Nostalgia Trap

Johanna Fernandez is a professor of history at CUNY's Baruch College. We had a great talk about her childhood in the Bronx, her path in higher education, her development as an activist, and her frien…

Freddie deBoer is an academic and writer with a talent for provocation. He joins me to discuss his family's roots on the left, his engagement with the politics of higher education, and the impetus be…

Sarah Leonard, a senior editor and writer at The Nation, talks about her new book, The Future We Want: Radical Ideas for the New Century, and shares her thoughts on what this wacky primary season por…

Corey Robin, professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College, shares his thoughts on the punishing 2016 presidential primary season. Trump, Sanders, Hillary:  what does it all mean? 

Professor Eric Foner is a leading contemporary historian, whose work focuses on American political history, shifting notions of freedom and liberty, and (perhaps most famously) on the period of post-…

David Nasaw is a historian and writer whose recent work has produced a series of magisterial biographies of some of the most towering figures in American history (William Randolph Hearst, Andrew Carn…

Justin Rogers-Cooper is a professor of English at LaGuardia Community College, as well as one of the best friends I made while studying at the CUNY Graduate Center through the Bush and Obama years. J…

Frederik Logevall is a professor of history and one of the foremost American scholars of the Vietnam War. His most recent book, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietna…

Liza Featherstone is a journalist and professor whose book Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers' Rights at Wal-Mart covered one of the largest class-action lawsuits in American histor…

Owen Powell is a retired military police sergeant, former Marine, and Iraq combat veteran whose experiences in war have been chronicled in the New York Times, on NPR, and perhaps most prominently in …

Minerva Ahumada is a professor of philosophy at LaGuardia Community College. In this episode, we talk about her youth in Mexico, her unexpected move to the United States, and how a Japanese version o…

Moustafa Bayoumi is an associate professor of English at Brooklyn College and the author of How Does it Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America (2009). In this conversation, we talk abo…

Will Menaker is an editor at Liveright Publishing, who recently put out Jacob Bacharach's debut novel, The Bend of the World. I've known Will since graduate school, where we shared a common love for …

Although the popular stereotype of "kids these days" has them staring apathetically at their phones, more concerned with selfies than politics, my experiences with young people at CUNY often give the…

Claudia Moreno Parsons is a professor of English at LaGuardia Community College, and also the wife of your humble host. Since I've spoken to so many guests about the different people that made an imp…

Currently a professor in the Economics department at John Jay College in New York City, Josh Mason is one of only a few economists that I know in real life, so it was great to have the opportunity to…

I've known English professor Neil Meyer for many years, since our time spent concurrently at the CUNY Graduate Center, which spanned more or less the entire Bush and early Obama eras. I never knew Ne…

My conversation with Jayashree Kamble, a writer and English professor at LaGuardia Community College, was an opportunity to talk about popular culture, an intense and rich subject of study that, at l…

Sarah Jaffe is a freelance writer and journalist whose work appears in The Guardian, In These Times, Salon, and Dissent Magazine, where she co-hosts the Belabored Podcast. We had a fun conversation a…