Nostalgia Trap

Kristen Lovell is a filmmaker whose new documentary, The Stroll, tells the story of transgender women surviving as sex workers in New York City’s Meatpacking District during the 1980s and 1990s. This…

This week Justin and I finally get around to watching Jordan Peele's latest film, Nope, a UFO story layered with allegories about race, nature, and cinema itself. We both find something simultaneousl…

On this week's News Trap, I tell the sad story of our podcast's PERSECUTION by the algorithmic fiends at YouTube, who are maliciously and wrongfully accusing Nostalgia Trap of advocating violence and…

This week Justin and I watch the Netflix documentary Inside the Mind of a Cat and contemplate the weird social, political, and spiritual economy of our relationship with cats. From global kitty litte…

This week Justin and I watch the Netflix documentary Waco: American Apocalypse, which tells the story of the disastrous 1993 battle between a Christian end times cult and the United States government…

David A. Banks is a Lecturer in the Geography and Planning department director of the Globalization Studies program at University at Albany, SUNY. His new book, The City Authentic: How the Attention …

On this week's News Trap we learn about Spotify and the fresh nightmare of AI music, pay our respects to a sad teenage suicide from internet bullying, and consider the burning question of the week f…

This week Justin and I read a fascinating, troubling recent New York Times editorial, "Our Way of Life is Poisoning Us," and try to wrap our minds and emotions around the existential implications of …

Malcolm Harris is a writer, cultural critic, and prominent voice on the post-Occupy American left. He joins us this week to discuss his latest book, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, a…

This week Justin and I watch the scary Netflix doc THE SOCIAL DILEMMA and freak out about the algorithms that control our thoughts, our feelings, and the VERY HISTORY OF HUMANITY. We're in the matrix…

Continuing our cruise through the full Mr. Show with Bob and David sketchography, David, Peter, and Geoff take a detailed look at the first two episodes of Season Two: "Now, Who Wants Ice Cream?" and…

Here’s the debut episode of a new weekly podcast called News Trap, in which I share the news stories, headlines, weird emails and cryptic text messages that are melting my mind each week. This is a p…

This week Justin and I read Billie Holiday’s incredible 1956 memoir Lady Sings the Blues, the story of one woman’s journey through a 20th century America saturated in the legacy of slavery and social…

Carl Freedman is a writer and professor of English literature at Louisiana State University who has written a number of important books on science fiction, American politics, and Marxist critical the…

This week Justin and I take on the US/China Tik Tok fight and consider the wider implications of social media technology weaponized by states in a new cold war. Are we the lab rats for a psychologica…

Tanya L. Roth is a historian and teacher whose new book, Her Cold War: Women in the U.S. Military, 1945-1980, details the experiences of American women after the 1948 Women’s Armed Services Integrati…

Is there property without police? This week Justin and I talk about the "bottom up" appeal of Fox News and Tucker Carlson, as we consider how concepts of home, family, and property are tied up in an …

What is “alt comedy” anyway? On this episode of Mr. Trap, we take you back to the mid-1990s, when finding hip comedy with an intelligent perspective was as difficult as finding weed and pornography. …

Our friend Avi Garelick joins us to discuss his recent piece on the war between Ron DeSantis and the Disney Corporation in Florida, as we explore the longer history of Florida’s extraordinary relati…

This week Justin and I watch the documentary Missing 411: The Hunted and contemplate cryptids, bigfoots, and mysterious disappearances in American forests. How are American history and politics tied …