Nostalgia Trap

Rick Perlstein is a historian and the author of a series of bestselling, massively entertaining books on the rise of American conservatism in the late 20th century. His 2008 book Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America sharpened his mega-thesis about the historical significance of "the Sixties" in the American political imagination, demonstrating how Nixon and other conservatives drove a wedge through public discourse by manipulating and nurturing the reactionary impulse that boiled underneath the surface of the era. In this conversation, Perlstein discusses his latest book Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980, shares stories about the methods behind the construction of his labyrinthine historical narrative, and reflects on the ways that nostalgia functions to distort our vision of the past, present, and future.

The 1993 film Falling Down, starring Michael Douglas and directed by Joel Schumacher, divided audiences and critics with a story of a man's descent into vigilante violence on a hot Los Angeles day. Viewed from 2020, the film shows us something deep and dark about American social reality in the years immediately following the end of the Cold War. Danny Bessner joins us for a detailed analysis of an important piece of 90s pop culture, connecting the history of Los Angeles as the rising center of American empire to the emotional disintegration of Douglas' character.

Jon Wiener is an American historian and co-author, along with Mike Davis, of the extraordinary book Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties. In this conversation, Wiener explains why it's so vital, particularly in 2020, to recover L.A.'s radical history, and explains the process behind communicating a complicated movement narrative to a broad audience. We also hear bits from Wiener's incredible career as a writer and journalist, including his involvement with the groundbreaking progressive radio station KPFK, and his unbelievable legal battle with the FBI to declassify their records of surveilling and harassing John Lennon.

Daegan Miller's first appearance on Nostalgia Trap, in which he discussed both his painful exit from academia and his stunning book This Radical Land: A Natural History of American Dissent, remains one of our most popular episodes. From the outskirts of a tiny town in rural Massachusetts, Miller returns to update us on his life outside the tortured confines of the university. In this conversation, in addition to the prerequisite nostalgia trip through late 20th century Ani DiFranco-style MTV radicalism, we talk about the everyday reality of being a "writer in the woods," the hyper-nationalist (read: eco-fascist) environmentalism of the Trump era, mixed emotions about the fading relevance of boomer culture, and the weird feeling of watching "the kids" make memes about Karl Marx.

What happened to the world of independently-operated head shops, feminist and black-owned bookstores, and health food markets that blossomed in the 1960s and 1970s? Josh Davis, professor of history and author of From Head Shops to Whole Foods: The Rise and Fall of Activist Entrepreneurs, joins us to explain how a movement to change the world was slowly subsumed into the neoliberal hellscape of consumer capitalism.

Stuart Schrader is a Lecturer and Assistant Research Scientist in Sociology at Johns Hopkins University, and the author of Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing. In this conversation, he shares details from the book about the Office of Public Safety, a 1960s American Cold War project that gave U.S. aid to counter-revolutionary police forces around the globe. As Schrader's work documents, the expansion of domestic police powers in the post-World War II mirrored, and was in fact a critical element of, the larger project of global American empire.

Sean Lawrence works as a bartender and manager at a couple of the most popular eating and drinking establishments in downtown Ventura, California. In this conversation, he shares amazing stories from the world of restaurants and bars during the pandemic, from fights with MAGA trolls and the anti-mask crowd, to the agony of layoffs and closings, to the continued suffocating fear of catching COVID, we shine a light on a rough but undeniably clarifying moment for workers in the food service industry.

Kristin Kobes Du Mez is a professor of history at Calvin University whose work focuses on the intersection of religion, gender, and politics in American life. Her new book Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation traces the development of a white, militant, patriarchal Christian culture in the decades since the 1960s, when the rise of feminism and the civil rights movement triggered an evangelical backlash that led directly to the Trump era. In this conversation, she explains how a "tough guy" ideal gained traction in Christian culture, as white evangelicals came to embrace a brutal ideology of authority, domination, and violence.

Eddie Pepitone is an actor and comedian whose latest standup special For the Masses captures the visceral hell of life in late capitalism. In this conversation, he talks about his path in comedy, the development of a "working class" voice, why he avoids trite topics like dating and pizza, and how his left-wing politics and Eastern spirituality find their way into his material.

How does the way we live reflect all the traps of American ideology? This week, one of our favorites, writer and activist Yasmin Nair, joins us for a wide-ranging conversation on the historical, social, and economic dimensions of U.S. housing policy. From current debates around gentrification and rent strikes to the romanticized image of suburban nuclear families in pop culture, we explore how ideas of home ownership are at the core of the national-imperial project.

Since his first appearance on the Nostalgia Trap in 2016, Nathan Tankus has gained a devoted following for his ideas on politics, economics, and global finance. His newsletter, Notes on the Crises, is closely watched by journalists, politicians, and economists, particularly after publishing a remarkable set of pieces on COVID-19 and the Federal Reserve in early 2020. In this conversation, he discusses the strangeness of his newfound celebrity, and offers his takes on this chaotic historical moment, from Bernie's flame-out to the Black Lives Matter uprising . For a special subscription discount to Nathan's Substack, go here: https://nathantankus.substack.com/subscribe?coupon=1a0be4be

This week Justin Rogers-Cooper joins us to celebrate our 200th episode with a deep dive into the political, economic, and cultural significance of the "Joker" character. What are the origins of the Joker image and mythology? How has the character evolved over time? And what does this archetype's ubiquitous presence tell us about our historical moment? This episode is dedicated in loving, living memory of Laszlo Scott Kehoe.

Asad Haider is a founding editor at Viewpoint Magazine and the author of Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump. In this conversation he explains how the history of anti-racist struggle in the United States provides a compelling set of ideas for a dynamic, anti-capitalist emancipatory practice. Along the way, we discuss the value of reading Marx in 2020, our distorted view of 1960s and 1970s radicalism, the significance of the Black Lives Matter moment, and much more.

Paul Renfro is a professor of history at Florida State University and the author of Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State. In this conversation he explains how fears of child abduction fueled a hysterical campaign in the 1970s and 1980s that produced a wave of new laws, structures of punishment, and ideas about family, security, and sexuality that continue to haunt American life.

Ken Layne is the creator of Desert Oracle, a magazine and radio show/podcast all about the strange inhabitants and culture of the Mojave Desert. Layne's trajectory through the world of alternative media winds through the 1990s and 2000s, when he was present at the creation of the Gawker media empire and subsequently took the reins of their influential politics outlet Wonkette. In this conversation, we talk about the evolution of underground culture through layers of toxic capitalism, as we trace Layne's path from the fast lane of LA/New York/DC digital media to the burgeoning psychedelic scene in the California desert.

Our series on the rapidly evolving politics of COVID-19 continues this week, with Justin Rogers-Cooper warning that the logic of finance capital may force a premature "re-opening" on the American public in the summer of 2020. In this conversation we talk about recent armed anti-lockdown protests, the movie Parasite as a window into the cultural zeitgeist around class inequality, and the potential for social violence as America plunges into an unprecedented depression.

Arash Azizi is a writer and scholar currently completing a Ph.D. in History and Middle Eastern Studies at NYU; his work focuses on the left in Iran and in the wider Islamic world. In this conversation, making frequent reference to cinema and pop culture, he discusses the global dimensions of anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements, tracing a narrative from the Cold War to the 21st century.

Drew Morton is an Assistant Professor of Mass Communication at Texas A&M University-Texarkana. He is the co-editor and co-founder of [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, the first peer-reviewed academic journal focused on the visual essay, drawn from a wide range of scholars (including Drew himself). In this conversation he describes his education in film, both as a casual viewer and fan and later as a graduate student in Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA, as we explore how the central questions, ideas, and methodologies of the discipline are evolving in a hyper-accelerated media landscape.

Yasmin Nair returns to the Trap for a deep dive into the film Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), a conversation that helps us frame ideas about prison abolition, animal rights, environmentalism, pandemics, and the tactical elements of a grassroots revolution.

As we continue our series on the politics of COVID-19, Justin Rogers-Cooper takes aim at the absurd ideology of "sacrifice," as we explore how American sentimental mythology allows us to justify capitalism's indifference to deaths of its "essential" workers.

Mistress Snow, Ph.D. is an academic in the humanities who was abruptly rejected by her mentor after coming out to her as a working dominatrix, an experience she documents in a recent Chronicle piece. In this conversation, she explains how her story connects with larger issues of class in academia, from the collapse of the job market and the humiliations of the adjunct hustle to the student loan nightmare and endless financial precarity. In the context of an accelerating economic and biological meltdown, we try to salvage what we love about academic work and the university, while looking ahead to a rapidly shifting future.

Yasmin Nair is a writer and activist who always says what's on her mind, and the results are consistently some of the most refreshing and challenging takes on modern American politics and culture. In this conversation, we talk about her most recent work, her outlook on the 2020 Democratic primary, the carceral politics of #MeToo, and why the U.S. left is often so hopelessly lost on issues of sex, race, and class.

Evan Purchell is a film historian and archivist whose latest film project, Ask Any Buddy, presents excerpted bits from 126 different gay male "adult" films from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. The effect is an uncanny journey into a lost world of urban gay culture, depicting a kind of imagninative fantasy of gay life before the AIDS crisis. In this conversation, Evan tells us about the film's origins as a popular Instagram account, and details some of the stars (both in front of and behind the camera) of this extraordinary moment in the history of cinema, culture, and sexuality.

With a nation in quarantine, Justin Rogers-Cooper joins us for a deep dive into the political opportunities presented by the COVID-19 moment, as we track the rapid evolution of capitalism in crisis. Now that the energy of apocalypse has been released into the discourse, where does it go? What new futures can we imagine as the old world shapeshifts before our eyes?

Justin Rogers-Cooper returns to continue our series on the extraordinary historical moment created by the COVID-19 crisis. In this conversation we take on the rapidly evolving politics of the virus, reflecting on the public outrage at massive corporate bailouts while working people are saddled with unimaginable economic ruin. Can the left seize that energy to win electoral and ideological victories? We also speculate on the direction of U.S. government policy, social stability, and American popular culture as the crisis develops.

Preview of bonus episode 182: Contagion with Justin Rogers-Cooper.

Kevin Baker is a historian studying the ways policymakers use predictive computer models to map the future. In this conversation, he tells us about navigating the shock of class consciousness in the academy, describes his work researching artificial intelligence at Berkeley, and offers the peculiar story of The Limits to Growth, a 1972 study based on SimCity-like computer programs that predicted the collapse of industrial civilization by the year 2050.

Trap favorites KJ Shepherd and Bill Black return for a much-needed election year vibe check, in which we discuss our individual and collective moods in the context of Bernie Sanders' continued success in the Democratic primary. From online battles with Marc Maron and other toxic centrist dorks to the wider view of academic work in a collapsing humanities job market, KJ and Bill bring their characteristically refreshing perspectives to an increasingly chaotic historical moment. Subscribe to KJ's newsletter: https://keegan.substack.com/ Read and support Contingent Magazine: https://contingentmagazine.org/

Alice Bag is a punk icon, the lead singer of legendary 1970s L.A. punk band The Bags, and now a writer, educator, and feminist archivist. In this conversation, she tells her story of overcoming a childhood in East L.A. wracked by poverty and domestic abuse, finding an outlet for her personal and political rage in the burgeoning Hollywood punk scene. In the years since that initial explosion, she's become one of the movement's chief historians, recovering the voices of women and people of color who are often left out of the mainstream punk narrative.

Rick Paulas is a journalist covering issues of housing and homelessness; his recent piece on Moms 4 Housing details what happened when a group of Black mothers occupied a vacant house in Oakland, California. In this conversation, we talk about America's housing crisis in the context of neoliberal capitalism, and explore the revolutionary political, social, and cultural implications of a more activist homeless population.

Tom DePaola is a Ph.D. candidate studying higher ed and academic labor at USC, and co-author (along with Adrianna J. Kezar and Daniel T. Scott) of the new book The Gig Academy: Mapping Labor in the Neoliberal University. He joins us to discuss the increasing precarity felt by academics and other workers at colleges across the country, and to explore the longer history of neoliberalism's devastating attack on both the ideological underpinnings and practical operation of American higher education.

Lavelle Porter is a writer and professor of English at CUNY's New York City College of Technology. He joins us to discuss his new book The Blackademic Life: Academic Fiction, Higher Education, and the Black Intellectual, which explores representations of black intellectual life from the Reconstruction Era to today. Along the way we touch on the lesser-known fictional works of W.E.B. DuBois, the rise of Black Studies on college campuses in the 1960s and 1970s, the complicated, tragic legacy of Bill Cosby, and the evolving conversation about higher education in 21st century hip hop.

Sarah Milov is a professor of history at the University of Virginia and the author of The Cigarette: A Political History. In this conversation, she describes how the intersection of private capital and state power combined (with astounding success) to promote the consumption of cigarettes to the American public, and how activists engaged ideas around public space, health, and consent to fight back.

Sarah Taber is a crop scientist and ex-farmworker with a wide knowledge of agricultural history and practice, which you can hear in action on her excellently-named podcast Farm to Taber. In this conversation, we talk about the role of the "farmer" in the American imagination and survey some of the most critical moments in the development of American food and farming policy.

Luke O'Neil is a writer whose work chronicles the dark edges of 21st century America, capturing the horrific tenor of our age in his incredible newsletter and in his latest book, Welcome to Hell World: Dispatches from the American Dystopia. From murderous cops and fascist dads to suicidal veterans and imprisoned children, O'Neil connects the dots of the American nightmare in a voice that's compelling and authentic and genuinely enraging. In this conversation, we talk about his path through the ugly landscape of new digital media and explore how the political and personal crash together in his work.

A.M. Gittlitz is a writer on radical politics, counterculture, and the paranormal, and the producer of a wonderful podcast called The Antifada. In this conversation, he catches us up on the worldwide UFO phenomenon, detailing how the U.S. government is pouring resources into investigating alien spacecraft, with big corporations (and the guy from Blink-182!) getting in on the action. Gittlitz shares plenty of incredible stories, many featured in his upcoming book I WANT TO BELIEVE: The Posadist Movement and Leftwing Ufology (Pluto Press, 2020), as we discuss the wider context of the alien narrative in culture and politics.

Mike Pearl is a writer and self-described "apocalypse expert" whose new book The Day It Finally Happens explores the increasingly bizarre scenarios that threaten to totally ruin our collective future. From internet blackouts and antibiotic-resistant superviruses to collapsing governments and mass extinction events, Mike tracks the actual probability of these nightmares coming true as a way of helping us navigate an anxious present. In this conversation, we game out some of the more insane ideas from his book while asking the question of our age: How bad is it gonna get?

Sam Yang is the host of Southpaw, a podcast about the intersection of leftist politics and combat sports. Yang is on a mission to reclaim fighting culture, forging connections between physicality, spirituality, and a more humane engagement with the planet and each other. In this conversation he discusses his background in martial arts, explaining how ethical ideas embedded in his combat training inform his political perspectives, and speculates on strategies for winning the hearts and minds of millions of UFC fans.

Bill Black and KJ Shepherd return to the Trap for a special Halloween episode, in which we reflect upon the public fears and personal phobias that plagued our childhoods. Together we explore all sorts of spooky stuff, including the hellish visions invoked by Chick tracts, the 1980s crusade against obscenity in pop music, the weird national obsession with children dying in abandoned refrigerators, and the varieties of erotic experience available at your local Barnes and Noble.

Kevin Kruse is a historian at Princeton University and the author of a number of important books about race, class, and politics in 20th century America. He is also one of the most visible historians online, with a massive Twitter following that often serves as a mini-course in American history. In this conversation, we talk about his unexpected rise to Twitter fame, his beef with right-wing propagandist Dinesh D'Souza, the many pleasures of archival research, and his connection to the wider community of historians and other scholars who are more actively engaging the public during a chaotic political moment.

Justin Rogers-Cooper returns to explore the 1993 Bill Murray comedy Groundhog Day, a deceptively straightforward film that pulses with dark insights on political economy, American history, human psychology, and everyday life in late capitalism. FULL EPISODE: https://www.patreon.com/posts/30812647

Brendan O'Malley is a historian and teacher whose experience with his school's abrupt closure was the subject of a fascinating, wrenching piece in Contingent Magazine this summer. He joins us to talk about his background in history, earning his Ph.D. at the CUNY Graduate Center, and his particular path through a rapidly collapsing academic job market. Brendan's story is ultimately a hopeful one, reflecting how a generation of young historians is finding our footing as teachers and scholars in ways none of us expected.

Susan Schnall served as a nurse in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War. Her experiences treating wounded Marines at Oak Noll Naval Hospital in Oakland, California transformed her, and in 1969 she faced court martial for her antiwar activism. In this conversation, she tells her incredible story of leaving the U.S. military and joining the antiwar movement, working as a hospital administrator and community organizer in New York City for 31 years, and serving as a core member of the Agent Orange Relief and Responsibility Campaign. You can read more about Susan's story, along with many other perspectives on the GI Movement (including a piece on GI coffeehouses by Nostalgia Trap host David Parsons), in a new book from NYU Press, Waging Peace in Vietnam: US Soldiers and Veterans Who Opposed the War.

With Trap favorite Bill Black joining us, a conversation about David's irrational fear of spiders leads into a wider consideration of existential politics in an apocalyptic age. Bill has lots to tell us about the El Paso shooting and the eco-fascist ideology from which it emerged, connecting it to the rise of doomsday scenarios, conspiracy theories, UFO flashmobs, and other pieces of outright weirdness circulating through the culture.

Writer and cultural critic Erik Davis joins us to discuss his fascinating, often startling new book, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies. By connecting the strange experiences of three psychedelic philosophers (Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson), Davis offers a narrative of the 1970s that goes beyond disco and Jimmy Carter, showing us a world of occult prophecies, paranoid conspiracies, and often drug-induced spiritual fuckery. In this conversation, Davis discusses the origins of High Weirdness, his longer journey as a thinker and writer, and how the transcendent freakiness of California in the 70s produced eerie premonitions of the chaotic dystopias of the 21st century.

KJ Shepherd is a Ph.D. historian whose research focuses on the history of American standardized testing and the "test preparation" industry it spawned. Along with trading stories about the horrors of teaching the SAT, we have a blunt talk about what's happening in the history discipline: the impossibility of finding full-time jobs, the humiliation of the application process, the "alt-ac" lie, and much more. But we also discuss the wider historical moment we're in, and how rising generations of non-tenured Ph.D.'s are shaping the future of scholarly work and public engagement.

Eli Valley is a comic artist and writer with an intense, visceral aesthetic that perfectly captures the rotten politics of our age. His acclaimed anthology Diaspora Boy: Comics on Crisis in America and Israel features a broad sample of his work over the past ten years. In this conversation we talk about his influences, both politically and artistically, and explore the historic and current role of counterculture in building left solidarity against fascism.

Liz Ryerson is a musician, writer, and teacher whose work explores the ideological and aesthetic landscape of video games and cult media. Her podcast The Blood Zone features her critical ideas about niche/independent media, from indie game design to music and cinema. In this conversation, we discuss the wider politics of the gaming and media world, including #Gamergate and other reactionary burblings, and trade ideas about leftists treading the stagnant cultural waters of late capitalism.

Justin Rogers-Cooper returns to continue our discussion of this Summer of Strangeness, this time taking on the Jeffrey Epstein case: who's connected, why it matters, and what it reveals about the dynamics of power, authority, and punishment within the wider nightmare of global capitalism.

Daniel Pinchbeck is the author of a number of books that explore big subjects like human consciousness, psychedelic drugs, shamanic cultures, and the Mayan 2012 prophecy. Lately he's been thinking and writing about UFOs, after a number of startling reports in mainstream media over the past year revealed the US government's deep engagement with spacecraft of unknown origin. In this conversation, we talk about his latest book, The Occult Control System: UFOs, aliens, other dimensions, and future timelines, and explore the possible explanations behind the UFO phenomenon's peculiar appearance at this specific moment in history.