Nostalgia Trap

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, the Democratic Party, the appeal of MMA, and much more.

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, currently streaming on Netflix.

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 with figures from Paul Robeson and W.E.B. DuBois to Richard Hofstadter, Herbert Gutman, and Eugene Genovese. We also talked about the origins of his historical methodology, his thoughts on contemporary politics, and his latest book, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad.

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 evolved into a wider examination of the ideological structures that lurk in the heart of American capitalism.

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 this episode covers lots of stuff: his childhood in Ohio, the serious social problems associated with grade-school bullying, the centrality of race in reading U.S. history, the "surveillance state" mentality of social media, leftist infighting in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the hope for action on climate change, the implications of the Ferguson uprising, and much more.

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 politics, the uses of counterfactual history, and much more.

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 shaping U.S. capitalism (and what we can do about it).

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 veteran, his attitude toward military service and war, and how being shot in Iraq made an impact on his spiritual development.

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.

0 false 18 pt 18 pt 0 0 false false false /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} 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 and political realities call for a more radical confrontation with the status quo.

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 popular music in the torture of (mostly Arab) detainees; and the particular cultural, political, and economic elements of the Arab-American and Muslim experience in post-9/11 America.

Will Menaker is an editor at Liveright Publishing, who recently put out Jacob Bacharach's debut novel, The Bend of the World. I've known Will since graduate school, where we shared a common love for The Onion, The Sopranos, and the weird ideological currents flowing through American popular culture. In this episode, we talk about his socialist ancestors, who opened cooperative factories in the United States, and how utopian fantasy and apocalyptic nightmares intersect with real politics.

Although the popular stereotype of "kids these days" has them staring apathetically at their phones, more concerned with selfies than politics, my experiences with young people at CUNY often give the lie to that idea. After a semester spent reading and writing about climate change, the students in Justin Rogers-Cooper's English 101 course at LaGuardia Community College were heavily engaged, and more than ready to share their thoughts. I sat down with the class and listened to harrowing stories about Hurricane Sandy, ideas for shifting the political conversation about climate change, and their fears and hopes for the future of life on planet Earth.

Claudia Moreno Parsons is a professor of English at LaGuardia Community College, and also the wife of your humble host. Since I've spoken to so many guests about the different people that made an impact on their lives, I thought that, for the podcast's 30th episode, it would be appropriate to speak with someone who's had a profound impact on my life. Claudia talks with me about her childhood in South Brooklyn, how books came to be so important to her, and how working with Ammiel Alcalay at the CUNY Graduate Center helped give shape to her work while fueling her intellectual imagination.

Currently a professor in the Economics department at John Jay College in New York City, Josh Mason is one of only a few economists that I know in real life, so it was great to have the opportunity to pick his brain about details we historians often tend to overlook. We talked about his background in left journalism, his work with major labor unions, the direction of U.S. labor politics, and the curious but perhaps understandable academic preoccupation with organic farming.

I've known English professor Neil Meyer for many years, since our time spent concurrently at the CUNY Graduate Center, which spanned more or less the entire Bush and early Obama eras. I never knew Neil was from Detroit before this conversation, and the discovery allowed us an entryway into a wide range of historical and political phenomenon. We talked about his work in early American literature, his thoughts on gay marriage, abortion, and other pieces of the so-called "culture war," and of course, our mutual concern about James Franco's graduate studies.

My conversation with Jayashree Kamble, a writer and English professor at LaGuardia Community College, was an opportunity to talk about popular culture, an intense and rich subject of study that, at least in my experience, is often met with some resistance in graduate history departments. Jayashree discusses her early education in India, how she decided to move to Minnesota for graduate school, and all about the main focus of her work studying popular romance fiction. What do those books and other pieces of media have to tell us about race, politics, identity, and ideology? Jayashree's answers to these questions gave me a mind-blowing glimpse into the profound ways that popular culture can function in our lives.

Sarah Jaffe is a freelance writer and journalist whose work appears in The Guardian, In These Times, Salon, and Dissent Magazine, where she co-hosts the Belabored Podcast. We had a fun conversation about 90s culture, the paradox of loving the NFL, Beyoncé's feminist status, Ferguson's continued uprising, the state of higher education and, of course, the biographical details of how "punk rock and shitty jobs" helped lead her to a life of left journalism.

Steve Brier is a historian whose work at the American Social History Project helped draw me into the field of working class social history. Steve also has some amazing stories about his father's time fighting fascists on the streets of East London in the lead-up to World War II, his time spent at Berkeley in the middle of the Free Speech Movement in 1964, and his work and friendship with legendary social historian Herbert Gutman.

Sarah Leonard is an exciting voice in left journalism, currently working as a writer and editor for The Nation, New Inquiry, and Dissent. She writes about stuff that matters: mass incarceration, feminism, the evolution of media and technology, and much more. We talked about her experiences working around figures from the Democratic Party, her take on Occupy's past and future, and the limits of identity-driven politics in the context of Hillary Clinton's inevitable 2016 run.

Frances Fox Piven is a towering figure of the American Left, a professor of political science whose combined academic work and political activism provide an extraordinary framework of ideas about poverty, race, war, and many other vital issues. We sat down for a conversation about her upbringing during the Great Depression, the development of her political values, her friendship with Howard Zinn, and her encounters with American reactionaries after becoming a featured target of right-wing hatred and paranoia on Glenn Beck's television program.

James Oakes was sitting at the head of a frighteningly tiny conference table when I entered the room for my first graduate course at the CUNY Graduate Center many years ago. A professor of American history, his intensely thoughtful approach to the discipline impressed and, of course, intimidated me. I've since come to know him as a serious and generous scholar, whose work on slavery and abolitionism serves, to me, as a great model for how politics and history can be effectively interwoven. In this conversation, we talk about his focus on slavery and the Civil War, his response to Lincoln's radical critics, and why he prefers to explore his politics, at least publicly, through the study of the 19th century.

In recent months I have been depending on writer and professor Anthony Galluzzo's fantastic Facebook feed for his uniquely cynical take on the latest news, notes, and opinions--particularly when it comes to higher education, gentrification, militarized police, imperial foreign policy, and lots of other big issues facing the world today. I finally got to sit down with him, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, of all places, to hear about his weird experience with actor Jason Patric on the week of 9/11/01, his perception of the freakish nature of Los Angeles sunshine, and the sometimes enlightening, sometimes frustrating times he's spent teaching at colleges like West Point and CUNY.

I've known Joe and John Lombardo since the mid-1990s, when I met them while working at a restaurant called Marie Callender's in Ventura, California. As an alienated, nerdy teenager, I looked up to the Lombardo brothers as models of a different kind of man than the jocks and surfers I was surrounded by in high school. In hindsight, they were my first encounter with hipsterism, and they taught me a lot about being cool. In this conversation, they tell me about their own upbringing, how they came to punk music as a saving grace, encounters with Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love, and Richard Simmons, and why they think the alternative rock scene of the 1990s was the last great moment in American counterculture. 0 false 18 pt 18 pt 0 0 false false false /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}

0 false 18 pt 18 pt 0 0 false false false /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Nichole Shippen is a political theorist and professor at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, New York. We talked a bit about her youth in a small rancher town in Wyoming, and how she navigated the particular cultural landscape of such a space. Our discussion focuses mainly on race, identity, and class structure in America, as we try to situate events in Ferguson, Missouri within a wider political and historical continuum. Her book Decolonizing Time: Work, Leisure, and Freedom will be published this fall.

David Zeiger's documentary film Sir! No Sir! had a profound impact on my graduate studies, educating me about the "GI movement" against the Vietnam War and kick-starting my project on the "GI coffeehouses" that functioned as the institutional support network for that important movement. We had a great conversation about his years growing up in Los Angeles, his need to "do something" about the war in Vietnam, his work with antiwar soldiers at a GI coffeehouse in Killeen, Texas (outside Fort Hood) in the early 1970s, and his development as a photographer and filmmaker.

During my early years as a graduate student in history, I took a course at the CUNY Graduate Center called "From Civil Rights to Black Power," taught by Professor Clarence Taylor. The readings for the course, along with Professor Taylor's radical approach to American racial politics, completely rearranged my perceptions about race and American society, and helped set me on a path to becoming a radical historian myself. His most recent book, Reds at the Blackboard: Communism, Civil Rights, and the New York City Teachers Union (Columbia University Press, 2011), historicizes the complex interaction between the radical Left and the wider politics of education. In this conversation, he talks about his years in New York City's public high school system and his evolving views on liberalism, conservatism, and the direction of radical politics in the age of Obama.

Reading Todd Gitlin's book The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage was a major moment in my development as a historian. Gitlin's colorful, rigorous description of that turbulent decade heavily influenced my decision to study postwar American politics when I began my graduate studies in 2004. I recently sat down in his office at Columbia University to talk about his experience as president of Students for a Democratic Society in the mid-1960s, his personal trajectory as an activist and academic, and his thoughts on Occupy Wall Street and the contemporary American political landscape.

In 2004, when he was executive officer of the CUNY Graduate Center's department of history, Professor Joshua Freeman was my first contact and mentor in the early years of grad school. His expertise and generosity helped me and many others in our transition to a rigorous Ph.D. program. He is now a Distinguished Professor at the GC and teaches at CUNY's Queens College, sharing his deep knowledge of American politics, economics, and society with students throughout New York City. This conversation touches on his experiences growing up in Brooklyn, his early connection to the Civil Rights Movement, the motivation behind his recent book American Empire, and his development as one of the nation's prominent scholars of American labor.

Ammiel Alcalay is a poet, writer, critic, translator, archivist, and much more. As a professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center, he is known as much for his scholarship as for his generosity: with his time, with his attention to student's work, and with his talents as editor and writer. Ammiel recently visited my apartment for a conversation about his youth in Boston growing up around poet and writer Charles Olson, his activism during the Vietnam years, and the path that led him to become a scholar of the Middle East.

My friend Justin Rogers-Cooper, a professor of English at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, New York, recently invited me to campus to record a "live" podcast with his students. The course was designed to help students consider, and prepare for possible participation in, the profession of teaching. Talking to bright young undergraduates about the "nuts and bolts" of pedagogy was a fascinating experience that offers a unique perspective on what 21st century college students value both in and out of the classroom. The range of backgrounds and experiences presented in this series of clips captures some of what I value most about CUNY itself: an engaged, diverse student body with deep insights into the world around them.

I've gotten to know Christopher Silsby through our work together at the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute at Baruch College. Christopher's particular take on the role of technology in education is one that continues to provoke engaging conversations at the Institute and beyond. It was a pleasure to sit down with him to hear about his upbringing in Kansas, his thoughts on education, and his work in theatre and history as he completes his Ph.D. at the CUNY Graduate Center.

As the main adviser on my dissertation, Josh Brown was and continues to be an important figure in the development of my own thoughts and ideas about American history. Active in the Vietnam antiwar movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Josh's vision of the historical discipline's social and political value is in part drawn from his experiences during that tumultuous era. We sat down to a great conversation that touches on his father's unique history in World War II, the violence he witnessed on the streets of Chicago in 1968, and how he eventually became drawn to the radical brand of social history practiced by legendary historian Herbert Gutman.

I first met Barbara Garson while researching the GI coffeehouse movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which aimed to open antiwar, counterculture coffeehouses in small towns outside military bases, as part of a larger movement to end the war in Vietnam. Barbara's time spent working at such a coffeehouse in Tacoma, Washington was one part of a long career of writing and activism. Her controversial play MacBird!, a satire of the Lyndon Johnson administration and the Kennedy family, was an off-Broadway hit in 1967. Over the following decades, she has published a series of books focusing on American labor (All the Livelong Day: The Meaning and Demeaning of Routine Work), the economic landscape (The Electronic Sweatshop: How Computers are Transforming the Office of the Future), and most recently, the social consequences of capitalism (Down the Up Escalator: How the 99 Percent Live). She joins me here to discuss her personal political development and the ideas driving her work.

Lavelle Porter is a writer with a fascinating set of interests, ranging from poetry and science fiction to racial politics, sexual identity, and the structures of higher education itself. His recent blog post, "More Thoughts on Graduate School," resonated with anyone who's ever agonized over grad school-related decisions in their life, capturing some of the ambivalence that often accompanies the "life of the mind." Lavelle joins me to talk about being at Morehouse College in Atlanta around the time Outkast blew up, how he became interested in artists and writers like Sun Ra and Samuel Delany, and what the future holds for education in America.

Why is the minimum wage so ridiculously low in 21st century America? My guests today (Eljeer Hawkins, Cora Bergantinos, and James Hoff) are part of the 15Now movement, which is seeking to drastically shift the conversation about the minimum wage in cities across the U.S. In Seattle, the movement recently achieved a major victory, in part due to the leadership of Kshama Sawant, a city council member and one of the first socialists elected to public office in a U.S. city in decades. Our conversation addresses the economic and political context of minimum wage activism and assesses the prospects for the 15Now movement as it sets its sights on cities like San Francisco and New York.

Why are sitcoms like Small Wonder so haunting to some of us? My guest, Bridget McGovern, a writer and managing editor at sci-fi/fantasy site tor.com, sheds some light on this subject and many others as we delve into the pop cultural universe, sharing stories about coming of age during an era of often strange, sometimes inspiring, always memorable cultural production. From The Golden Girls and Designing Women to Jim Jarmusch and Game of Thrones, Bridget and I talk about pop culture's particular impact on identity, its power to build communities, and its uncanny ability to make us keep the lights on.

What does is it mean to be "conservative" in America? My guest on this episode, professor and writer Corey Robin, has spent a great deal of his career thinking about conservatism and its particular influence in the U.S. His most recent book, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, investigates the consistent themes and ideologies underlying this movement, and offers some startling conclusions that, perhaps unsurprisingly, make a lot of conservatives really angry. In this conversation, we talk about his coming of age in the Reagan eighties, his college years spent confronting the realities of Ivy League endowments, and his current work in publications from Harper's to the New York Times. You can find more of Robin's political analysis on his blog, coreyrobin.com.

I first became aware of James Hoff as the editor of the student newspaper, the Advocate, at the CUNY Graduate Center while both of us were working on our degrees in the mid-oughts. James shepherded the paper through a turbulent moment at CUNY, maintaining a radical voice that tirelessly defended the mainly working class student body against an often appalling administration. In this conversation we talk about his upbringing in California, his time spent traveling around the United States, and his eventual landing in New York City, where he teaches English and continues to promote working class politics (like the 15 Now movement) in publications like the Huffington Post and Inside Higher Ed.

As we continue our journey through the halls of LaGuardia Community College in Queens, New York, I stop to talk with Christine Marks, a professor of English whose work focuses on intimate structures like identity, gender, food, and the body. Our conversation includes Christine's less-than-ideal experience as a high school exchange student from Germany, her eventual return to the United States, and her work with American novelist and essayist Siri Hustvedt.

Stafford Gregoire wasn't always a professor of English at CUNY's LaGuardia Community College. His past as a bike messenger in New York City during the early 1980s, riding the streets and avenues with a cast of characters out of a Hubert Selby, Jr. novel, set him on an intellectual journey that continues now in the halls of higher education. Stafford's stories touch on racial identity, gentrification, class politics, and the role that art can play in moving us toward both political and personal transcendence.