Nostalgia Trap

I started teaching college history courses in 2005 when I was a graduate student at the City University of New York. Looking back at those early years, I can hardly believe how little I knew about ho…

David Lynch died earlier this month, and like many others I’ve been reflecting on his legacy, not only in the wider culture but in my own personal trajectory and identity. In this episode, I focus on…

The politics of rebuilding Los Angeles after the fires, tech maneuvering for Trump juice, social media outrage missing the mark, Elon's Nazi salute masking something darker, a new Gilded Age comes in…

Ross Barkan is a political writer and novelist whose Substack is one of our favorite places for thoughtful takes on the current political and cultural landscape. He joins me this week to survey the l…

This week I’m joined by Evan Friss, author of the current New York Times bestseller The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore, which traces the development of bookshops as integral, often pa…

Fires in Los Angeles unleash a wave of online hate from the left and right. What chance do we have to mitigate the coming climate change disasters if the population's reactions are driven by algorith…

This week I talk with David Humphries, a professor of English at Queensborough Community College in New York City, about his excellent project Happy Nostalgia: Making Connections with the Music of t…

A critical but often overlooked chapter in American labor history, the animator’s strike that shook the Walt Disney Corporation in 1941 was part of a wave of labor struggle in World War II era Hollyw…

This week we watched the excellent Apple TV series Severance and put it in conversation with Naomi Klein’s latest book Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. Both texts explore how the concept …

A United Healthcare CEO is assassinated and the world laughs, fitness and nutrition culture goes fascist, Europe in collapse while China salivates, Trump's tariffs portend new global shockwaves.

To h…

It's Black Friday, so between insane binges of online shopping, Justin and I sat down to record a conversation about the Netflix documentary The Antisocial Network: From Memes to Mayhem, as we consid…

Musk's endgame on environmental regulations, universities bracing for a war on DEI and critical race theory, Houthi pirates drawn to their deaths in Ukraine, national economies bracing for world war.…

Tim Keogh is an Associate Professor of History at the Queensborough Community College in New York City. His book In Levittown’s Shadow: Poverty in America’s Wealthiest Postwar Suburb turns a common …

This week I’m joined by my good friend Peter Sabatino for a conversation all about Vincent Van Gogh’s personal and artistic legacy. We both read the book Van Gogh: The Life by Steven Naifeh and Grego…

Armed militias roam the hurricane ravaged wastelands of North Carolina, no one wants children and it's not because of the economy, Apple's Vision Pro is a massive failure, we're stepping off the ship…

Jack Reid is an American historian and the author of Roadside Americans: The Rise and Fall of Hitchhiking in a Changing Nation (UNC Press, 2020). In this conversation, we talk about the specific cult…

Joseph M. Thompson is assistant professor of history at Mississippi State University, and the author of Cold War Country: How Nashville's Music Row and the Pentagon Created the Sound of American Patr…

Andrew C. McKevitt is John D. Winters Endowed Professor of History at Louisiana Tech University. His latest book, Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America, explores how g…

R.E.M. is one of the most influential rock bands in American music history, with a legendary arc that took them from college radio punks in the early 80s to critical darlings and arena rockers with m…