Nostalgia Trap

Stuart Schrader is a Lecturer and Assistant Research Scientist in Sociology at Johns Hopkins University, and the author of Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing. In this conversation, he shares details from the book about the Office of Public Safety, a 1960s American Cold War project that gave U.S. aid to counter-revolutionary police forces around the globe. As Schrader's work documents, the expansion of domestic police powers in the post-World War II mirrored, and was in fact a critical element of, the larger project of global American empire.

Sean Lawrence works as a bartender and manager at a couple of the most popular eating and drinking establishments in downtown Ventura, California. In this conversation, he shares amazing stories from the world of restaurants and bars during the pandemic, from fights with MAGA trolls and the anti-mask crowd, to the agony of layoffs and closings, to the continued suffocating fear of catching COVID, we shine a light on a rough but undeniably clarifying moment for workers in the food service industry.

Kristin Kobes Du Mez is a professor of history at Calvin University whose work focuses on the intersection of religion, gender, and politics in American life. Her new book Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation traces the development of a white, militant, patriarchal Christian culture in the decades since the 1960s, when the rise of feminism and the civil rights movement triggered an evangelical backlash that led directly to the Trump era. In this conversation, she explains how a "tough guy" ideal gained traction in Christian culture, as white evangelicals came to embrace a brutal ideology of authority, domination, and violence.

Eddie Pepitone is an actor and comedian whose latest standup special For the Masses captures the visceral hell of life in late capitalism. In this conversation, he talks about his path in comedy, the development of a "working class" voice, why he avoids trite topics like dating and pizza, and how his left-wing politics and Eastern spirituality find their way into his material.

How does the way we live reflect all the traps of American ideology? This week, one of our favorites, writer and activist Yasmin Nair, joins us for a wide-ranging conversation on the historical, social, and economic dimensions of U.S. housing policy. From current debates around gentrification and rent strikes to the romanticized image of suburban nuclear families in pop culture, we explore how ideas of home ownership are at the core of the national-imperial project.