Nostalgia Trap

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.

On Episode Two of The Nostalgia Trap, I finally get the opportunity to meet and chat with Laura Tanenbaum, a professor of English at LaGuardia Community College whose work I've enjoyed on Jacobin, her own blog The Golden Notebooks, and in some of the most rewarding Facebook political battles of the past year. Laura and I talk about her years growing up in Chicago among a science-oriented family, her complicated feelings about 90s culture and films like Fight Club, and her interdisciplinary approach to teaching and writing.

On the first episode of The Nostalgia Trap, I sit down to a conversation with writer and editor Connor Kilpatrick of Jacobin magazine. Connor and I talk about his childhood in Texas, his surprisingly apolitical college years, and the "moment of clarity" after Obama's election that led him to the optimistic brand of left politics he embraces today.