Nostalgia Trap

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. I bet you can guess who won! This conversation touches on some of the gender and family dynamics at play in religious cults, and the paradox of creating a coherent "free" society with an armed population subject to the whims of charismatic religious leaders. If we're continuing the Trap method of seeing history as a map of the future, the road from Waco leads directly to Oklahoma City, Trump, and QAnon.   Full episode: https://www.patreon.com/posts/livestream-5-12-82918108

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 Economy Builds Urban America, tells us how American cities are branding themselves with crafty historical “authenticity” in order to draw the creative class to populate and revitalize their dying towns. In this conversation, Banks explains how this nostalgia-driven gentrification, amplified by social media, is a powerful engine in 21st century urban planning, as capital endlessly asks us to “eat the past.” Subscribe to Nostalgia Trap to access our massive library of bonus episodes, video essays, and more: https://patreon.com/nostalgiatrap  

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 for online leftists: Is Chomsky canceled for hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein and Woody Allen? Full episode: https://www.patreon.com/posts/news-trap-5-3-23-82469893  

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 "microplastics" and the larger phenomenon of a world saturated in oil-based consumer products. From Joe Rogan's freakout about chemicals shrinking our taints, to the pop eco-terrorism of How to Blow Up a Pipeline, we imagine how our corrupted political media content machine can possibly confront a wholly plasticized reality. Is it too late to stop any of this? Is the plastic in control of history? Full episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/livestream-4-28-82204734

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, and the World, which tells the story of how California became the primary machine of American empire. From railroads and universities to social media platforms and artificial intelligence, Harris traces a history that re-orients our understanding of the West Coast’s central place in the past and future of global capitalism.  Check out Malcolm’s previous Nostalgia Trap appearance: https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-120-bad-22385554 Subscribe to Nostalgia Trap to access our massive library of bonus episodes, video essays, and more: https://patreon.com/nostalgiatrap  

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, man! It's real! Subscribe to access our giant library of bonus episodes, video essays, and lots more: patreon.com/nostalgiatrap

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 "A Talking Junkie?" Both of these episodes have plenty to love, including sketches that anticipate/predict Hamilton! and the January 6th Capitol Riot, among other eerie premonitions. But there's also lots to cringe at here, as we lament the weird dynamics of race, gender, and "alt comedy" during an odd moment in late 90s pop culture.  Catch up with the rest of Mr Trap on our Patreon page:   Episode One - Where Do I Go Now?: https://www.patreon.com/posts/mr-trap-ep-1-do-78316534   Episode Two - Deep Nonsense: https://www.patreon.com/posts/mr-trap-ep-2-79766387

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 place for me to share the Nostalgia Trap “backchannel” conversations that animate much of the content we put out.  As I’ve mentioned on the show many times, my good friend and frequent co-host Justin Rogers-Cooper and I have been curating a private 24 hour news service, exclusively with each other via text message, for years now, and the screenshots, 3am rants, and relentless live analysis of unfolding apocalypse have been the backbone of our work together on Nostalgia Trap.     So I want to let you in on our little news world. Each week I’ll share the cream of the crop from these screenshots/news freakouts, plus book recommendations and other fun stuff. In this first episode, we get into lithium wars, global civil unrest, and the fraud of green capitalism, and get a surprise visit from our old pal Kurt Vonnegut. This debut episode of News Trap is free for everyone; all future episodes are for subscribers only – so join the club! Subscribe here: https://www.patreon.com/nostalgiatrap

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 violence. We discuss the book as a visceral lesson in the lived experience of racial capitalism, tracking how a voice haunted by history carries her through fame, money, drugs, exploitation, incarceration, and death. Why does Holiday’s life and voice still speak to us? And what does she have to say? Check out the whole episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-358-lady-80456339

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 theory. In our last conversation, we talked about his book American Presidents and Oliver Stone: Kennedy, Nixon, and Bush between History and Cinema and got into the weird cultural legacy of the JFK assassination. This week Carl returns to Nostalgia Trap to continue our survey of titanic 1960s presidents with this conversation all about Richard Nixon and his freaky place in the American political imagination. Underneath our explorations is the persistent question: Did Nixon make us, or did we make Nixon? Check out Carl’s piece in L.A. Review of Books on the lines from Nixon to Trump: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/from-nixon-to-trump-metastases-of-cultural-power/ And here’s Carl’s book, not to be missed: Age of Nixon: A Study in Cultural Power Subscribe to Nostalgia Trap to get all the good stuff on our bonus stream: https://www.patreon.com/nostalgiatrap