Nostalgia Trap

The world is filled with Pete Campbells – people whose wealthy families and social connections allow them to coast through life, easily opening doors that are locked tight for the rest of us. Doesn’t that just burn you up? On this week’s Gender Trap, Yasmin Nair and I talk about Episode 4 of Mad Men (“New Amsterdam”), in which we are forced to come to terms with the archetypal privileged son, and see him as but one part of a marvelous, odious machine that traps us all. Can we learn to love Pete Campbell?  Listen to the whole episode and access all our weekly bonus traps

We're back on the livestream circuit with Justin Rogers-Cooper, talking about the fragile set of historical circumstances upon which the neoliberal era was built, and how those circumstances are rapidly deteriorating/disappearing into an era of pandemic, imperial war, energy depletion, and planetary emergency. Buckle up, motherfuckers: the age of neoliberalism is dying, and something new is being born. Subscribe to listen to the whole episode and all our livestreams/bonus content

Amanda Klein is a professor of Film Studies at East Carolina University and the author of a number of works on American media and society. Her latest book, Millennials Killed the Video Star: MTV’s Transition to Reality Programming, is a detailed history of MTV’s abrupt evolution from music-centered content to non-stop reality programs in the late 90s and early 2000s. In this conversation, Klein discusses how MTV executives chased the elusive millennial dollar in a rapidly changing media landscape, producing shows like The Hills, Jersey Shore, Buckwild, and many others, offering a young, largely white audience an opportunity to imagine themselves occupying a wide range of non-white identities. Which MTV did you watch?   Subscribe to Nostalgia Trap to access our library of bonus content: patreon.com/nostalgiatrap

This week Justin and I consider the life and career of David Bowie, casting him as a master practitioner of pop magick, who harnessed the occult energies of art and celebrity to implant himself permanently in our cultural DNA. Nothing in Bowie’s work expresses this more clearly than his final album, Blackstar, released on his 69th birthday and two days before his death from liver cancer in January 2016. In this conversation we talk about Bowie’s life, art, and final act, as we reflect on how his particularly curatorial, affectionate, subversive, playful approach to music and stardom resonates in pop culture literally everywhere you look. There's lots more to this episode for subscribers, including links and playlists to accompany the Bowie-fest: patreon.com/posts/record-trap-ep-4-71628069

In her incredible new book Paradoxes of Nostalgia: Cold War Triumphalism and Global Disorder Since 1989, historian Penny Von Eschen identifies nostalgia as a corrosive, reactionary force in global politics and popular culture since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and explains how the lingering ghosts of the Cold War haunt our era. From George H.W. Bush hosting an official White House screening of The Hunt for Red October in 1990 to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Von Eschen traces how Cold War nostalgia distorts our vision of the past and forecloses on possibilities for a peaceful future.  Subscribe to Nostalgia Trap to access our whole universe of bonus content: patreon.com/nostalgiatrap

This week Ryan and I watch Wonder Boys (2000), starring Michael Douglas as a professor struggling to write a follow-up to his successful first novel while juggling personal relationships with students and faculty and ingesting massive amounts of drugs and alcohol. The movie depicts a romantic vision of campus life that seems miles away from our respective experiences in 21st century academia, while still reflecting a lot of the things that drew us to academic life in the first place. Is longing for the world of Wonder Boys just another nostalgia trap?  Subscribe to listen to the whole episode and gain access to our giant library of bonus content: patreon.com/nostalgiatrap

Bret Easton Ellis’ 1991 novel American Psycho, about a 1980s Wall Street serial killer, is one of the sickest acts of American satire I’ve read, and Mary Harron’s 2000 movie adaptation starring Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman nails the book’s tone while excising some of its most graphic violence. This week Yasmin and I ask: What is American Psycho really about? Is Bateman an aberration, or a perfect representation of American masculinity? What does it take to “fit in” a psychotic society? Click here to listen to the full episode.

Daniel Chard is a professor of history at Western Washington University and the author of Nixon’s War at Home: The FBI, Leftist Guerillas, and the Origins of Counterterrorism. In this conversation, we both reflect on the different cultural and political forces that drew us to the American left in the 1990s, and how our politics have evolved in the decades since the heady days of freeganism, drum circles, anti-globalization protests, anarchist collectives, black bloc tactics, Ani DiFranco, and other key features of the “dream of the 90s.” Check out Daniel’s first appearance on the show for a detailed discussion of his research on leftist violence and the FBI. Subscribe to Nostalgia Trap to access our whole library of bonus episodes, essays, and video content. 

Jonathan Crary is a professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia University whose work examines the role of the human eye, aesthetics, and visual culture in modern history. His latest book, Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World, is a razor sharp critique of “digital capitalism” and the outsized role of the internet in our daily lives and the larger economy. Our conversation reflects on the decades since the 1960s, when hopes for radical change became invested in structures of technology and finance that have not only failed to produce utopia, but have in effect produced the opposite: an alienated, misinformed, angry society teetering on the brink of political, social, and ecological apocalypse. What would it look like to move beyond the digital age?  Subscribe to the Nostalgia Trap Patreon to access our massive library of bonus content: patreon.com/nostalgiatrap  

Justin Farrar and I continue our conversation about rock music and the occult by watching the incredibly disturbing Paradise Lost documentary series, which details the case of three young men wrongfully accused of the grisly murders of three children in the town of West Memphis, Arkansas in 1993. With prosecutors (literally) presenting Metallica lyrics as evidence of murderous intent, the case was part of a dark undercurrent in the 1990s, as music and counterculture became targets of intense paranoia, hatred, and violence from all varieties of American reactionaries. We share our memories and insights from this scary, prophetic era in rock history, when America’s endless cycle of Satanic panics aimed its sights at the MTV generation. To listen to all episodes of Record Trap, plus the rest of the Trap universe, subscribe! patreon.com/nostalgiatrap