Nostalgia Trap

This week we talk about the political and social economy of “first person shooter” video games with Danny Bessner, whose recent piece in The Drift investigates the deep cultural contradictions at pla…

Alex Vitale is a professor of sociology and Coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College. His 2017 book, The End of Policing, has received significant attention in the …

Here's a quick look at our new video lecture series NAM-TV, our new video lecture series on the Vietnam War and American historical memory. Episode One is available now for subscribers at patreon.com…

Katrinell Davis is an associate professor of sociology at Florida State University and the author of two incredible books: Hard Work is Not Enough: Gender and Racial Inequality in an Urban Workspace …

Abraham Lincoln: Working class hero? Holy Angel of Liberation? Capitalist collaborator? Matthew Stanley has some ideas for us. As an associate professor of history at Albany State University, his wor…

This week Justin and I watch the HBO documentary Q: Into the Storm, and share our ideas about the QAnon phenomenon, from the sewers of 8chan to the hordes of Q-Tubers amplifying its ideas, paying spe…

What does it mean to “eat like a man”? This week’s guest, Emily J.H. Contois, is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Tulsa and the author of Diners, Dudes, and Diets: How Ge…

This week Claudia joins us to survey two of Martin Scorsese’s earliest films, Mean Streets (1973) and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), both of which express the lived experiences of working cl…

Kyle Burke is an assistant professor of history and Co-Coordinator of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at Hartwick College. In this conversation, he discusses his book Revolutionaries for the …

Karina Moreno is an associate professor in the department of urban policy and planning at Hunter College. She joins us to discuss her latest piece in Jacobin, which surveys the Biden administration’…

This week, Claudia and I talk about 3 of our favorite films, the “acid noirs”: The Long Goodbye (1973), The Big Lebowski (1998), and Inherent Vice (2014). United in theme and tone, the films explore …

Anne Balay is the author of two extraordinary works of social history: Steel Closets: Voices of Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Steelworkers and Semi Queer: Inside the World of Gay, Trans, and Black T…

Justin Rogers-Cooper helps us takes a deep dive into the aesthetic and political legacy of Kurt Cobain, who died of suicide 25 years ago this month. Cobain is an iconic pop cultural figure for a numb…

This week’s guest runs the website and podcast The Blockchain Socialist, which seeks to investigate the intersection of blockchain technology and left politics. In this conversation, we talk about th…

Joe Clark (author of News Parade: The American Newsreel and the World as Spectacle) returns to the show to talk about the ugly elephant in the room for young academics: the total collapse of full-tim…

Courtenay Stallings is a writer, historian, and the author of Laura’s Ghost: Women Speak about Twin Peaks. The book explores how Laura Palmer, whose death lies at the center of David Lynch’s epic te…

Tom O’Neill’s mind-blowing book CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties sent me down so many unbelievable rabbit holes, made me feel so paranoid and obsessed, that I abs…

Reality Bites (dir. Ben Stiller, 1994) is a film that attempts to condense the entirety of the Gen X experience into a 100 minute romantic comedy in which Winona Ryder faces the unfortunate predicame…

This week Claudia and I watched American Beauty (dir. Sam Mendes, 1999), a film that had a major cultural impact upon its release but hits significantly different in 2021. From the awkward screen pre…

Richard Kent Evans is the author of MOVE: An American Religion, a groundbreaking history of the MOVE organization, a black radical group whose founding members were killed alongside their children wh…