Nostalgia Trap

Hunter S. Thompson’s 1971 novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas remains a classic of American drug literature, a haunting reflection on the cultural and political hangover of the revolutionary 1960s. …

An explosive piece called "Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College" raises a few questions for me: What is the left's attitude toward tech? Is there anything positive about AI?Is digital tech…

FAA failures creating realistic fears of looming airline disasters, Trump's cryptocurrency scam, quantum computing and financial apocalypse, Kanye's celebrity vagina mega corporation, Israel's endgam…

April 30, 2025 is the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, so I’m marking the occasion by reflecting on the war’s meaning all these decades later. I share my own experiences as a historian…

The recent death of Val Kilmer got Justin and I thinking about Jim Morrison and the curious legacy of The Doors in American pop culture. In this conversation, we continue our exploration of the amorp…

I'm reading S.C. Gwynne's incredible book Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History, and it's making me think…

As the Trump administration tests the "Hamilton glitch" in the U.S. Constitution by sending Abrego Garcia and others to a foreign concentration camp without legal due process, I thought it might be t…

Trump's tariff carnival is doing real damage to the global economy, and Justin shares his thoughts on how a collapsing financial architecture will impact big capital, our daily lives, and the Trump p…

Trump is dismantling the global neoliberal economic order that has served as the left's boogeyman for years, which SHOULD be an opportunity for the left to offer something beyond shrugging ambivalanc…

Guitar Center dudes and their insanely rigid opinions lead to a conversation with Justin about the political psychology of FOMO, the rise of the pedophile hunter influencer class, the masculine despe…

Adam Kotsko is a writer and cultural critic whose work focuses on American pop culture, from “cringe” comedies to our national obsession with sociopathic protagonists. His latest book, Late Star Trek…

Fascism comes to my local city council meeting, a proud Israel supporter haunts my gym, Elon Musk's transgender daughter drives him off a cliff, Trump wants to send people to foreign torture camps fo…

Today I fall into paranoid android mode, thinking about what it means to "own the libs" from the left in the new Trump Reich. My message to an increasingly marginalized left flank: be careful what yo…

Trump and Elon Musk are actively working to destroy the global economic order, but to what end? This week Justin and I consider the wacky cartoon reality that Americans inhabit, and speculate about t…

Stephen Petrus is director of Public History Programs at LaGuardia and Wagner Archives and co-author of the book Folk City: New York and the American Folk Music Revival (2015). He joins me to discus…

Our good friend Justin Rogers-Cooper joins me to survey the first month of Trump's presidency, as we play out some of the nastier currents now circling in American and global political culture, from …

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…

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…

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 maxim…

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…