Nostalgia Trap

On our first episode after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, Yasmin Nair and I take a moment to consider the implications: What does this mean for a newly emboldened right? And how can the left find new strategies of resistance?

We also watch a particularly brutal episode of Mad Men (S1E3, "The Marriage of Figaro"), which brings our abortion discussion back to the early 1960s and connects concepts of "privacy" to houses, neighborhoods, and bedrooms.

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Historian and writer Dan McClure returns to the Trap for a talk about his incredible new book Winter in America: A Cultural History of Neoliberalism, from the Sixties to the Reagan Revolution, which explores how the cruel economic principles we call "neoliberalism" found currency in popular culture in the years since the Vietnam War, delivering us into a nightmare world that protects capital and liquidates democracy.

Check out Dan's previous appearance on Nostalgia Trap.

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On the very first episode of Record Trap, Justin Farrar joins me to lay out our mission statement for the podcast: a regular series of conversations about music, counterculture, and radical politics. What better way to kick off this project than by talking about drugs and The Beatles? The world's greatest rock band didn't just put out classic albums; they also helped introduce a whole generation to the psychedelic experience through their playful artistic engagement with LSD, marijuana, and other tools of chemical adventure. We take a trip through the 1960s to explore how four lads from Liverpool journeyed to the outer reaches of their own minds and packaged the lessons for the masses.

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What makes a great teacher? In an effort to avoid becoming completely blackpilled doomers, this week Ryan and I have a conversation about our favorite teachers, from kindergarten to grad school. We try to remember the things that made us want to become teachers ourselves, and wonder if the ideas and practices of our ancient heroes can help guide us through the dark waters of today's campus.

Check out Ryan's website

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Stories about the past form the ideological foundation of the American project. This week's guest, Alicia Puglionesi, is a historian and writer whose work often focuses on "hauntings" – both real and imagined – in our collective history. Her latest book, In Whose Ruins: Power, Possession, and the Landscapes of American Empire, explores the fake narratives and mythologies created to justify land theft, genocide, and the endless extraction of natural resources for profit. In this conversation, she explains how fundamental elements like oil, water, and atomic power were harnessed by capital through processes of historical erasure and, above all, storytelling.

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Digital Humanities? More like Digital Hu-SHAM-ities, am I right? On this episode of Campus Trap, Ryan Boyd and I trade stories about our experiences with the digital pedagogy boom/bust cycle of the past decade or so, in which a whole generation was sold on the idea that computers would somehow make higher education better for everyone (spoiler alert: it didn't happen). So if the COVID/Zoom era finally made us understand that tech can't solve the university's problems, what's our path forward? Is there an opportunity to reclaim and repurpose the campus?

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On this week's livestream, Justin Rogers-Cooper joins us to ponder the looming economic wreckage soon washing upon America's shores, and what that means for an already volatile political and social domestic situation. We also reflect on how "delivering the goods" is a critical piece of state power, and what that means for Democrats in a world of inflation, insane gas prices, and impending mass layoffs. Fun stuff! But don't worry, we also consider the personal/psychological elements at play here. Aside from these structural traps, are we also at the mercy of increasingly deranged individuals with unimaginable power?

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"What is a woman? What is a man?" Go fuck yourself! Those questions are traps! In this episode of Gender Trap, Yasmin and I talk about the right's absurd yet powerful assault on all things gender-related, and how the left's reactive, academic takes on gender hobble our ability to fight back. What would a popular left vision of gender actually look like? Because it ain't RuPaul! We also, of course, bring an episode of Mad Men (S1, E2, "Ladies Room") into the mix, as we examine how Betty and Don's fucked up 1950s nightmare marriage showcases the trap of Cold War domestic gender roles in dynamic, psychologically gory detail.

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Grace Elizabeth Hale is a professor of history and American Studies at the University of Virginia whose work focuses on race, class, and culture in the 20th century, particularly in the American South. Her latest book, Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture tells the story of how a small college town in Georgia became a center of indie and punk culture in the 1970s and 1980s, producing major bands like the B-52s and R.E.M. while maintaining a queer D.I.Y cultural scene that's become a significant legend in the annals of American rock. What makes Athens so special? And can that magic be recreated in other places?

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On the debut episode of Campus Trap, Ryan Boyd joins me to reflect on how much the stereotypical "college experience" has evolved since our undergraduate days, when a countercultural bacchanalia was still dominant in the popular imagination, if not in practical reality. From the world of keg-stands and bongloads to the sobering realities of 21st century academia, we trace our own paths through graduate school and into a precarious labor market that seems shakier by the minute. How did our collective vision of college transform in the neoliberal era? And now that we're professors ourselves, how do we navigate an increasingly dysfunctional society alongside our students?

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