Nostalgia Trap

Freddie deBoer joins me to discuss his viral piece on 90s nostalgia, “It's So Sad When Old People Romanticize Their Heydays, Also the 90s Were Objectively the Best Time to Be Alive.” This is a raw a…

This week Justin and I talk about the Great Chatbot Panic of 2023, leftists in love with Trump's "brilliant" visit to Ohio, and the alleged moral authority of U.S. actions re: Ukraine, one year into …

In Part Two of my conversation with writer and musician Sean Nelson, we talk about the origins of his band Harvey Danger in the 1990s Seattle music scene, the bizarre rush of having a massive radio h…

Sean Nelson is a writer and musician, known widely as the lead singer of the band Harvey Danger, whose 1998 single “Flagpole Sitta” became a staple of “alternative rock” radio and MTV and an inescapa…

This week Justin and I talk about the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. Are we entering an accelerated era of industrial mass poisonings, or is this just more of the same old industrial mass …

Tad Skotnicki is a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the author of The Sympathetic Consumer: Moral Critique in Capitalist Culture (Stanford University Press…

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…

What happens when three old pals get together to talk about the 90s sketch comedy program Mr. Show with Bob and David? This podcast answers that very question! Welcome to the debut episode of Mr. Tra…

This week Justin and I go all in on Baz Luhrmann’s camp masterpiece Elvis (2022), as we consider the life, work, and legacy of an iconic 20th century artist/product/celebrity/Christ figure. How is El…

What does it mean to “go underground”? Lara Langer Cohen is an associate professor of English at Swarthmore College. Her latest book, Going Underground: Race, Space, and the Subterranean in the Ninet…

This week Yasmin and I watch Chinatown (1974) and have a conversation about the film’s infamously elegant screenplay, shocking plot twist, insanely dark ending, and wonderfully sleazy cameo from the…

How do shifting ideas about physical fitness, health, and the body reflect larger ideological structures like nation, race, gender, and capitalism? Natalia Mehlman Petrzela is a historian of American…

On this episode of Housing Trap, Andrew is joined by Zach Paganini, a Ph.D. student in the Earth and Environmental Sciences program at the CUNY Graduate Center, for a conversation about the effects …

This week Justin and I watched the HBO Max documentary This Place Rules, which gives us a chance to talk about the weird undercurrents of rape, sexual domination, violence, and pedophilia coursing th…

What is film noir and why does it matter? In the first episode of a series called Shadow Nation, I reflect on the commercial failure of Guillermo Del Toro’s prestige noir remake Nightmare Alley (2021…

Our series on 1990s/2000s comedy continues this week with a conversation about Seinfeld. Justin and I watched two episodes (S5E5 "The Bris" and S7E4 "The Wink"), and reflect on the show's weird eleva…

This week Justin and I watch Elf (2003) and talk about Will Ferrell's late 90s/early 2000s comic persona in the context of male bodies, George W. Bush, and a particular cultural turn toward "dumb ass…

What makes disturbing, graphic shows like CSI and Intervention so morbidly appealing? How does our desire for uncomfortable entertainment reflect a larger normalization of fear, precarity, and violen…

This week Justin and I jump off our previous discussion of Groundhog Day with a look at Planes, Trains, and Automobiles (1987), a deceptively complicated film about class, gender, and the queer socia…

Since clever people are now declaring the end of college education, Ryan and I thought it might be fun to survey the highs and lows of our own respective "college" experiences, from undergrad to Ph.D…