nuclear war and climate collapse, he doesn't hold out much hope for the survival of the human race. What makes him such a Gloomy Gus? Reading critically through Chomsky's lectures and writings on the end of the world, we look at the details of his apoc...

Here's another quick clip from Part Two of our trilogy with Justin Rogers-Cooper on the complicated life, work, and legacy of Noam Chomsky.  Subscribe and listen to the whole episode, along with all our bonus content: patreon.com/posts/episode-333-noam-69582699

Where does American popular music come from, and what does the devil have to do with it? On Part One of a two-part series on music and the occult, Justin Farrar and I discuss Peter Bebergal's excellent history Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll , as we explore the eerie mythology that haunts the origins of blues and rock. Some of the musicians and other figures mentioned in th...

Our series on the life, work, and legacy of Noam Chomsky continues with a critical look at Chomsky's signature intellectual work, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media . This episode traces Chomsky's development through the 1970s and 1980s, as he evolved into a fierce critic of state violence and corporate propaganda, while becoming a bit of a radical celebrity himself. Justin...

This week Yasmin and I watch two films, Working Girls (Lizzie Borden, 1986) and Working Girl (Mike Nichols, 1988), as we think about the intersection of sex, gender, labor, and capitalism. Is sex work any different from an office job? That depends: What brand of hyper-gendered humiliation are you willing to endure for money?   To listen to this episode, and access our entire library of bonus conte...

Ryan's recent trip to Montreal gets us thinking about the connections between cities and college campuses, as we try to imagine more vibrant institutions than the crumbling ones we currently haunt. Of course, creating a better university would mean confronting the ways that capitalism structures higher education, and Ryan shares some ideas from his recent Substack piece about radical teaching prac...

In the first of a trilogy of episodes examining the life, work, and legacy of Noam Chomsky, Justin Rogers-Cooper joins us for a discussion of Chomsky's younger years: the historical moment into which he was born, the people and ideas that surrounded him, and the formation of his political and intellectual values. In this episode we pay particular attention to the evolution of Chomsky's attitudes a...

On our first episode after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade , Yasmin Nair and I take a moment to consider the implications: What does this mean for a newly emboldened right? And how can the left find new strategies of resistance? We also watch a particularly brutal episode of Mad Men (S1E3, "The Marriage of Figaro"), which brings our abortion discussion back to the early 1960s and connects...

Historian and writer Dan McClure returns to the Trap for a talk about his incredible new book Winter in America: A Cultural History of Neoliberalism, from the Sixties to the Reagan Revolution , which explores how the cruel economic principles we call "neoliberalism" found currency in popular culture in the years since the Vietnam War, delivering us into a nightmare world that protects capital and...

On the very first episode of Record Trap, Justin Farrar joins me to lay out our mission statement for the podcast: a regular series of conversations about music, counterculture, and radical politics. What better way to kick off this project than by talking about drugs and The Beatles? The world's greatest rock band didn't just put out classic albums; they also helped introduce a whole generation t...

What makes a great teacher? In an effort to avoid becoming completely blackpilled doomers, this week Ryan and I have a conversation about our favorite teachers, from kindergarten to grad school. We try to remember the things that made us want to become teachers ourselves, and wonder if the ideas and practices of our ancient heroes can help guide us through the dark waters of today's campus. Check...

Stories about the past form the ideological foundation of the American project. This week's guest, Alicia Puglionesi , is a historian and writer whose work often focuses on "hauntings" – both real and imagined – in our collective history. Her latest book, In Whose Ruins: Power, Possession, and the Landscapes of American Empire , explores the fake narratives and mythologies created to justify land...

Digital Humanities? More like Digital Hu-SHAM-ities, am I right? On this episode of Campus Trap, Ryan Boyd and I trade stories about our experiences with the digital pedagogy boom/bust cycle of the past decade or so, in which a whole generation was sold on the idea that computers would somehow make higher education better for everyone (spoiler alert: it didn't happen). So if the COVID/Zoom era fin...

On this week's livestream, Justin Rogers-Cooper joins us to ponder the looming economic wreckage soon washing upon America's shores, and what that means for an already volatile political and social domestic situation. We also reflect on how "delivering the goods" is a critical piece of state power, and what that means for Democrats in a world of inflation, insane gas prices, and impending mass lay...

"What is a woman? What is a man?" Go fuck yourself! Those questions are traps! In this episode of Gender Trap, Yasmin and I talk about the right's absurd yet powerful assault on all things gender-related, and how the left's reactive, academic takes on gender hobble our ability to fight back. What would a popular left vision of gender actually look like? Because it ain't RuPaul! We also, of course,...

Grace Elizabeth Hale is a professor of history and American Studies at the University of  Virginia whose work focuses on race, class, and culture in the 20th century, particularly in the American South. Her latest book, Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture tells the story of how a small college town in Georgia became a center of indie and punk cult...

On the debut episode of Campus Trap, Ryan Boyd joins me to reflect on how much the stereotypical "college experience" has evolved since our undergraduate days, when a countercultural bacchanalia was still dominant in the popular  imagination, if not in practical reality. From the world of keg-stands and bongloads to the sobering realities of 21st century academia, we trace our own paths through gr...

Jason Vuic is a historian and writer whose books tell incredible stories about the unintended consequences of unbridled American ambition. This conversation focuses on his two latest books: The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History and The Swamp Peddlers: How Lot Sellers, Land Scammers, and Retirees Built Modern Florida and Transformed the American Dream , as we explore how the marke...

How does "gossip" intersect with gender and power? If a woman "knows a secret" about a powerful man, what can she do with it? This week Yasmin and I consider gossip as an alternative social media network, bubbling under the surface of our political culture. Of course, Mad Men is a central text here, so we take a detailed look at how the show's pilot uses the concept of "gossip" to lay out the show...