A recent law school event featuring former L.A. County District Attorney Jackie Lacey honestly blew my mind, and made me think a lot about the intersection of crime, law enforcement, reform movements, and political violence. I try to put those ideas together alongside the current culture of J6 pardons and Luigi mania, as we fall further into a chao…

There are currently too many news stories to fit into the "ominous portents of a dark future" file, so I've chosen a few of the most flagrant examples of Trump/Musk savagery to share, along with some reflections on how to fight for our minds and for each other as the world heads down the toilet. Check out our Patreon for more: patreon.com/nostalgia…

I got my first job when I was 15 years old, working at a Pumpkin Patch on a local farm, and it’s been all downhill from there. I’m partly joking, but the working world has never been a place of maximum success and happiness for me, and in this episode I try to come to terms with my own job history as a way of exploring the pressures that consume ma…

The haunting documentary All I Can Say, which chronicles a few vibrant years in the life of Shannon Hoon, the lead singer of 90s grunge rock band Blind Melon, is a slice of deep 90s nostalgia shot on camcorder by Hoon himself before he died of a drug overdose in October 1995. In this conversation, Justin Rogers-Cooper joins me to reflect on Hoon’s …

I started teaching college history courses in 2005 when I was a graduate student at the City University of New York. Looking back at those early years, I can hardly believe how little I knew about how to teach college courses. As I mark my 20th year of teaching, I thought I would reflect on everything I’ve learned from two decades of serving as an …

David Lynch died earlier this month, and like many others I’ve been reflecting on his legacy, not only in the wider culture but in my own personal trajectory and identity. In this episode, I focus on the latter. Rather than trying to analyze the larger meaning of Lynch’s filmography, I wanted to sort out how his work intervened on my life, in parti…

The politics of rebuilding Los Angeles after the fires, tech maneuvering for Trump juice, social media outrage missing the mark, Elon's Nazi salute masking something darker, a new Gilded Age comes into view, what's at risk with global capital behaving like a caged animal. This is a short clip from a full episode, which you can hear by subscribing t…

Ross Barkan is a political writer and novelist whose Substack is one of our favorite places for thoughtful takes on the current political and cultural landscape. He joins me this week to survey the landscape with Trump taking office again, as we consider the tech world’s shifting allegiances and cultural power, the exhaustion with #resistance outra…

This week I’m joined by Evan Friss, author of the current New York Times bestseller The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore, which traces the development of bookshops as integral, often paradoxical, spaces within the landscape of American consumer culture. What is a bookshop? And what makes it different from literally any other place you …

Fires in Los Angeles unleash a wave of online hate from the left and right. What chance do we have to mitigate the coming climate change disasters if the population's reactions are driven by algorithms that massage and indulge our worst impulses? This is a short clip from a full-length episode for Nostalgia Trap subscribers, sign up for a FREE 7-da…

This week I talk with David Humphries, a professor of English at Queensborough Community College in New York City, about his excellent project Happy Nostalgia: Making Connections with the Music of the ‘90s, which collects essays from CUNY scholars on the last “analog” moment of music fandom, the beautiful and tragic 1990s. We get a chance to trade …

A critical but often overlooked chapter in American labor history, the animator’s strike that shook the Walt Disney Corporation in 1941 was part of a wave of labor struggle in World War II era Hollywood. Jake S. Friedman’s book The Disney Revolt: The Great Labor War of Animation’s Golden Age chronicles the strike in colorful detail, and includes pl…

This week we watched the excellent Apple TV series Severance and put it in conversation with Naomi Klein’s latest book Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. Both texts explore how the concept of “doubles” plays out in capitalist culture, and we have fun talking about the ways they did (and didn’t) blow our minds. From Klein’s refreshing take …

A United Healthcare CEO is assassinated and the world laughs, fitness and nutrition culture goes fascist, Europe in collapse while China salivates, Trump's tariffs portend new global shockwaves. To hear the whole episode, subscribe for a FREE 7 day trial: https://www.patreon.com/posts/117457956?pr=true&forSale=true…

It's Black Friday, so between insane binges of online shopping, Justin and I sat down to record a conversation about the Netflix documentary The Antisocial Network: From Memes to Mayhem, as we consider the path from Occupy Wall Street and Bernie Sanders to 1/6 and Donald Trump's triumph in the 2024 election. What role has internet culture played in…

Musk's endgame on environmental regulations, universities bracing for a war on DEI and critical race theory, Houthi pirates drawn to their deaths in Ukraine, national economies bracing for world war. Happy Thanksgiving! Subscribe to access our entire library of bonus content, including weekly News Trap updates: patreon.com/nostalgiatrap…

Tim Keogh is an Associate Professor of History at the Queensborough Community College in New York City. His book In Levittown’s Shadow: Poverty in America’s Wealthiest Postwar Suburb turns a common American story on its head, giving us a picture of life at the economic bottom of the postwar suburban housing boom. This conversation features challeng…