Chad E. Pearson is a labor historian and writer whose work focuses on ruling class organizations and violence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this episode we discuss his latest book, Capital’s Terrorists: Klansmen, Lawmen, and Employers in the Long Nineteenth Century (UNC Press, 2022), which explores how elite capitalists evolved new strategies of violence and repression during the Second Industrial Revolution, employing extralegal terror—from book burning and blacklists to kidnappings, arson, and murder—as a means of securing their power over a rising population of wage workers. 

This week Justin and I consider the possibility that news of Twitter's imminent demise may be premature, which leads to a discussion of tech bro culture's connection to the wider history of consumer capitalism and the series of swaggering men who promise utopian escapes from the very nightmare they've created, producing an endless cycle of technological baubles that attempt to remove us from linear time and distract us from the inevitable march toward death. Does it work? You tell me! Listen to the whole episode 

Shane Burley returns to the Trap for a challenging conversation about Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 Vietnam war mindfuck Full Metal Jacket, a film that asks deep, dark questions about violence, masculinity, racial imperialism, and other persistent features of human history. From its prolonged opening training sequence of horrific, hilariously choreographed ritual abuse to the oddly staged final battle sequences and bleak, abrupt ending, we explore how Full Metal Jacket’s relentless tone of removed, sarcastic cynicism offers a fractal view of war that remains one of Kubrick’s most punishing visions. Subscribe to listen to the full episode

On this installment of Housing Trap, Andrew Schustek talks with Benjamin Teresa, a professor in the Urban and Regional Studies and Planning program at the Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs at UVA. In this conversation, Teresa explains the role of finance and real estate in shaping the possibilities and limits of housing policy, and offers some ideas on how community engagement might open a trapdoor to a more livable future.  Subscribe to Nostalgia Trap to access our entire catalog 

The livestream returns to a week full of exciting collapses: MAGA, Twitter, Meta, all run by men who talk a big game but suddenly can't seal the deal. Is this a temporary blip, "something that happens to all guys sometimes," or are the big swingers of the digital era reaching their limits? Join the Nostalgia Trap Patreon and listen to the whole episode

This week Ryan and I watch an incendiary viral TikTok and debate the idea of “third places” – those special spaces where a human being can be a human being, around other human beings. Does such a space exist anymore? Who knows! But it seems like the degradation of public space in the past few decades just MIGHT have something to do with the decline of liberal social values – or is it the other way around? Let’s ask Mike Davis… Subscribe to access the entire Campus Trap catalog

Andrew Schustek and Samuel Stein continue their conversation on the inner workings of American housing policy, this time focusing on subsidies, affordable housing, and signs of weakness/vulnerability in the “real estate state.”  Subscribe to listen to the whole episode

Nostalgia Trap fellow traveler and guest host Andrew Schustek continues our series of conversations on the political economy of housing in the 21st century. This week, Andrew talks with geographer, urban planner and housing policy analyst Samuel Stein, whose book Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State is already a classic of modern urban studies and required reading for anyone interested in a progressive vision of city planning. In this episode, Andrew and Sam introduce us to the major structures of the “real estate state” and imagine pathways to a future of lower rents and better living. Subscribe to listen to Part Two

This week Justin and I watch the first few episodes of Adam Curtis' latest documentary provocation, Russia 1985–1999: TraumaZone, as we consider the different ways to imagine "collapse," both ideologically and aesthetically.  Listen to the whole episode

Do you need a college degree in order to understand T.S. Eliot poems? Does subjecting a work of art or literature to academic analysis ruin our enjoyment of said work? This week Ryan and I talk about the “point” of a humanities education in a technocratic neoliberal world, and reflect on the increasingly dominant view of college as a transaction rather than an education. How do we put the heart back in higher ed? Listen to the whole episode