Nostalgia Trap

Ellen Schrecker is an American historian whose work focuses on Cold War-era anti-communism. Her book Many are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America is a canonical treatment of the subject. In this inte…

Sarah Jones is a writer and social media editor at the New Republic, where her work has focused on poverty, politics, feminism, health care, and a number of other issues. I wanted to talk to her abou…

Katie Halper is the host of the Katie Halper Show on WBAI, where she regularly brings a fresh, funny, and stridently left perspective to the horrific landscape of modern American politics. We talked …

Justin Rogers-Cooper and I have spent a lot of time talking about false flags, conspiracy theories, and the strange American predilection for constructing our own personal realities. In this conversa…

Jesse Myerson is a writer and activist whose work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Dissent, The Baffler, and many of other publications. We talk a lot about the contemporary left, Occupy Wall Street, t…

It's always fun to sit down with writer Freddie deBoer, whose sharp, often savage takes on American politics usually provoke strong reactions from both friends and foes. In this conversation we talk …

Matt Lau was a ubiquitous presence at the CUNY Graduate Center during my years of study there, perhaps most memorably as the author of a series of ridiculous satirical pieces on the back page of the …

Nostalgia Trap AM/FM:  It's the end of the world and you know it.

Nostalgia Trap AM/FM:  Real conversations about history, politics, and culture, remixed for an apocalyptic era. Coming soon.

Michael Busch is a senior editor at Warscapes, an online magazine that features writing, art, photography and other media from war-torn regions around the globe. Michael talks with me about his youth…

L.A. Kauffman is a longtime organizer and historian whose new book, Direct Action:  Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism traces the history of the left in the post 1960s era. She spoke …

Daniel Pinchbeck's bestselling 2002 book Breaking Open the Head:  A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism had a profound effect on me when I read it in my early twenties. Along…

Will Menaker is one of the hosts of Chapo Trap House, a fierce and funny podcast that took the media world by storm during Election 2016. Here Will makes a triumphant return to the Nostalgia Trap, di…

Felix Biederman is one of the hosts of Chapo Trap House, a podcast that mixes relentless satire with incisive political analysis. In this conversation, recorded less than 24 hours after Donald Trump …

Matt Christman is one third of the wildly popular podcast Chapo Trap House, a show that takes left political satire to a brutal, hilarious, and altogether new place. He talked with me about his youth…

Myq Kaplan is a very funny stand-up comedian whose material often touches on cultural issues like veganism, polyamory, and psychedelic drugs. I talked to him about his work in linguistics at Boston U…

Thaddeus Russell is a professor of history and writer whose book A Renegade History of the United States presents a striking counter-narrative to popular interpretations of the American experience. I…

Nathan Cedric Tankus is a young scholar studying American economics during the antebellum period. He talked with me about his research, his personal background, and the future of left/right politics.

Dahlia Elsayed is a visual artist, writer, and professor at LaGuardia Community College. She told me all about her youth in New Jersey during the Reagan years, her take on the punks vs. hippies rival…