Nostalgia Trap

In taking his internet creepypasta Backrooms from YouTube to the cinema screen, director Kane Parsons has created a piece of popular art that resonates deeply with some of our favorite Nostalgia Trap themes: '90s analog culture, toxic masculinity, psychedelic dream spaces, and the overriding feeling that the historical vibe is growing dark. Justin joins me to explore this puzzle of a movie, and to unpack its uncanny connection to our collective trips into extradimensional worlds.

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In the shadow of the U.S. officially losing the war in Iran, the American political and economic world continues to chase after a high that's perhaps no longer attainable. This week we examine how Trump, MAGA, AI companies, and the American left are grappling with a bubbling existential crisis that's unprecedented in scale and intensity.

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It's time for the old "there's a civil war brewing in the Democratic Party" conversation again, and Justin joins me to poke holes in the orthodoxies embraced by both "sides" of the alleged progressive/left vs centrist debate currently gripping the American public. It's 2016 all over again! Or is it?

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This week Justin joins me to explore the tall claims made in a recent New York Times piece, "Gen Z Fell Out of Love With Work. I Don't Blame Them." Are we really experiencing a generational revolt against centuries of American attitudes about education, work, wages, and life itself? Let's see what these Gen Z kids have to say.

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Does economic crisis predictably produce extreme political movements? History's lessons are a bit unclear on that point and, as we investigate in this episode, the summer of 2026 is testing our understanding of the relationship between political economy and social reality. Strap in, folks: we just found a new planet hiding behind the sun!

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As a wave of Mamdani-supported COMMUNISTS win power in New York, Justin and I ask the question that's on everyone's minds: is this the future of the Democratic Party? And more importantly, what will American politics look like in the wake of the Trump era?

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With news that Elon Musk in the world's first trillionaire after the historic SpaceX IPO, Justin joins me to discuss the financial gamesmanship at work in the AI industry, the planetary limits of this particular phase of capitalism, and the reasons why the #TeslaTakedown moment is long in the past.

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Since the Iran war began many weeks ago, it feels like we're living in some kind of surreal rhetorical purgatory. Surveying the wider news landscape, though, a wider pattern emerges, and a "Charlie Brown" analogy reveals something a bit darker hidden in our collective basement.

It's the best of times and the worst of times, as average Americans are paying more for pretty much everything while the stock market breaks records. What's up with that? Justin joins us this week to talk about the contradictions currently bracing up the global economy, as we map out how the Ukraine and Iran Wars are reshaping global power and the outlook for everything from gas and food prices to the "AI bubble." Plus, our usual speculations on the possibilities for progressive politics and leftist revolution within this particular social and economic climate. BUY BUY BUY or SELL SELL SELL?

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Recent debates about whether or not leftist streamers like Hasan Piker should be embraced by the Democratic Party lead Justin and me to explore how the "marketplace of ideas" intersects with the broad historical and economic forces that govern our collective destiny.

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This week we check out the explosive Ronan Farrow piece on Sam Altman and consider the intersection of AI, climate crises, and sociopathic personalities that defines this historical moment. Who is really in the driver's seat of our collective future?

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Did Bernie's loss break the left's brain?

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By joining Israel in a reckless attack on Iran, Trump has put the entire global system in the kill box, which begs the question, what's more dangerous: Trump when he's winning or Trump when he's trapped like a dog? And what happens when the material realities unleashed by this attack come home to roost?

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This week Justin and I game out scenarios unfolding from the U.S./Israel attack on Iran. Is it all about Epstein? (LOL) Or might China and Russia have something to do with Trump's latest insane wager? Let's take a look at the imperial chessboard.

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My late night adventures into the local jazz underworld have introduced me to some fascinating new friends, and I wanted to bring two of them into the Nostalgia Trap universe. Monte Montgomery and Alan Burgess are old pals whose frequent conversations often veer into the uncomfortable territories of race, culture and politics that will be familiar to Trap listeners. In this first episode in a series with Monte and Alan, we tackle the idea of "cultural appropriation" within the context of "race music," from Elvis to Eminem.

Check out Monte's first appearance on Nostalgia Trap here.

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On this week's News Trap Justin and I talk about the delicious crash of the crypto hustle, the sinister promise of "agentic AI," the human wreckage of Silicon Valley's utopian projects, the sad fall of Noam Chomsky, and the larger implications of Jeffrey Epstein's legendary run as the elite's favorite BFF.

When I was growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, Rolling Stone magazine was an indispensable resource for discovering the hip edge of American pop culture. Of course, I didn't realize at the time that the magazine had its roots in the 1960s counterculture, crafted by entrepreneur Jann Wenner as a subversive Trojan horse within the staid landscape of Cold War America. On this episode, historian Charles L. Ponce de Leon joins me for a conversation about his new book Rolling Stone and the Rise of Hip Capitalism: How a Magazine Born in the 1960s Changed America (UNC Press 2026), as we explore the magazine's complex evolution and the ironies of "counterculture" becoming "mainstream."

Check out my '90s music podcast/video series with John Lombardo, 120 MONTHS:

https://substack.com/@120months

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This week Justin joins me to consider what would happen if the post-1945 "rules based order" really does collapse -- something that seems more inevitable with each passing moment. With the Trump administration acting in severely irrational ways, how will the global system react? In addition to thinking about Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney's dire warning at this week's Davos conference, we talk about the wider chaos unleashed by ICE in Minnesota, Trump's attack on the Fed, and the continued dive into the abyss of 19th century imperial logic.

This week we're talking with Aaron G. Fountain, Jr. about his new book High School Students Unite! Teen Activism, Education Reform, and FBI Surveillance in Postwar America (UNC Press, 2025). By shifting focus from college campuses to American high schools, Fountain's work uncovers a whole world of 1960s and 1970s activism by young people around the country, who fought for their own rights within a larger struggle for social, racial, and economic justice. In this conversation, he shares some of the most compelling revelations he's discovered in oral history interviews, underground newspaper archives, and FBI records, and reflects on the role that high schoolers play in today's chaotic political landscape.

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2026 is leaping out of the gate with a flood of chaotic news stories, from Minneapolis to Greenland, from Venezuela to Iran. Justin joins me to look for the patterns uniting this increasingly jarring geopolitical reality, and to consider the poisonous cocktail of psychological, economic and historical forces that are launching us into a seemingly bleak future.

What makes John Candy such a unique figure in American pop culture? And why are we still talking about him in 2025? In this episode, Justin and I discuss the new documentary John Candy: I Like Me (dir. Colin Hanks) and reflect on Candy's outsized space in the cultural imagination, while exploring some of the darker elements of our paternal attraction to specific celebrities.

Check out our previous episode all about Planes, Trains, and Automobiles (dir. John Hughes), a key work in the Candy oeuvre.

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It's time once again to sip some eggnog and survey the wreckage of the past 12 months, as Justin joins us for a conversation about the continuing (though anti-viral) insanity of the Russia-Ukraine War and its significance within the larger framework of Europe's decline. We also talk about the strength of the MAGA project in the wake of Charlie Kirk's assassination and the rising cost of living, and consider the disturbing implications of the "Fuck Around and Find Out" philosophy as applied to political violence. Happy Holidays!

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As we continue our exploration of various forms of intoxicants, I share some personal stories and insights about America's favorite mind-altering substance: alcohol. From teenage experiments with wine coolers to the tipsy world of New York City dive bars, I've collected some hard-earned perspectives on the complicated role booze plays in our lives and the wider world. Cheers!

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Is the Trump Reich in terminal decline? Have we entered a new stage in the madness of this administration? This week Justin joins me to catalog some of the important points of failure and retreat in the White House and beyond, from Trump's faltering ballroom construction project and the quiet shuttering of DOGE, to tech psychos like Sam Altman and Elon Musk selling increasingly unrealistic visions of the future (OpenAI dominance and Nazified white supremacy, respectively). Meanwhile, China sharpens the blades of its own tech projects and Europe casts its eyes eastward.

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Lots of fun stuff today: slavery in the tuna industry, monetized Nazi content driving engagement across every major social media platform, the idea of "moving where it's cheaper" meets open ridicule, poetry as a way of hacking AI systems into encouraging self harm, Iran faces truly apocalyptic drought conditions, and worldwide murder rates decline precipitously because there aren't enough kids around to do the killing anymore.

Have you ever seen A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies? It's an epic documentary whose title says it all: a legendary director tells his life story while sharing ideas about the history of cinema. Kind of a two-for-one. I highly recommend it.

Anyway, that's what I'm going to do with this series, except instead of movies I'll be talking about drugs. I don't think my drug experiences are particularly unique, but I do have a lot of drug experiences, and I think I've got some insights to offer that extend beyond memoir; that is, I'm going to attempt to connect my own highs and lows with the broader history and politics of the past couple decades.

So, in this first episode, I share some stories and thoughts about the world of pills: uppers, downers and, um, in-betweeners. I hope you enjoy...and stay tuned for more adventures in intoxication.

This series is, for obvious reasons, only for subscribers. Click here to check it out

The latest Jeffrey Epstein email dump brings up some intriguing ideas about the shadowy financier's actual role among all his elite friends, from Donald Trump to Noam Chomsky. Why did so many powerful people seek his advice and companionship, despite knowing the details of his dark crimes? As Justin Rogers-Cooper explains, the answer raises uncomfortable questions about American history, "cancel culture," and the depths of inhumanity we're willing to forgive in our heroes, leaders, and friends.

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This week Justin and I talk about the Mamdani victory in NYC; the shifting dynamics of the much hyped "civil war" within the Democratic Party; how to read the Trump administration's weak response on elections and the government shutdown; Marjorie Taylor-Greene's pivot away from QAnon world; the Heritage Foundation's fight over Nick Fuentes and Nazi influencers; bombshell news about Nayib Bukele and his El Salvador prison project.

The US government shits the bed, Trump dumps AI feces on protesters, the East Wing of the White House gets flushed down the toilet, Mamdani squeezes out a floater upon a dying Democratic Party, and something stinks about the US dropping bombs on "drug dealers" off the coast of Venezuela.

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Spoiler alert! I recorded this livestream about an hour after finishing this movie, so this is me attempting to untangle my thoughts about it. A complicated, funny, scary, and beautiful contemplation about revolutionary praxis (worst word in the world), One Battle After Another is definitely worth your time. I explain why here.

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This week Justin joins me to consider the dialectical nature of our 2025 reality, as we examine the utopian and dystopian properties of Bad Bunny Super Bowl discourse, the rise of Zohran Mamdani, and the accelerated unleashing of AI slop upon a world of hungry little piggies. Are we in heaven, or are we in hell? Why not both?

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The Supreme Court is scared of crossing Trump; Stephen Miller wants to declare the Democratic Party a terrorist organization; an ICE raid in Chicago lays the groundwork for a new era of authoritarianism; late night TV says goodbye; microplastics are giving everyone cancer; and we're all awaiting an economic crash at a scale the world has never seen. Cheers!

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Veep is an HBO comedy series, starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus, that presents a dark satire of insider DC political culture. This week Justin and I consider Veep's acid take on the critical years between 2012-2019, when Obama-era technocratic optimism gave way to Trumpian funhouse fascism. What Veep shows us is the reptilian machinations of the "burned out losers and conniving robots" that succeed in American party politics, giving us an opportunity to ask: is that true? Is the world really run by people this cynical and depraved?

The sci-fi horror film M3GAN was a "surprise" hit last year, generating tons of internet buzz, viral Tik Tok dance videos and, of course, endless think pieces. As Justin Rogers-Cooper and I talk about this week, M3GAN operates on multiple levels, and contains a discourse about AI, capitalist culture, and queer family formation that makes it much more than another "killer robot" movie. Like Silicon Valley itself, M3GAN sings to us: "Tell me your dreams, I will dream them too." But are we really in charge of the dream?

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The FBI-orchestrated murder of Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton in 1969 remains one of the most singularly evil crimes of the 20th century, and it's a story about which most Americans know very little. The 2021 film Judas and the Black Messiah, directed by Shaka King, is a heavy, detailed consideration of the events that led to Hampton's death, focusing mainly on the figure of William O'Neal, a small-time thief coerced by the FBI into becoming a confidential informant working within Hampton's organization. As Justin and I discuss in this episode, the film puts us in the center of the complicated moral calculations that defined 1960s radicalism, and asks hard questions about the price of loyalty, freedom, and revolution.

Listen to whole episode with 7 day free trial of our Patreon membership;

https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-362-and-85368710

Continuing our epic survey of Mr. Show with Bob and David, the most important television program of all time, we watch the final two episodes of Mr. Show's second season: "Operation Hell on Earth" and "The Velveteen Touch of a Dandy Fop." As David, Peter, and Geoff discuss here, the show feels like it takes a thematic/aesthetic turn in these particular sketches, with hints of where we're headed in Season 3. There's weird arty stuff here (the entire "Recruiters" sketch, a parody of the basketball documentary Hoop Dreams, is uncanny), plus some all-time favorite characters (Fartin' Gary, Droopy), and more than a few surprising takes on 90s culture and politics.

Mr. Trap is included with a subscription to the Nostalgia Trap Patreon -- sign up for a FREE 7 day trial here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/mr-trap-ep-5-hey-85206762

Kristen Lovell is a filmmaker whose new documentary, The Stroll, tells the story of transgender women surviving as sex workers in New York City's Meatpacking District during the 1980s and 1990s. This is harrowing stuff, and a perspective on urban history and gentrification like you've never seen before. In this conversation, Lovell tells me about her own experiences in the neighborhood, and reflects on how the Giuliani/Bloomberg era used real estate and finance to cover the city's dark history with luxury facades.

Subscribe to Nostalgia Trap to access our massive library of bonus episodes, video essays, and more: https://patreon.com/nostalgiatrap

This week Justin and I finally get around to watching Jordan Peele's latest film, Nope, a UFO story layered with allegories about race, nature, and cinema itself. We both find something simultaneously compelling and frustrating about Peele's work, and in this conversation we try to get at the weird contours and contradictions of his auteurist project.

Listen to the whole episode with a free trial of our Patreon stream: https://www.patreon.com/posts/livestream-6-16-84684829

On this week's News Trap, I tell the sad story of our podcast's PERSECUTION by the algorithmic fiends at YouTube, who are maliciously and wrongfully accusing Nostalgia Trap of advocating violence and conspiracy theories on our channel.

Depsite this campaign, I persevere by sharing some startling examples of the real violence latent in the American system, with stories about housing, homelessness, and new trends in Vegas table gaming.

Check out this interview with housing activist Paul Boden: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/may/29/paul-boden-america-homelessness-crisis

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This week Justin and I watch the Netflix documentary Inside the Mind of a Cat and contemplate the weird social, political, and spiritual economy of our relationship with cats. From global kitty litter supply chains to the uncanny dominance of cat videos in online spaces, we try to get a handle on how cats became such integral characters in our personal lives and in the wider world.

Listen to the full stream: https://www.patreon.com/posts/livestream-5-19-83262670

This week Justin and I watch the Netflix documentary Waco: American Apocalypse, which tells the story of the disastrous 1993 battle between a Christian end times cult and the United States government. I bet you can guess who won! This conversation touches on some of the gender and family dynamics at play in religious cults, and the paradox of creating a coherent "free" society with an armed population subject to the whims of charismatic religious leaders. If we're continuing the Trap method of seeing history as a map of the future, the road from Waco leads directly to Oklahoma City, Trump, and QAnon.

Full episode: https://www.patreon.com/posts/livestream-5-12-82918108

David A. Banks is a Lecturer in the Geography and Planning department director of the Globalization Studies program at University at Albany, SUNY. His new book, The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America, tells us how American cities are branding themselves with crafty historical "authenticity" in order to draw the creative class to populate and revitalize their dying towns. In this conversation, Banks explains how this nostalgia-driven gentrification, amplified by social media, is a powerful engine in 21st century urban planning, as capital endlessly asks us to "eat the past."

Subscribe to Nostalgia Trap to access our massive library of bonus episodes, video essays, and more: https://patreon.com/nostalgiatrap

On this week's News Trap we learn about Spotify and the fresh nightmare of AI music, pay our respects to a sad teenage suicide from internet bullying, and consider the burning question of the week for online leftists: Is Chomsky canceled for hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein and Woody Allen?

Full episode: https://www.patreon.com/posts/news-trap-5-3-23-82469893

This week Justin and I read a fascinating, troubling recent New York Times editorial, "Our Way of Life is Poisoning Us," and try to wrap our minds and emotions around the existential implications of "microplastics" and the larger phenomenon of a world saturated in oil-based consumer products. From Joe Rogan's freakout about chemicals shrinking our taints, to the pop eco-terrorism of How to Blow Up a Pipeline, we imagine how our corrupted political media content machine can possibly confront a wholly plasticized reality. Is it too late to stop any of this? Is the plastic in control of history?

Full episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/livestream-4-28-82204734

Malcolm Harris is a writer, cultural critic, and prominent voice on the post-Occupy American left. He joins us this week to discuss his latest book, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, which tells the story of how California became the primary machine of American empire. From railroads and universities to social media platforms and artificial intelligence, Harris traces a history that re-orients our understanding of the West Coast's central place in the past and future of global capitalism.

Check out Malcolm's previous Nostalgia Trap appearance: https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-120-bad-22385554

Subscribe to Nostalgia Trap to access our massive library of bonus episodes, video essays, and more: https://patreon.com/nostalgiatrap

This week Justin and I watch the scary Netflix doc THE SOCIAL DILEMMA and freak out about the algorithms that control our thoughts, our feelings, and the VERY HISTORY OF HUMANITY. We're in the matrix, man! It's real!

Subscribe to access our giant library of bonus episodes, video essays, and lots more:

patreon.com/nostalgiatrap

Continuing our cruise through the full Mr. Show with Bob and David sketchography, David, Peter, and Geoff take a detailed look at the first two episodes of Season Two: "Now, Who Wants Ice Cream?" and "A Talking Junkie?" Both of these episodes have plenty to love, including sketches that anticipate/predict Hamilton! and the January 6th Capitol Riot, among other eerie premonitions. But there's also lots to cringe at here, as we lament the weird dynamics of race, gender, and "alt comedy" during an odd moment in late 90s pop culture.

Here's the debut episode of a new weekly podcast called News Trap, in which I share the news stories, headlines, weird emails and cryptic text messages that are melting my mind each week. This is a place for me to share the Nostalgia Trap "backchannel" conversations that animate much of the content we put out.

As I've mentioned on the show many times, my good friend and frequent co-host Justin Rogers-Cooper and I have been curating a private 24 hour news service, exclusively with each other via text message, for years now, and the screenshots, 3am rants, and relentless live analysis of unfolding apocalypse have been the backbone of our work together on Nostalgia Trap.

So I want to let you in on our little news world. Each week I'll share the cream of the crop from these screenshots/news freakouts, plus book recommendations and other fun stuff. In this first episode, we get into lithium wars, global civil unrest, and the fraud of green capitalism, and get a surprise visit from our old pal Kurt Vonnegut.

This debut episode of News Trap is free for everyone; all future episodes are for subscribers only – so join the club!

Subscribe here: https://www.patreon.com/nostalgiatrap

This week Justin and I read Billie Holiday's incredible 1956 memoir Lady Sings the Blues, the story of one woman's journey through a 20th century America saturated in the legacy of slavery and social violence. We discuss the book as a visceral lesson in the lived experience of racial capitalism, tracking how a voice haunted by history carries her through fame, money, drugs, exploitation, incarceration, and death. Why does Holiday's life and voice still speak to us? And what does she have to say?

Check out the whole episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-358-lady-80456339

Carl Freedman is a writer and professor of English literature at Louisiana State University who has written a number of important books on science fiction, American politics, and Marxist critical theory. In our last conversation, we talked about his book American Presidents and Oliver Stone: Kennedy, Nixon, and Bush between History and Cinema and got into the weird cultural legacy of the JFK assassination. This week Carl returns to Nostalgia Trap to continue our survey of titanic 1960s presidents with this conversation all about Richard Nixon and his freaky place in the American political imagination. Underneath our explorations is the persistent question: Did Nixon make us, or did we make Nixon?

Check out Carl's piece in L.A. Review of Books on the lines from Nixon to Trump: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/from-nixon-to-trump-metastases-of-cultural-power/

And here's Carl's book, not to be missed: Age of Nixon: A Study in Cultural Power

Subscribe to Nostalgia Trap to get all the good stuff on our bonus stream: https://www.patreon.com/nostalgiatrap

This week Justin and I take on the US/China Tik Tok fight and consider the wider implications of social media technology weaponized by states in a new cold war. Are we the lab rats for a psychological experiment conducted on a world-historical scale? Fuuuuuuuck, I certainly hope not! In either case, this is an intense conversation surveying the gangster-ass landscape of global capital at a particularly chilling moment, as we try to unlock the future by applying the reptilian logic of money and power to this week's wacky events. Russia, Ukraine, China, NATO, and of course, Las Vegas -- all on the table today. Let's do this.

Subscribe to listen to all our livestreams/bonus stuff, whenever you want: https://www.patreon.com/posts/livestream-3-17-80177026

Tanya L. Roth is a historian and teacher whose new book, Her Cold War: Women in the U.S. Military, 1945-1980, details the experiences of American women after the 1948 Women's Armed Services Integration Act began a new era in the history of military service. In this conversation, Roth explains how, in the decades since World War II, the U.S. military became a central battleground in the fight for gender equality, as women challenged (and ultimately overturned) their classification as "noncombatants" and continue to reshape the structure and ideology of an institution that, for better or worse, serves as a critical engine of social engineering.

Subscribe to access our weekly livestream and giant library of bonus episodes: https://www.patreon.com/nostalgiatrap

Is there property without police? This week Justin and I talk about the "bottom up" appeal of Fox News and Tucker Carlson, as we consider how concepts of home, family, and property are tied up in an ideology of crime and punishment. Lots of directions and implications here, from Ron DeSantis' sadistic turn at Guantanamo to Lori Lightfoot's loss in Chicago. How deep does America's prison mindset go? I think we're gonna find out!

What is "alt comedy" anyway? On this episode of Mr. Trap, we take you back to the mid-1990s, when finding hip comedy with an intelligent perspective was as difficult as finding weed and pornography. Which is to say, pretty difficult! As we survey Mr. Show's first season, we share some of our favorite bits and talk about what made Bob and David stand out in the larger world of 90s humor, from Saturday Night Live to In Living Color. Geoff and Peter tell us what makes Bob's Droopy character so special, we all have a laugh about Tom Kenny's surreal Abraham Lincoln impression, and David tells the story of his multiple, bizarre real-life encounters with the actual Bob Odenkirk and David Cross.

All episodes of Mr. Trap are included with a Nostalgia Trap subscription:

patreon.com/nostalgiatrap

Our friend Avi Garelick joins us to discuss his recent piece on the war between Ron DeSantis and the Disney Corporation in Florida, as we explore the longer history of Florida's extraordinary relationship to the Disney brand. Along the way, we talk about Sean Baker's haunting film The Florida Project, the weird politics and aesthetics of "New Urbanism," and the current direction of housing politics in American cities.

Check out our subscribers-only podcast series on Disney's wild history:

Ep 1 - Time is a Flat Circle: https://www.patreon.com/posts/trap-tv-brick-is-74949645

Ep 2 - Uncle Walt Goes to War: https://www.patreon.com/posts/trap-tv-brick-to-75566223

Ep 3 - Space Cowboys: https://www.patreon.com/posts/trap-tv-brick-76267538

This week Justin and I watch the documentary Missing 411: The Hunted and contemplate cryptids, bigfoots, and mysterious disappearances in American forests. How are American history and politics tied up in these stories? What happened to all of these people? And most of all, what the fuck is making these sounds?

Join up and listen to the whole episode: https://www.patreon.com/posts/livestream-3-3-w-79523275

Freddie deBoer joins me to discuss his viral piece on 90s nostalgia, "It's So Sad When Old People Romanticize Their Heydays, Also the 90s Were Objectively the Best Time to Be Alive." This is a raw and honest conversation about what we miss about the era, what we absolutely hate about the 21st century, and how our lament for the loss of a certain kind of analog social reality is yes, old man shit, but also a call to the younger generation and a cataloging of the ways digital life has crippled us all. There was another way of living, kids. Let us tell you about it…

Listen to whole episode: https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-354-was-79472867

This week Justin and I talk about the Great Chatbot Panic of 2023, leftists in love with Trump's "brilliant" visit to Ohio, and the alleged moral authority of U.S. actions re: Ukraine, one year into the war. Let's do this.

Subscribe to listen to the whole episode and access all our bonus stuff, livestreams, and videos: https://www.patreon.com/posts/livestream-2-24-79161824

In Part Two of my conversation with writer and musician Sean Nelson, we talk about the origins of his band Harvey Danger in the 1990s Seattle music scene, the bizarre rush of having a massive radio hit, and the bleak economic landscape of indie rock in the streaming era. Along the way, Sean offers some hard-earned wisdom and personal reflections on the pejorative concept of the "one hit wonder," as we contemplate the past and future possibilities of subversive popular culture. Were the 90s really the last golden age, or is that just another nostalgia trap?

Listen to the whole episode: https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-353-part-79010461

Sean Nelson is a writer and musician, known widely as the lead singer of the band Harvey Danger, whose 1998 single "Flagpole Sitta" became a staple of "alternative rock" radio and MTV and an inescapable earworm in 90s pop culture. In Part One of this conversation, we talk about what "alternative" means, tracing a line from the 1960s psychedelic culture that produced insane shit like the Monkees movie Head (1968) to the Seattle scene that drew Sean and many others in the early 1990s.

Check out Part Two of our conversation: https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-353-part-79010461

This week Justin and I talk about the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. Are we entering an accelerated era of industrial mass poisonings, or is this just more of the same old industrial mass poisonings?

Listen to the whole episode: patreon.com/posts/livestream-2-17-78840239

Tad Skotnicki is a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the author of The Sympathetic Consumer: Moral Critique in Capitalist Culture (Stanford University Press, 2021). He joins me for a conversation about the common features of consumer activism, from 19th century abolitionism to 21st century Fair Trade movements, which have all based their projects around the idea that consumers are responsible for sympathizing with the invisible laborers that produce their goods, from sugar to iPhones. Skotnicki shares some great historical examples to help illustrate how capitalism's consistent production of "sympathetic consumers" is a feature, not a bug.

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Carl Freedman is a writer and professor of English literature at Louisiana State University who has written a number of important books on science fiction, American politics, and Marxist critical theory. In this conversation, we talk about his book American Presidents and Oliver Stone: Kennedy, Nixon, and Bush between History and Cinema and go down the JFK assassination rabbit hole. How does Oliver Stone's hyper-stylized vision capture the psychedelic violence of a beautiful young celebrity president's savage murder in broad daylight? And how much can we trace a 21st century American political culture of conspiracy theories, true crime obsession, and spectacular public violence to the ritual bloodshed of November 22, 1963?

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What happens when three old pals get together to talk about the 90s sketch comedy program Mr. Show with Bob and David? This podcast answers that very question! Welcome to the debut episode of Mr. Trap, a place where me (David Parsons) and my good friends Peter Sabatino and Geoff Johnson can trade ideas, memories, analysis, and even a few laffs about a show that touched our young hearts and forged our identities. In this opening conversation we get into Mr. Show's origins in the L.A. alt comedy scene, the transition to HBO, and the first few insane sketches announcing a new *extra ironic* set of Gen X comedy voices.

First episode is free -- everything else is for Nostalgia Trap Patreon subscribers only!

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This week Justin and I go all in on Baz Luhrmann's camp masterpiece Elvis (2022), as we consider the life, work, and legacy of an iconic 20th century artist/product/celebrity/Christ figure. How is Elvis' insane life story emblematic of an archetypal cultural phenomenon, from Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin to Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston? How do we sort out the contradictions of race, gender, sexuality, and class in Elvis' rise and fall? And perhaps most of all, what's up with Tom Hanks in this movie?

Listen to the whole episode: https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-349-i-w-78198738

What does it mean to "go underground"? Lara Langer Cohen is an associate professor of English at Swarthmore College. Her latest book, Going Underground: Race, Space, and the Subterranean in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Duke University Press, 2023), explores how subterranean spaces (both real and imagined) animated social, political, and cultural movements in 19th century America, from the abolitionists of the Underground Railroad to anarchist secret societies and practitioners of sex magic. In this conversation, we plunge into these underground worlds and excavate some of the lost people and ideas that populate the places that exist beneath our collective history.

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This week Yasmin and I watch Chinatown (1974) and have a conversation about the film's infamously elegant screenplay, shocking plot twist, insanely dark ending, and wonderfully sleazy cameo from the film's director, Roman Polanski, whose own personal corruption intersects with the film's brutal vision of a corrupted world. What does Chinatown have to say to us now?

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How do shifting ideas about physical fitness, health, and the body reflect larger ideological structures like nation, race, gender, and capitalism? Natalia Mehlman Petrzela is a historian of American culture and politics and associate professor of history at the New School. In this conversation, we discuss her latest book Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America's Exercise Obsession, which tracks the evolution of fitness culture from the strongman exhibitions at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair to the Peloton/home gym movement of the COVID-19 era.

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On this episode of Housing Trap, Andrew is joined by Zach Paganini, a Ph.D. student in the Earth and Environmental Sciences program at the CUNY Graduate Center, for a conversation about the effects of water on the political economy of housing in America's coastal cities. Threatened by floods, superstorms, and rising sea levels, cities from New York to Florida to Southern California, known for their lucrative real estate, are already undergoing immense shifts in anticipation of a wet future. Schustek and Paganini explore the contours of that future, explaining how housing policy is a central arena in the battle for economic and environmental fairness and sustainability.

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This week Justin and I watched the HBO Max documentary This Place Rules, which gives us a chance to talk about the weird undercurrents of rape, sexual domination, violence, and pedophilia coursing through 1/6, QAnon, Alex Jones, Proud Boys, Antifa, and even the filmmaker himself. Are we in a unique moment for subconscious urges bubbling to the surface of public politics, or has it always been this way?

Listen to the whole episode: https://www.patreon.com/posts/livestream-1-13-77204705

What is film noir and why does it matter? In the first episode of a series called Shadow Nation, I reflect on the commercial failure of Guillermo Del Toro's prestige noir remake Nightmare Alley (2021) and wonder what makes a movie "noir" in the first place. Is it just detectives and fedoras and femmes fatale? Or is there a way of understanding noir beyond style, genre, and visual aesthetic?

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Our series on 1990s/2000s comedy continues this week with a conversation about Seinfeld. Justin and I watched two episodes (S5E5 "The Bris" and S7E4 "The Wink"), and reflect on the show's weird elevated "dream vision" of 90s bourgeois culture.

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This week Justin and I watch Elf (2003) and talk about Will Ferrell's late 90s/early 2000s comic persona in the context of male bodies, George W. Bush, and a particular cultural turn toward "dumb assholes" in the digital era.

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What makes disturbing, graphic shows like CSI and Intervention so morbidly appealing? How does our desire for uncomfortable entertainment reflect a larger normalization of fear, precarity, and violence in our everyday reality? Hunter Hargraves is Associate Professor of Cinema and Television Arts at California State University, Fullerton. His new book, Uncomfortable Television (Duke University Press, 2023), examines how 21st century television invites viewers to find pleasure in discomfort, training us to survive in a neoliberal world that's just one cringe experience after another.

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This week Justin and I jump off our previous discussion of Groundhog Day with a look at Planes, Trains, and Automobiles (1987), a deceptively complicated film about class, gender, and the queer social dynamics of American capitalism. We talk a lot about John Candy as a performer and celebrity here, finding lots of unexpected connections with the life and death of Kurt Cobain, another figure who introduced working class conceptions of embodiment (think butts, buttholes, blood, semen, foot odor, etc) at a critical moment in American pop cultural history.

Since clever people are now declaring the end of college education, Ryan and I thought it might be fun to survey the highs and lows of our own respective "college" experiences, from undergrad to Ph.D. What worked for us, and what ruined our lives forever? Like any good academics, we're making a list!

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Go read Ryan's Substack

Check out David's grad school rant on YouTube

Daniel Horowitz is a historian and the author of many books on American consumer culture, economics, and political ideology. In this conversation we discuss his latest book, American Dreams, American Nightmares: Culture and Crisis in Residential Real Estate from the Great Recession to the COVID-19 Pandemic (UNC Press, 2022), which connects the dots of our 21st century housing crisis, from HGTV reality shows (with titles like Flip or Flop, Hot Mess House, etc.), to Airbnb real estate moguls and the new era of working from home. How did buying, selling, and living in houses become such a social, cultural, and economic war zone?

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This week Justin and I talk about China's Zero Covid policies coming apart as Apple demands MORE IPHONES, which leads to a wider consideration of what it means when a state drives people from the farms to the factories. Plus, we reflect on Ye's new Christofascism in the context of violence against LGBTQ+ communities, as we ponder how to confront an enemy that LOLs at the damage they create.

Listen to the whole episode: patreon.com/posts/livestream-12-9-75725406

On this episode of TRAP TV, we examine a critical moment in the history of the Walt Disney Company, when the tremendous success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937 gave way to a period of rapid expansion and ambitious, ultimately unsuccessful projects that nearly bankrupted the business and ended the Disney era. Then, the war came. This is the story of how World War II not only rescued Disney from financial ruin, it sharpened the company's aesthetic and ideological purpose. With an unprecedented animator's strike nearly paralyzing production in 1941, the war and its fallout on the homefront began a new period for both Disney the man and Disney the cultural product, as hyper-nationalism, militarism, and explicit anti-communism entered Disney's bloodstream and brought the company to unimagined new heights of profit and influence.

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This week Justin and I talk about the fight between labor, management, unions, and the state now being waged in the railroad industry, and trace the longer history of rail and transport as central spaces for navigating the class violence bubbling under the surface of the American economy. Plus, Christmas nostalgia for all the boys and girls!

Full episode: patreon.com/posts/livestream-12-2-75429714

This week Yasmin and I watch Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968) and Birth (Jonathan Glazer, 2004), two films about trapped women, pixie haircuts, beautiful New York apartments, stifling bourgeois social norms, and creepy children born of Satan. There's plenty for us to chew on here—from architecture and occult power to deeply unsettling notions of childhood, death, and sexuality—as we consider how these films locate an atmosphere of dread and horror in the fantastic spaces of elite New York.

Chad E. Pearson is a labor historian and writer whose work focuses on ruling class organizations and violence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this episode we discuss his latest book, Capital's Terrorists: Klansmen, Lawmen, and Employers in the Long Nineteenth Century (UNC Press, 2022), which explores how elite capitalists evolved new strategies of violence and repression during the Second Industrial Revolution, employing extralegal terror—from book burning and blacklists to kidnappings, arson, and murder—as a means of securing their power over a rising population of wage workers.

This week Justin and I consider the possibility that news of Twitter's imminent demise may be premature, which leads to a discussion of tech bro culture's connection to the wider history of consumer capitalism and the series of swaggering men who promise utopian escapes from the very nightmare they've created, producing an endless cycle of technological baubles that attempt to remove us from linear time and distract us from the inevitable march toward death. Does it work? You tell me!

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Shane Burley returns to the Trap for a challenging conversation about Stanley Kubrick's 1987 Vietnam war mindfuck Full Metal Jacket, a film that asks deep, dark questions about violence, masculinity, racial imperialism, and other persistent features of human history. From its prolonged opening training sequence of horrific, hilariously choreographed ritual abuse to the oddly staged final battle sequences and bleak, abrupt ending, we explore how Full Metal Jacket's relentless tone of removed, sarcastic cynicism offers a fractal view of war that remains one of Kubrick's most punishing visions.

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On this installment of Housing Trap, Andrew Schustek talks with Benjamin Teresa, a professor in the Urban and Regional Studies and Planning program at the Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs at UVA. In this conversation, Teresa explains the role of finance and real estate in shaping the possibilities and limits of housing policy, and offers some ideas on how community engagement might open a trapdoor to a more livable future.

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The livestream returns to a week full of exciting collapses: MAGA, Twitter, Meta, all run by men who talk a big game but suddenly can't seal the deal. Is this a temporary blip, "something that happens to all guys sometimes," or are the big swingers of the digital era reaching their limits?

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This week Ryan and I watch an incendiary viral TikTok and debate the idea of "third places" – those special spaces where a human being can be a human being, around other human beings. Does such a space exist anymore? Who knows! But it seems like the degradation of public space in the past few decades just MIGHT have something to do with the decline of liberal social values – or is it the other way around? Let's ask Mike Davis…

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Andrew Schustek and Samuel Stein continue their conversation on the inner workings of American housing policy, this time focusing on subsidies, affordable housing, and signs of weakness/vulnerability in the "real estate state."

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Nostalgia Trap fellow traveler and guest host Andrew Schustek continues our series of conversations on the political economy of housing in the 21st century. This week, Andrew talks with geographer, urban planner and housing policy analyst Samuel Stein, whose book Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State is already a classic of modern urban studies and required reading for anyone interested in a progressive vision of city planning. In this episode, Andrew and Sam introduce us to the major structures of the "real estate state" and imagine pathways to a future of lower rents and better living.

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This week Justin and I watch the first few episodes of Adam Curtis' latest documentary provocation, Russia 1985–1999: TraumaZone, as we consider the different ways to imagine "collapse," both ideologically and aesthetically.

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Do you need a college degree in order to understand T.S. Eliot poems? Does subjecting a work of art or literature to academic analysis ruin our enjoyment of said work? This week Ryan and I talk about the "point" of a humanities education in a technocratic neoliberal world, and reflect on the increasingly dominant view of college as a transaction rather than an education. How do we put the heart back in higher ed?

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Shane Burley is a writer and filmmaker whose work explores the contours of 21st century fascist movements. His latest book, Why We Fight: Essays on Fascism, Resistance, and Surviving the Apocalypse (AK Press, 2021), covers the rapid shift in organizing tactics on the right and left in the years since the 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right rally. In this conversation we reflect on the fascist, antisemitic vibes now permeating pop culture and political discourse, and Shane shares his experiences as a journalist covering radical politics at an increasingly fractured historical moment.

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This week Justin and I talk about the UFO documentary Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind: Contact Has Begun (2020), and get into the multiple UFO narratives currently circulating in online/media/state intelligence discourse. As always, we apply the Trap method of entertaining many different layered truths (an ecology of realities is one way to put it), but also tell some stories about our own "contact" experiences that shaped our personal perceptions of what's out there.

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This week Yasmin and I endure Andrew Dominik's much over-hyped Netflix #content Blonde, a fictional passion play "about" Marilyn Monroe, based on the novel by Joyce Carol Oates. Our reactions are analytical and emotional, and we work out the intense feelings about celebrity, power, and gender brought up by the film's often absurd provocations. And by the way, what are the gender dynamics at work here? Is this Andrea Dworkin sex-negative feminism disguised as arthouse shock therapy, or a brilliant, radical take on fame and desire? One thing we can agree on: Marilyn deserves better.

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Is the era of tech utopianism over? Does anyone believe that Zuckerberg's Hail Mary plan to trap us all in some nightmarish alternate digital reality is actually going to work? This week Justin and I consider the social and cultural elements of tech as a driver of the US economy, and wonder if virtual reality is really the future, or the dead end of Silicon Valley's grip on the popular imagination.

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Historian and author Jason Vuic returns to the Trap to talk about his book The Yucks: Two Years in Tampa with the Losingest Team in NFL History, which tells the incredible story of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers' disastrous, legendary first season as a professional football organization. Marked by appalling working conditions, a colorfully brutal head coach, a penny-pinching owner, and a winking gay pirate mascot, the Bucs' 26-game losing streak is a bizarre piece of sports history that, as Vuic explains, paints a striking picture of 1970s American entrepreneurial culture and the chaotic politics of building and promoting Florida.

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As we continue into the "wormhole" opened up by COVID and Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Justin and I consider the positions of those "behind the wall" of empire. How will we experience the future shocks now coming more clearly into view?

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How much American bootstrap ideology are we obligated to deliver to students? This week Ryan Boyd and I take a look at some "practical advice" about "surviving college" from a couple of recent popular books on the subject, and we discover a disturbing strain of self-help/New Age/Protestant work ethic/grindset philosophy that, perhaps unsurprisingly, fails to acknowledge structural and material barriers (money, food, housing, etc) to student success. So what's a teacher to do? Sell the hustle or sell the trapdoor?

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This week on the livestream we continue our discussion with Justin Rogers-Cooper on the end of the neoliberal order in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the "wormhole" we're entering. Justin offers some context and insights from environmental historian Jason W. Moore's Capitalism in the Web of Life (Verso, 2015), and we listen to some groovy stuff from JPW's excellent new album Something Happening/Always Happening.

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