Nostalgia Trap

To mark the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Justin Rogers-Cooper joins us for a trilogy of episodes considering the event’s legacy and long-term impact. In Part One, we consider the immediate s…

Bertrand Cooper joins us to discuss his latest incendiary piece in Current Affairs, “Who Actually Gets to Create Black Pop Culture?,” which argues that the elite class composition of many Black creat…

Who are “the people”? Erik Baker joins us to discuss his latest piece in n+1, a review of Thomas Frank’s 2020 book The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism. Baker takes on Frank’s New Deal n…

Full episode: patreon.com/nostalgiatrap. Kyle Riismandel returns to the Trap to discuss the abysmal HBO documentary Woodstock ‘99: Peace, Love, and Rage, a film that, despite its shortcomings, gives …

What do Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy, and the rest of the gang have to tell us about the staggering loneliness at the heart of the American experience? Blake Scott Ball is a professor of history at Hu…

Kyle Riismandel, author of Neighborhood of Fear: The Suburban Crisis in American Culture, 1975-2001, returns to talk about the idea of generations, both as useful historical dividers and as complicat…

On Episode 5, we take a look at the period 1956-1963, when the United States attempted to create an anti-communist state called South Vietnam, with a well-connected Catholic-Confucian politician name…

Elizabeth Becker is an award-winning author and journalist; her latest book, You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War (2021), profiles three journalists whose groundbreaking w…

Donald Borenstein is a freelance video director, editor, and one of my favorite online friends, whose posts on politics, culture, and media have been a highlight of my feed for years. This week we fi…

On this week’s episode we explore the world of CIA spookery unleashed in Vietnam as the French exited the region and the United States began escalating its involvement in Vietnamese affairs. From the…

The kids are crazy for Columbo! This week our friend Bill Black drops by to talk about the long-running detective show starring Peter Falk that’s seen an unlikely resurgence in the COVID era. From it…

Allan Cooper is a professor of political science at North Carolina Central University. He joins us to discuss his latest book, Africa and the Global System of Capital Accumulation, which describes t…

On this week's episode of NAM-TV, we continue our story with a look at the First Indochina War (1946-1954), in which France attempted to reconquer Vietnam by fighting the Viet Minh, Ho Chi Minh's inc…

Aaron Lecklider is a professor of American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston and the author of Love’s Next Meeting: The Forgotten History of Homosexuality and the Left in American Cu…

This week Claudia and I continue our movie series with two 1980s Hollywood comedies about the lives of working class women, Pretty in Pink (1986) and Working Girl (1988). Our conversation explores ho…

Here's a quick look at Episode 2 of NAM-TV, our new video lecture series on the Vietnam War and American historical memory. Available now for subscribers at patreon.com/nostalgiatrap, with new episod…

A quick clip from this week's livestream with Justin Rogers-Cooper providing some historical context and analysis to ongoing horrors in Ethiopia, Myanmar, Colombia, and Belarus. Subscribe for the ful…