Devin Thomas O’Shea transports Travis to Milwaukee, 1932, where Thomas Pynchon’s newest novel Shadow Ticket kicks off with speakeasy intrigue, Depression misery, and a precision-engineered car bomb. Devin unpacks Pynchon’s characteristic hinge-of-history setting, when everyone’s forced to pick sides, as the book’s reluctant bruiser-turned-investigator Hicks McTaggart gets thrashed around by forces he can’t (and won’t) understand.

Shadow Ticket’s paranoia, occult object-mysticism, and explosive politics connect to the real history of American labor violence: the Haymarket bombing and riot, the Bay View massacre, and the 1932 Ford hunger march. What can the novel, probably Pynchon’s last, teach us about our current strange moment in history?

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Devin Thomas O’Shea

https://devinoshea.wordpress.com/

https://x.com/devintoshea

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The Veiled Prophet: Secret Societies, White Supremacy, and the Struggle for St. Louis by Devin Thomas O'Shea — Coming June 2026

https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2770-the-veiled-prophet

Check out our new podcast series network Cursed Media and binge the entirety of our exclusive shows Science in Transition by Liv Agar and Truly, Tradly, Deeply by Annie Kelly

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Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme

Vocals by THEY/LIVE (https://instagram.com/theyylivve / https://sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (https://pedrocorrea.com)

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QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.