Nostalgia Trap

Maximillian Alvarez returns to the Trap to talk about his terrific new podcast Working People, a show that features deep conversations about life, labor, politics, and everything in between, from the perspective of working class people. He joins us to describe his latest series about General Motors and the social costs of the long decline of industrial manufacturing. Along the way, we chat about the alienation of social media, the prison of the gig economy, the continuing prescience of David Foster Wallace, and lots more.

Justin Rogers-Cooper stops by to talk about Amazon's impending invasion of Long Island City, Queens, where he works as a professor of English at LaGuardia Community College. Our conversation explores the psychotic evil of Jeff Bezos, the corrupt city leaders who are laying out a $3 billion red carpet for him, the larger structures of capitalism and consumerism driving Amazon's power, and what all of this means for the future of New York City and the planet.

Jason Wilson is a writer for The Guardian whose work often covers the far right of American political culture. From Milo to the Proud Boys, Alex Jones to Glenn Beck, Wilson details the internal drama, street fights, and larger context of right-wing movements in the 21st century. In this episode, we catch up with his latest reporting on "deplatforming" and explore the role social media plays in spreading extreme ideas.

Conner Habib is the host of Against Everyone w/ Conner Habib, a podcast about subjects that often fall outside the range of typical "left" discussions—things like radical philosophy, the occult, psychoanalysis, sexuality, porn, and much more. In this conversation, he explains how the concept of desire permeates our politics, present in everything from sex work and surveillance to academia and the military-industrial complex, and why healing the planet and healing ourselves are inextricably connected projects.

Brooke Newman is a professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University and the author of A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica, a book that traces the evolution of racial definitions and sexual practices in one of 18th century Britain's most valuable colonies. In this conversation, Newman discusses how notions of race and nation interacted with sex, gender, and class in often surprising ways during a brutal imperial occupation, and explains how Jamaica's particular history reveals the deep, pathological contradictions at the heart of the Atlantic slave system.