Nostalgia Trap

Is there a deeper, more powerful nostalgia trap than the Christmas season? In this conversation, Yasmin Nair helps me work out my mixed emotions about the holidays, as we watch the Billy Wilder movie…

Our epic trilogy on the life, work, and legacy of Howard Zinn concludes with a conversation about Zinn’s place in the wider history of the American left. Was Zinn a communist, an anarchist, or what? …

KJ Shepherd joins us to talk about the #FreeBritney moment and the wider phenomenon of diva worship. What makes a diva? And more importantly, how is celebrity fandom entangled with capitalism and que…

Our series on the life, work, and legacy of Howard Zinn continues with a detailed conversation about the book that made Zinn famous, A People’s History of the United States. Published in 1980, A Peop…

In Part One of our series on the life, work, and legacy of Howard Zinn, Justin Rogers-Cooper and I read Zinn’s 1994 memoir You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train and extract some of the juiciest bit…

Rax King returns to the Trap to tell us all about her new book Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer, which surveys the wreckage of 21st century American pop culture and finds mu…

As he approaches a major personal milestone, our good friend and Nostalgia Trap producer Peter Sabatino joins me for an honest conversation about the role alcohol has played in our respective lives. …

Max Chafkin, author of The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power (see Episode 294), returns for a conversation all about SpaceX cowboy Elon Musk. Is this guy a tech genius sav…

Could a Red Hot Chili Peppers song from 1999 hold the key to understanding the political economy of 21st century tech culture and the globalization of Hollywood’s vampiric vision of human nature? As …

This week Freddie deBoer joins me to talk about his recent Substack piece “Smoking Weed Doesn’t Feel Good for Me Anymore, and It Hasn’t for a Long Time,” exploring how cannabis legalization, stronger…

Part Two of our conversation with Yasmin Nair on death and grief in the COVID era. Check out Yasmin’s incredible archive of writing, including many of the pieces discussed in this episode, here: yasm…

Andrew Schustek joins us to discuss the extraordinary Japanese horror film Cure (1997), one of a number of unbelievably prescient works directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa that take on the nightmarish socia…

Max Chafkin is an editor at Bloomberg Businessweek whose new book, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power tells the unbelievable true story of Peter Thiel’s rise to power …

Justin joins us to talk about Ross Barkan’s incredible book The Prince: Andrew Cuomo, Coronavirus, and the Fall of New York, as we discuss some of the wilder implications of Cuomo’s sickening “daddy”…

Ross Barkan is a journalist who has been covering New York state politics, in particular the governorship of Andrew Cuomo, for the last eight years. He joins us to discuss his book The Prince: Andrew…

For the conclusion of our 9/11 trilogy, Justin Rogers-Cooper and I watch Alfonso Cuarón's 2006 cinematic masterpiece Children of Men, a work that has moved and obsessed both of us for years. We refle…

For Part Two of our 9/11 trilogy, Justin Rogers-Cooper helps us untangle the world of 9/11 truthers and related conspiracy theories, as we explore how the attacks and their aftermath destabilized con…