Nostalgia Trap

Latest Episodes:

Nostalgia Trap - Episode 166: Showing the Receipts w/ Kevin Kruse Oct 22, 2019

Show notes

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.

Episode 165: Today is Tomorrow w/ Justin Rogers-Cooper (BONUS) Oct 18, 2019

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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

Nostalgia Trap - Episode 164: School's Out Forever w/ Brendan O'Malley Oct 10, 2019

Show notes

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.

Nostalgia Trap - Episode 163: Waging Peace w/ Susan Schnall Oct 02, 2019

Show notes

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.

Nostalgia Trap - Episode 162: Doomsday Politics w/ Bill Black Sep 19, 2019

Show notes

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.

Nostalgia Trap - Episode 161: Circling the Eschaton w/ Erik Davis Sep 10, 2019

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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.

Nostalgia Trap - Episode 160: Growth Mindset w/ KJ Shepherd Sep 02, 2019

Show notes

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.

Nostalgia Trap - Episode 159: Subtext Becomes Text w/ Eli Valley Aug 22, 2019

Show notes

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.

Nostalgia Trap - Episode 158: Mapping the Zone w/ Liz Ryerson Aug 13, 2019

Show notes

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.

Nostalgia Trap - Episode 157: Above the Law w/ Justin Rogers-Cooper Jul 31, 2019

Show notes

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.

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