Nostalgia Trap

A.M. Gittlitz is a writer on radical politics, counterculture, and the paranormal, and the producer of a wonderful podcast called The Antifada. In this conversation, he catches us up on the worldwide UFO phenomenon, detailing how the U.S. government is pouring resources into investigating alien spacecraft, with big corporations (and the guy from Blink-182!) getting in on the action. Gittlitz shares plenty of incredible stories, many featured in his upcoming book I WANT TO BELIEVE: The Posadist Movement and Leftwing Ufology (Pluto Press, 2020), as we discuss the wider context of the alien narrative in culture and politics. 

Mike Pearl is a writer and self-described “apocalypse expert” whose new book The Day It Finally Happens explores the increasingly bizarre scenarios that threaten to totally ruin our collective future. From internet blackouts and antibiotic-resistant superviruses to collapsing governments and mass extinction events, Mike tracks the actual probability of these nightmares coming true as a way of helping us navigate an anxious present. In this conversation, we game out some of the more insane ideas from his book while asking the question of our age: How bad is it gonna get? 

Sam Yang is the host of Southpaw, a podcast about the intersection of leftist politics and combat sports. Yang is on a mission to reclaim fighting culture, forging connections between physicality, spirituality, and a more humane engagement with the planet and each other. In this conversation he discusses his background in martial arts, explaining how ethical ideas embedded in his combat training inform his political perspectives, and speculates on strategies for winning the hearts and minds of millions of UFC fans.

Bill Black and KJ Shepherd return to the Trap for a special Halloween episode, in which we reflect upon the public fears and personal phobias that plagued our childhoods. Together we explore all sorts of spooky stuff, including the hellish visions invoked by Chick tracts, the 1980s crusade against obscenity in pop music, the weird national obsession with children dying in abandoned refrigerators, and the varieties of erotic experience available at your local Barnes and Noble.  

Kevin Kruse is a historian at Princeton University and the author of a number of important books about race, class, and politics in 20th century America. He is also one of the most visible historians online, with a massive Twitter following that often serves as a mini-course in American history. In this conversation, we talk about his unexpected rise to Twitter fame, his beef with right-wing propagandist Dinesh D’Souza, the many pleasures of archival research, and his connection to the wider community of historians and other scholars who are more actively engaging the public during a chaotic political moment. 

Justin Rogers-Cooper returns to explore the 1993 Bill Murray comedy Groundhog Day, a deceptively straightforward film that pulses with dark insights on political economy, American history, human psychology, and everyday life in late capitalism.  FULL EPISODE: https://www.patreon.com/posts/30812647

Brendan O’Malley is a historian and teacher whose experience with his school’s abrupt closure was the subject of a fascinating, wrenching piece in Contingent Magazine this summer. He joins us to talk about his background in history, earning his Ph.D. at the CUNY Graduate Center, and his particular path through a rapidly collapsing academic job market. Brendan’s story is ultimately a hopeful one, reflecting how a generation of young historians is finding our footing as teachers and scholars in ways none of us expected. 

Susan Schnall served as a nurse in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War. Her experiences treating wounded Marines at Oak Noll Naval Hospital in Oakland, California transformed her, and in 1969 she faced court martial for her antiwar activism. In this conversation, she tells her incredible story of leaving the U.S. military and joining the antiwar movement, working as a hospital administrator and community organizer in New York City for 31 years, and serving as a core member of the Agent Orange Relief and Responsibility Campaign.  You can read more about Susan's story, along with many other perspectives on the GI Movement (including a piece on GI coffeehouses by Nostalgia Trap host David Parsons), in a new book from NYU Press, Waging Peace in Vietnam: US Soldiers and Veterans Who Opposed the War.

With Trap favorite Bill Black joining us, a conversation about David’s irrational fear of spiders leads into a wider consideration of existential politics in an apocalyptic age. Bill has lots to tell us about the El Paso shooting and the eco-fascist ideology from which it emerged, connecting it to the rise of doomsday scenarios, conspiracy theories, UFO flashmobs, and other pieces of outright weirdness circulating through the culture. 

Writer and cultural critic Erik Davis joins us to discuss his fascinating, often startling new book, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies. By connecting the strange experiences of three psychedelic philosophers (Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson), Davis offers a narrative of the 1970s that goes beyond disco and Jimmy Carter, showing us a world of occult prophecies, paranoid conspiracies, and often drug-induced spiritual fuckery. In this conversation, Davis discusses the origins of High Weirdness, his longer journey as a thinker and writer, and how the transcendent freakiness of California in the 70s produced eerie premonitions of the chaotic dystopias of the 21st century.