Nostalgia Trap

This week I’m joined by my good friend Peter Sabatino for a conversation all about Vincent Van Gogh’s personal and artistic legacy. We both read the book Van Gogh: The Life by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, a gigantic magisterial biography that affected us both in surprising ways. While Van Gogh embodies the archetypal image of the “tortured artist,” there’s so much more to his story, and Peter and I wanted to share our personal reactions to the aesthetic gift that Van Gogh created for the world in his short, difficult, astounding life. 

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Armed militias roam the hurricane ravaged wastelands of North Carolina, no one wants children and it's not because of the economy, Apple's Vision Pro is a massive failure, we're stepping off the ship of rational discourse and entering the wonderland of feelings as facts.

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Jack Reid is an American historian and the author of Roadside Americans: The Rise and Fall of Hitchhiking in a Changing Nation (UNC Press, 2020). In this conversation, we talk about the specific culture, between the 1930s and 1970s, that produced hitchhiking as a common social experience, when ordinary Americans would travel with strangers they met on the road. What happened to hitchhiking? And what does its disappearance tell us about our lonely historical moment? 

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Joseph M. Thompson is assistant professor of history at Mississippi State University, and the author of Cold War Country: How Nashville's Music Row and the Pentagon Created the Sound of American Patriotism (UNC Press, 2024). Thompson’s history tracks the deep connections between country music and the U.S. military, uncovering a concerted effort by government officials and cultural creators to cement country culture and national pride (and of course, anti-communism). Our conversation moves from Slim Pickens to Toby Keith, as we explore how the cultural politics of country continue to shape the 21st century.

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Andrew C. McKevitt is John D. Winters Endowed Professor of History at Louisiana Tech University. His latest book, Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America, explores how guns came to occupy a curious place between “constitutional right” and “consumer good,” as the Cold War provided a cultural, political, and material framework by which guns could become the hottest item of the late 20th century. In this conversation, McKevitt shares some of the highlights of his research and provides historical context for the often simplistic “gun control” debate. 

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R.E.M. is one of the most influential rock bands in American music history, with a legendary arc that took them from college radio punks in the early 80s to critical darlings and arena rockers with multiple smash albums throughout the 90s. But what happened after that? This week Justin shares a thesis about the final phase of R.E.M.’s career, during which the band signed an $80 million contract with Warner Brothers – and it all went downhill from there. As we take a close look at Michael Stipe’s creative output and public persona, we recoil at how even our favorite artists can succumb to the poisonous influence of money and fame.

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Anti-immigration politics are winning the moment, the market for testosterone replacement therapy is booming, child labor is on the horizon, and United Health EATS PEOPLE.

And so ends this week's FREE PREVIEW for News Trap. Subscribe to continue the News Trap journey and keep up with all new episodes next week and beyond: 

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A stunning new piece in The Atlantic offers details on the fall of America as seen from Phoenix, Arizona. Folks, 2024 is gonna be a hell of year.

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Today we take a detailed look at this incredible Wall Street Journal piece featuring text messages from Yahya Sinwar, Hamas leader and architect of 10/7. What's Sinwar's strategy? And how does it fit into an American antiwar movement's calculations?

This week's episodes of News Trap are free for everyone but next week we're back to subscribers-only...so subscribe!  Here's the link: https://www.patreon.com/collection/520366?view=expanded

Nobody likes new cars, everyone loves old cars, Americans are on a spending spree while complaining about the economy, the anti-AI rebellion is growing.

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This week Justin and I talk about the 2008 Coen brothers film Burn After Reading, another “acid take” on American politics and culture with uncanny implications for our 2024 carnival timeline.  

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David Rensin is the author of more than a dozen books, five of them New York Times bestsellers. I was lucky enough to meet David through the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, and he joins me here for a conversation about his long, strange trip as a journalist and author, from writing for Rolling Stone and Playboy in the 1960s and 70s to co-authoring massively popular books with Tim Allen and Jeff Foxworthy (!) in the 1990s. Rensin’s 2013 book  All for a Few Perfect Waves: The Audacious Life and Legend of Rebel Surfer Miki Dora is one of the most compelling visions of mid-century California I’ve encountered, and we talk here about Rensin’s decades-long odyssey to capture Dora’s significance as a surfer and cultural figure.  

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"Everyday carry" and "prepper" culture, unsold Teslas piling up at dealerships, AI as the future of global capitalism, AI does not in fact work, Biden is not properly buying our votes.

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We've been posting daily news wrap-ups/freakouts every morning over at the Nostalgia Trap Patreon page for our subscribers. I'm posting today's episode on the main feed, hoping you'll subscribe.

My goals with News Trap are to share perspectives on the big trends shaping our present and future, to fill in the gaps on stories you may have missed, or offer challenges to orthodoxies on the left and right, and to avoid the nauseating cycle of social media bullshit.

If that sounds like your thing, please join us. A Nostalgia Trap subscription includes access to every News Trap episode, along with our entire library of bonus content, interviews, and videos. Thanks! 

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Trump can't control himself in court, food prices are gonna decide the election, Tik Tok is gearing up for a Supreme Court battle, the U.S. can't make enough weapons for both Israel AND Ukraine, and RFK, Jr. has a brain worm (no, literally).

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As campus protests against Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza continue, Justin and I pick up on our discussion from last week about the wider historical issues at play. This week we talk more about anti-apartheid campaigns of the 1980s, and consider the idea of “divestment” at elite colleges. The neoliberal, corporate university is having quite a moment – confronting the contradictions of its hyper-capitalist structure and social justice culture – and we are here for it.

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On today's News Trap I share some snippets about Chinese state capitalism, RFK's hilariously shitty presidential campaign, Elon Musk pulling the plug on everyone's dumb car chargers, the normalization of guns in schools and, of course, more on the campus protests against Israel's still unfolding genocide in Gaza.

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This week Justin and I attempt to put the latest round of campus protests into historical context, both in the wider view (19th century abolitionism, Vietnam, South Africa) and in our specific moment (Occupy, Black Lives Matter, pandemic, Israel/Gaza). What are the students’ demands, and how do we reconcile them with a popular  social movement that could actually win? 

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It’s been a minute since Justin and I have shared our takes on “the news,” so this week we have a typically dark, unhinged conversation about what’s coming for us in 2024, with an American population frothing at the mouth to BUILD THE WALL and weapons-crazy madmen lashing out around the globe. It’s an incredible time to be alive.  

Full episode: https://www.patreon.com/posts/102232361?pr=true

Conspiracy theories are a hell of a drug. Justin and I know this from experience, so watching the new Netflix documentary American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders brought up some deeply identifiable thoughts and emotions for both of us. Do you REALLY want to know the exact details of the dark forces at work within our most sacred institutions? As we discuss here, there’s a heavy price to pay for that knowledge, one way or another.

This is the first half of this week's episode, go to our Patreon page to listen to the whole thing!

https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-386-of-98833719

It’s Part Four of our six-part adventure through the history of American automaking and car culture, and we’ve finally reached the moment when everything starts to unravel: the 1970s. When Arab nations decide to flex their oil muscle against the United States in 1973, they deliver American consumers into an entirely new economic reality, and Detroit struggles to meet the era’s new demands for fuel efficiency, safety, and lower emissions. Meanwhile, Japan enters the market with a new approach to cars and the production process that further erodes Detroit’s power – until an unlikely hero, the minivan, takes over the 1980s suburbs and points to a rocky road ahead.

In Part Three of our journey through the history of American car culture, we explore how the massive cultural and political shifts of the 1960s made an impact on American automaking. From the Chevrolet Corvair spinning out and making Ralph Nader a household name, to the Ford Mustang turning boring housewives and husbands into hip celebrities, this was a wild era. When Detroit takes a sinister turn with the 1965 Pontiac GTO, a muscle car war grips American street racing subcultures, before it all burns out when the gas gets too expensive and the smog chokes the skies. 

Full episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-385-of-98244614

As we continue our story of America’s love affair with the automobile, it’s time to look at the tailfin behemoths of the 1950s, the cars that look like “guns you can fuck.” With the automakers morphing into weapons manufacturers to help Uncle Sam win World War II, the postwar consumer reaped the strange benefits of military technology and imperial ideology seeping into the design of his suburban luxury sedan. Meanwhile, a cute little car produced by the Nazis was slowly stealing the hearts of America’s budding counterculture. 

Full episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/97593008?pr=true

This week we watch Fast Five (2011), the fifth installment in the Fast and Furious franchise, and contemplate how these movies embed radical ideas about criminality, subversion, insurgency, and family in often goofy stories about driving really fast cars, furiously. 

Full episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-383-fast-97420130

For more reflections on car culture, check out Part One of our new series, The History of America in Six Cars: https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-382-of-t-97179277

The supreme object of the 20th century, the automobile’s development as both transportation technology and cultural totem is literally the story of American capitalism. In the first episode of a six-part series, we examine the life and legacy of Henry Ford, whose Model T took the nation by storm after its debut in 1908. As Ford rises to an unprecedented position of wealth and power, his virulent anti-semitism and destructive business impulses threaten his company’s dominance of an emerging mass market in the 1920s. 

The Model T’s rise and fall as the nation’s most popular commercial product gives us a chance to examine the dark forces at the heart of the progressive era, connecting Ford’s business innovations (the assembly line, the $5 day, etc) to the racism and hypernationalism that plunged the world into depression and war.

The series will continue with Parts 2-5 on our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/nostalgiatrap

Sources/inspiration for this episode include:

Paul Ingrassia, Engines of Change: The American Dream in Fifteen Cars 

William Knoedelseder, Fins: Harley Earl, the Rise of General Motors, and the Glory Days of Detroit 

Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America 

Our friend Andrew Schustek is back with an all-new Housing Trap conversation all about the unfolding crisis of housing in 21st century New York City and beyond. This time he talks with returning guest Samuel Stein, a geographer, urban planner and housing policy analyst whose book Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State is a must read for housing policy nerds (you know who you are). The boys talk about Sam’s new piece in the New York Review of Architecture and contemplate the future of affordable housing in America.

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This week Justin and I discuss the 1989 tearjerker Field of Dreams, a film about ghosts playing baseball in some guy’s backyard that endures as a beloved classic of American cinema. What’s going on with  that? As a lifelong devotee of the film, Justin articulates why Field of Dreams hits so hard, as we explore how the secular religious magic of baseball and movies intermingle with dreams of capitalist and socialist utopias.   

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Float Universe is an Instagram meme/troll account that’s ostensibly focused on the intersection of floatation tanks and psychedelic culture. The account’s creator joins me this week to explain how the floating experience mirrors the druggy rush of online dopamine adventures, as we explore how trolling and conspiracy theories are bending our everyday realities. 

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We simply did not cover enough topics in our first “2023 Year in Review” episode, so this week Justin is back to talk about some of the big trends looming on the horizon of 2024: another grim yet insanely consequential U.S. presidential election, rising anti-immigrant sentiment on both left and right, the ominous march of genocidal war in Gaza, and the accelerating violent race for resources to light up our dumb little devices. 

This is the first 7 minutes of a 70 minute conversation -- listen to the whole episode and access tons of other cool stuff by subscribing to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-378-big-95389642

Clay Routledge is a teacher, writer, and researcher in the field of existential psychology. His latest book, Past Forward: How Nostalgia Can Help You Live a More Meaningful Life explores a topic near and dear to our hearts: nostalgia and its power to shape the future. In this conversation, we talk about our own obsessions with specific pop cultural objects from our respective youths (video games, music, movies), and reflect on how nostalgic memories shape our individual and collective identities.

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It’s time to take a nostalgic look back at the past year, as we survey some of the big trends from 2023 that will inevitably fuck up our collective 2024. This year we end up talking a lot about tech’s grip on our political and cultural imagination: labor strikes in Hollywood and the auto industry, the impact of AI, and the giant lie of green capitalism glimpsed in the debacle of electric vehicles. Will 2024 be the year the tech spell breaks? 

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Following last week’s episode all about Elliott Smith, this week Justin and I continue our discussion of sad boys and bad dads with a conversation all about Stand By Me, the 1986 Stephen King/Rob Reiner nostalgia-fest about four boys journeying into the postwar American hinterlands to find a dead body (spoiler: the body is a metaphor). In this conversation, we explore how this movie’s sentimental, disturbing vision of mid-century American adolescence fits into a longer historical discourse of masculinity, trauma, and healing.

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This week Justin and I talk about the genius singer-songwriter Elliott Smith, who produced a stunning body of music in the late 90s before dying, tragically and cryptically, in 2003 at the age of 34. Smith's life and art intersects with the world of punk and grunge that emerged from the Pacific Northwest in the 80s and 90s, from the "boy culture" of Gus Van Sant films to the anti-rape politics of riot grrrl era feminism. In this conversation, we try to situate Smith within that wider history and offer some thoughts on his brief but prolific career.

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Anthony Galluzzo’s new book Against the Vortex: Zardoz and Degrowth Utopias in the Seventies and Today offers a delightfully adventurous set of takes on some of this podcast’s running obsessions: the collapse of the 1960s left, revolutionary violence, cult cinema, weird sex rituals, 1970s communes and “intentional communities,” population bombs, nuclear futures and, perhaps most of all, the religious belief in infinite technological progress that animates both the right and left. Fully automated luxury communism, anyone? In this conversation, Galluzzo shares how Zardoz’s bizarre story of a bikini-clad Sean Connery’s prison break from a dystopian society recovers the lost “degrowth” movements of the 1970s and brings us a radically different vision of our collective future. 

‘Tis the season for William S. Burroughs’ Thanksgiving Prayer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLSveRGmpIE

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Justin Rogers-Cooper joins us for a conversation all about the life, work, and legacy of George Carlin, a key American cultural figure whose standup comedy transmitted radical ideas in the form of hilarious, often profane, “jokes.” What are “jokes” anyway? In this episode we find the traps in Carlin’s perspectives and reflect on the larger concept of standup comedy, particularly in the context of a Trumpian political reality that seems closer to Carlin’s dark, apocalyptic comedic vision than ever before.

Check out the rest of our series deconstructing the radical old dudes of the 20th century: 

A People’s History of Howard Zinn 

Manufacturing Noam Chomsky

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This week we’ve got a brand new Housing Trap conversation with guest host Andrew Schustek talking with Charlie Dulik, whose latest piece in The Baffler explores the controversy and mythology surrounding the “mom and pop landlord” in 21st century American life. Is collecting rent from tenants just another hustle for working class people? Or is “landlord” a distinct category of capitalist exploitation? 

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This week Justin and I try to wrap our minds and hearts around what's happening in Gaza. We offer some historical context, share some incredible Chomsky quotes (of course), and attempt to map out the future possibilities for the region. As always, though, it's hard to separate political analysis from the "fog of war" and the deep emotional stakes of watching an ongoing genocide funded by the United States government. We do our best to offer some directions for hope in an unfolding nightmare.

Full episode: https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-370-91362380

We are “back in action” and “ready to roll” and also just “ready” to continue our discussion of Mr. Show with Bob and David, a comedy television thing from the Before Times. On this episode, Peter, Geoff and David cover the opening episodes of Season 3: “Heaven’s Chimney” and “Peanut Butter, Eggs, and Dice.” There’s a lot of fun and challenging stuff here, as the show gets more confident in attacking its cultural targets, from right wing Christian cultists to self-congratulating liberal douchebags. Of course, there’s also plenty to cringe about, from Bob’s truly unbelievable depiction of a mentally challenged person to David Cross’ tired redneck minstrel character “Ronnie Dobbs.” Let’s have us a champagne jam!

Full episode: https://www.patreon.com/posts/mr-trap-ep-6-now-90044447

This week Justin and I watched the forgotten 1996 science fiction thriller Chain Reaction, starring Keanu Reeves as a scientist (lol) who discovers a source of infinite free energy and becomes the target of multiple global conspiracies aimed at controlling the world’s energy future. Seen from 2023, Chain Reaction reveals high anxiety about fossil fuels, the CIA, and the “just right” porridge of liberal masculinity (hint: it’s Obama/Morgan Freeman). This is first-rate Hollywood crap that somehow functions as an uncanny prophecy of our bad future. Run, Keanu, run! 

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In the past few weeks I've received many messages asking about the future of the show, so I wanted to put out a quick update about what's happening in my life (nothing too dramatic!) and where I expect the show to go. Long story short? I'm going to law school, and Nostalgia Trap will continue as I make my way through it. If you want to hear the whole story of why the hell anyone would go to law school in 2023, I tell it here, including all the weird signs and synchronicities that have set me on a somewhat unexpected, but eerily inevitable, new path.

This week I crank up the doom machine and cover a few troubling trends for a dystopian future, drawing connections between this week's horrific destruction of Lahaina, Maui to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. What are young people supposed to think about all this? And more importantly, will today's kids ever become HOMEOWNERS?

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This week Justin and I survey the big stories of the hot summer of 2023, with our eye on an unfolding and genuinely shocking set of ecological developments, the continuing practical and spiritual crisis of mass migration, the ominous undertones of the Hollywood strike and, of course, the revelations from major governments that yes, aliens exist and they have cool psychedelic vehicles. Is that just another collective heat hallucination, or have we truly arrived at the next chapter of the end times saga? 

Check out the whole episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-365-2023-86817216

Veep is an HBO comedy series, starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus, that presents a dark satire of insider DC political culture. This week Justin and I consider Veep’s acid take on the critical years between 2012-2019, when Obama-era technocratic optimism gave way to Trumpian funhouse fascism. What Veep shows us is the reptilian machinations of the “burned out losers and conniving robots” that succeed in American party politics, giving us an opportunity to ask: is that true? Is the world really run by people this cynical and depraved?

The sci-fi horror film M3GAN was a “surprise” hit last year, generating tons of internet buzz, viral Tik Tok dance videos and, of course, endless think pieces. As Justin Rogers-Cooper and I talk about this week, M3GAN operates on multiple levels, and contains a discourse about AI, capitalist culture, and queer family formation that makes it much more than another “killer robot” movie. Like Silicon Valley itself, M3GAN sings to us: “Tell me your dreams, I will dream them too.” But are we really in charge of the dream? 

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The FBI-orchestrated murder of Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton in 1969 remains one of the most singularly evil crimes of the 20th century, and it’s a story about which most Americans know very little. The 2021 film Judas and the Black Messiah, directed by Shaka King, is a heavy, detailed consideration of the events that led to Hampton’s death, focusing mainly on the figure of William O’Neal, a small-time thief coerced by the FBI into becoming a confidential informant working within Hampton’s organization. As Justin and I discuss in this episode, the film puts us in the center of the complicated moral calculations that defined 1960s radicalism, and asks hard questions about the price of loyalty, freedom, and revolution.  

Listen to whole episode with 7 day free trial of our Patreon membership;

https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-362-and-85368710

Continuing our epic survey of Mr. Show with Bob and David, the most important television program of all time, we watch the final two episodes of Mr. Show’s second season: “Operation Hell on Earth” and “The Velveteen Touch of a Dandy Fop.” As David, Peter, and Geoff discuss here, the show feels like it takes a thematic/aesthetic turn in these particular sketches, with hints of where we’re headed in Season 3. There’s weird arty stuff here (the entire “Recruiters” sketch, a parody of the basketball documentary Hoop Dreams,  is uncanny), plus some all-time favorite characters (Fartin’ Gary, Droopy), and more than a few surprising takes on 90s culture and politics.

Mr. Trap is included with a subscription to the Nostalgia Trap Patreon -- sign up for a FREE 7 day trial here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/mr-trap-ep-5-hey-85206762

Kristen Lovell is a filmmaker whose new documentary, The Stroll, tells the story of transgender women surviving as sex workers in New York City’s Meatpacking District during the 1980s and 1990s. This is harrowing stuff, and a perspective on urban history and gentrification like you’ve never seen before. In this conversation, Lovell tells me about her own experiences in the neighborhood, and reflects on how the Giuliani/Bloomberg era used real estate and finance to cover the city’s dark history with luxury facades.

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 finally get around to watching Jordan Peele's latest film, Nope, a UFO story layered with allegories about race, nature, and cinema itself. We both find something simultaneously compelling and frustrating about Peele's work, and in this conversation we try to get at the weird contours and contradictions of his auteurist project.

Listen to the whole episode with a free trial of our Patreon stream: https://www.patreon.com/posts/livestream-6-16-84684829

On this week's News Trap, I tell the sad story of our podcast's PERSECUTION by the algorithmic fiends at YouTube, who are maliciously and wrongfully accusing Nostalgia Trap of advocating violence and conspiracy theories on our channel.

Depsite this campaign, I persevere by sharing some startling examples of the real violence latent in the American system, with stories about housing, homelessness, and new trends in Vegas table gaming. 

Check out this interview with housing activist Paul Boden: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/may/29/paul-boden-america-homelessness-crisis

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This week Justin and I watch the Netflix documentary Inside the Mind of a Cat and contemplate the weird social, political, and spiritual economy of our relationship with cats. From global kitty litter supply chains to the uncanny dominance of cat videos in online spaces, we try to get a handle on how cats became such integral characters in our personal lives and in the wider world.

Listen to the full stream: https://www.patreon.com/posts/livestream-5-19-83262670

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.”

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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

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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. 

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

This week Justin and I take on the US/China Tik Tok fight and consider the wider implications of social media technology weaponized by states in a new cold war. Are we the lab rats for a psychological experiment conducted on a world-historical scale? Fuuuuuuuck, I certainly hope not! In either case, this is an intense conversation surveying the gangster-ass landscape of global capital at a particularly chilling moment, as we try to unlock the future by applying the reptilian logic of money and power to this week's wacky events. Russia, Ukraine, China, NATO, and of course, Las Vegas -- all on the table today. Let's do this.

Subscribe to listen to all our livestreams/bonus stuff, whenever you want: https://www.patreon.com/posts/livestream-3-17-80177026

Tanya L. Roth is a historian and teacher whose new book, Her Cold War: Women in the U.S. Military, 1945-1980, details the experiences of American women after the 1948 Women’s Armed Services Integration Act began a new era in the history of military service. In this conversation, Roth explains how, in the decades since World War II, the U.S. military became a central battleground in the fight for gender equality, as women challenged (and ultimately overturned) their classification as “noncombatants” and continue to reshape the structure and ideology of an institution that, for better or worse, serves as a critical engine of social engineering.

Subscribe to access our weekly livestream and giant library of bonus episodes: https://www.patreon.com/nostalgiatrap

Is there property without police? This week Justin and I talk about the "bottom up" appeal of Fox News and Tucker Carlson, as we consider how concepts of home, family, and property are tied up in an ideology of crime and punishment. Lots of directions and implications here, from Ron DeSantis' sadistic turn at Guantanamo to Lori Lightfoot's loss in Chicago. How deep does America's prison mindset go? I think we're gonna find out!

What is “alt comedy” anyway? On this episode of Mr. Trap, we take you back to the mid-1990s, when finding hip comedy with an intelligent perspective was as difficult as finding weed and pornography. Which is to say, pretty difficult! As we survey Mr. Show’s first season, we share some of our favorite bits and talk about what made Bob and David stand out in the larger world of 90s humor, from Saturday Night Live to In Living Color. Geoff and Peter tell us what makes Bob’s Droopy character so special, we all have a laugh about Tom Kenny’s surreal Abraham Lincoln impression, and David tells the story of his multiple, bizarre real-life encounters with the actual Bob Odenkirk and David Cross. 

All episodes of Mr. Trap are included with a Nostalgia Trap subscription: 

patreon.com/nostalgiatrap

Our friend Avi Garelick joins us to discuss his recent piece on the war between Ron DeSantis and the Disney Corporation in Florida, as we explore the longer history of Florida’s extraordinary relationship to the Disney brand. Along the way, we talk about Sean Baker’s haunting film The Florida Project, the weird politics and aesthetics of “New Urbanism,” and the current direction of housing politics in American cities. 

Check out our subscribers-only podcast series on Disney’s wild history:

Ep 1 - Time is a Flat Circle: https://www.patreon.com/posts/trap-tv-brick-is-74949645

Ep 2 - Uncle Walt Goes to War: https://www.patreon.com/posts/trap-tv-brick-to-75566223

Ep 3 - Space Cowboys: https://www.patreon.com/posts/trap-tv-brick-76267538

This week Justin and I watch the documentary Missing 411: The Hunted and contemplate cryptids, bigfoots, and mysterious disappearances in American forests. How are American history and politics tied up in these stories? What happened to all of these people? And most of all, what the fuck is making these sounds?   

Join up and listen to the whole episode: https://www.patreon.com/posts/livestream-3-3-w-79523275

Freddie deBoer joins me to discuss his viral piece on 90s nostalgia, “It's So Sad When Old People Romanticize Their Heydays, Also the 90s Were Objectively the Best Time to Be Alive.” This is a raw and honest conversation about what we miss about the era, what we absolutely hate about the 21st century, and how our lament for the loss of a certain kind of analog social reality is yes, old man shit, but also a call to the younger generation and a cataloging of the ways digital life has crippled us all. There was another way of living, kids. Let us tell you about it… 

Listen to whole episode: https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-354-was-79472867

This week Justin and I talk about the Great Chatbot Panic of 2023, leftists in love with Trump's "brilliant" visit to Ohio, and the alleged moral authority of U.S. actions re: Ukraine, one year into the war. Let's do this.

Subscribe to listen to the whole episode and access all our bonus stuff, livestreams, and videos: https://www.patreon.com/posts/livestream-2-24-79161824

In Part Two of my conversation with writer and musician Sean Nelson, we talk about the origins of his band Harvey Danger in the 1990s Seattle music scene, the bizarre rush of having a massive radio hit, and the bleak economic landscape of indie rock in the streaming era. Along the way, Sean offers some hard-earned wisdom and personal reflections on the pejorative concept of the “one hit wonder,” as we contemplate the past and future possibilities of subversive popular culture. Were the 90s really the last golden age, or is that just another nostalgia trap?  

Listen to the whole episode: https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-353-part-79010461

Sean Nelson is a writer and musician, known widely as the lead singer of the band Harvey Danger, whose 1998 single “Flagpole Sitta” became a staple of “alternative rock” radio and MTV and an inescapable earworm in 90s pop culture. In Part One of this conversation, we talk about what “alternative” means, tracing a line from the 1960s psychedelic culture that produced insane shit like the Monkees movie Head (1968) to the Seattle scene that drew Sean and many others in the early 1990s.

Check out Part Two of our conversation: https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-353-part-79010461

This week Justin and I talk about the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. Are we entering an accelerated era of industrial mass poisonings, or is this just more of the same old industrial mass poisonings? 

Listen to the whole episode: patreon.com/posts/livestream-2-17-78840239

Tad Skotnicki is a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the author of The Sympathetic Consumer: Moral Critique in Capitalist Culture (Stanford University Press, 2021). He joins me for a conversation about the common features of consumer activism, from 19th century abolitionism to 21st century Fair Trade movements, which have all based their projects around the idea that consumers are responsible for sympathizing with the invisible laborers that produce their goods, from sugar to iPhones. Skotnicki shares some great historical examples to help illustrate how capitalism’s consistent production of “sympathetic consumers” is a feature, not a bug. 

Subscribe to Nostalgia Trap to access our massive library of bonus episodes, video essays, livestreams and more: patreon.com/nostalgiatrap

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 this conversation, we talk about his book American Presidents and Oliver Stone: Kennedy, Nixon, and Bush between History and Cinema and go down the JFK assassination rabbit hole. How does Oliver Stone’s hyper-stylized vision capture the psychedelic violence of a beautiful young celebrity president’s savage murder in broad daylight? And how much can we trace a 21st century American political culture of conspiracy theories, true crime obsession, and spectacular public violence to the ritual bloodshed of November 22, 1963? 

Subscribe to Nostalgia Trap to access our massive library of bonus conversations, livestreams, and videos: patreon.com/nostalgiatrap

What happens when three old pals get together to talk about the 90s sketch comedy program Mr. Show with Bob and David? This podcast answers that very question! Welcome to the debut episode of Mr. Trap, a place where me (David Parsons) and my good friends Peter Sabatino and Geoff Johnson can trade ideas, memories, analysis, and even a few laffs about a show that touched our young hearts and forged our identities. In this opening conversation we get into Mr. Show’s origins in the L.A. alt comedy scene, the transition to HBO, and the first few insane sketches announcing a new *extra ironic* set of Gen X comedy voices.

First episode is free -- everything else is for Nostalgia Trap Patreon subscribers only!

New episodes of Mr. Trap are coming throughout Spring/Summer 2023. Subscribe to hear the whole series: patreon.com/nostalgiatrap

This week Justin and I go all in on Baz Luhrmann’s camp masterpiece Elvis (2022), as we consider the life, work, and legacy of an iconic 20th century artist/product/celebrity/Christ figure. How is Elvis’ insane life story emblematic of an archetypal cultural phenomenon, from Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin to Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston? How do we sort out the contradictions of race, gender, sexuality, and class in Elvis’ rise and fall? And perhaps most of all, what’s up with Tom Hanks in this movie? 

Listen to the whole episode: https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-349-i-w-78198738

What does it mean to “go underground”? Lara Langer Cohen is an associate professor of English at Swarthmore College. Her latest book, Going Underground: Race, Space, and the Subterranean in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Duke University Press, 2023), explores how subterranean spaces (both real and imagined) animated social, political, and cultural movements in 19th century America, from the abolitionists of the Underground Railroad to anarchist secret societies and practitioners of sex magic. In this conversation, we plunge into these underground worlds and excavate some of the lost people and ideas that populate the places that exist beneath our collective history. 

Subscribe to Nostalgia Trap to access more conversations, livestreams, and videos: patreon.com/nostalgiatrap

This week Yasmin and I watch Chinatown (1974) and have a conversation about the film’s infamously elegant screenplay, shocking plot twist, insanely dark ending, and wonderfully sleazy cameo from the film’s director, Roman Polanski, whose own personal corruption intersects with the film’s brutal vision of a corrupted world. What does Chinatown have to say to us now? 

Subscribe to hear the whole episode, plus access all our fabulous bonus stuff: patreon.com/nostalgiatrap

How do shifting ideas about physical fitness, health, and the body reflect larger ideological structures like nation, race, gender, and capitalism? Natalia Mehlman Petrzela is a historian of American culture and politics and associate professor of history at the New School. In this conversation, we discuss her latest book Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession, which tracks the evolution of fitness culture from the strongman exhibitions at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair to the Peloton/home gym movement of the COVID-19 era.  

Subscribe to Nostalgia Trap to access our library of bonus episodes, livestreams, and video essays: patreon.com/nostalgiatrap

On this episode of Housing Trap, Andrew is joined by Zach Paganini, a Ph.D. student in the Earth and Environmental Sciences program at the CUNY Graduate Center, for a conversation about the effects of water on the political economy of housing in America’s coastal cities. Threatened by floods, superstorms, and rising sea levels, cities from New York to Florida to Southern California, known for their lucrative real estate, are already undergoing immense shifts in anticipation of a wet future. Schustek and Paganini explore the contours of that future, explaining how housing policy is a central arena in the battle for economic and environmental fairness and sustainability. 

For more Housing Trap, along with access to the entire Nostalgia Trap bonus library for just $5, subscribe to our Patreon: patreon.com/nostalgiatrap

This week Justin and I watched the HBO Max documentary This Place Rules, which gives us a chance to talk about the weird undercurrents of rape, sexual domination, violence, and pedophilia coursing through 1/6, QAnon, Alex Jones, Proud Boys, Antifa, and even the filmmaker himself. Are we in a unique moment for subconscious urges bubbling to the surface of public politics, or has it always been this way? 

Listen to the whole episode: https://www.patreon.com/posts/livestream-1-13-77204705

What is film noir and why does it matter? In the first episode of a series called Shadow Nation, I reflect on the commercial failure of Guillermo Del Toro’s prestige noir remake Nightmare Alley (2021) and wonder what makes a movie “noir” in the first place. Is it just detectives and fedoras and femmes fatale? Or is there a way of understanding noir beyond style, genre, and visual aesthetic?

Check out the full episode, in video and podcast form for Nostalgia Trap subscribers:

patreon.com/posts/trap-tv-shadow-76793267

Our series on 1990s/2000s comedy continues this week with a conversation about Seinfeld. Justin and I watched two episodes (S5E5 "The Bris" and S7E4 "The Wink"), and reflect on the show's weird elevated "dream vision" of 90s bourgeois culture. 

Listen to the whole episode: patreon.com/posts/livestream-12-30-76564956

This week Justin and I watch Elf (2003) and talk about Will Ferrell's late 90s/early 2000s comic persona in the context of male bodies, George W. Bush, and a particular cultural turn toward "dumb assholes" in the digital era.

Listen to the whole episode: patreon.com/posts/livestream-12-23-76298993

What makes disturbing, graphic shows like CSI and Intervention so morbidly appealing? How does our desire for uncomfortable entertainment reflect a larger normalization of fear, precarity, and violence in our everyday reality? Hunter Hargraves is Associate Professor of Cinema and Television Arts at California State University, Fullerton. His new book, Uncomfortable Television (Duke University Press, 2023), examines how 21st century television invites viewers to find pleasure in discomfort, training us to survive in a neoliberal world that’s just one cringe experience after another. 

Subscribe to Nostalgia Trap and get access to all our bonus stuff

This week Justin and I jump off our previous discussion of Groundhog Day with a look at Planes, Trains, and Automobiles (1987), a deceptively complicated film about class, gender, and the queer social dynamics of American capitalism. We talk a lot about John Candy as a performer and celebrity here, finding lots of unexpected connections with the life and death of Kurt Cobain, another figure who introduced working class conceptions of embodiment (think butts, buttholes, blood, semen, foot odor, etc) at a critical moment in American pop cultural history. 

Since clever people are now declaring the end of college education, Ryan and I thought it might be fun to survey the highs and lows of our own respective "college" experiences, from undergrad to Ph.D. What worked for us, and what ruined our lives forever? Like any good academics, we're making a list! 

Listen to the whole episode

Go read Ryan's Substack 

Check out David's grad school rant on YouTube

Daniel Horowitz is a historian and the author of many books on American consumer culture, economics, and political ideology. In this conversation we discuss his latest book, American Dreams, American Nightmares: Culture and Crisis in Residential Real Estate from the Great Recession to the COVID-19 Pandemic (UNC Press, 2022), which connects the dots of our 21st century housing crisis, from HGTV reality shows (with titles like Flip or Flop, Hot Mess House, etc.), to Airbnb real estate moguls and the new era of working from home. How did buying, selling, and living in houses become such a social, cultural, and economic war zone? 

Check out the Nostalgia Trap YouTube Channel: youtube.com/boozeshaman

Subscribe to our Patreon: patreon.com/nostalgiatrap

This week Justin and I talk about China's Zero Covid policies coming apart as Apple demands MORE IPHONES, which leads to a wider consideration of what it means when a state drives people from the farms to the factories. Plus, we reflect on Ye's new Christofascism in the context of violence against LGBTQ+ communities, as we ponder how to confront an enemy that LOLs at the damage they create.

Listen to the whole episode: patreon.com/posts/livestream-12-9-75725406

On this episode of TRAP TV, we examine a critical moment in the history of the Walt Disney Company, when the tremendous success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937 gave way to a period of rapid expansion and ambitious, ultimately unsuccessful projects that nearly bankrupted the business and ended the Disney era. Then, the war came. This is the story of how World War II not only rescued Disney from financial ruin, it sharpened the company’s aesthetic and ideological purpose. With an unprecedented animator’s strike nearly paralyzing production in 1941, the war and its fallout on the homefront began a new period for both Disney the man and Disney the cultural product, as hyper-nationalism, militarism, and explicit anti-communism entered Disney’s bloodstream and brought the company to unimagined new heights of profit and influence. 

Subscribe to watch/listen to the whole episode: patreon.com/nostalgiatrap

This week Justin and I talk about the fight between labor, management, unions, and the state now being waged in the railroad industry, and trace the longer history of rail and transport as central spaces for navigating the class violence bubbling under the surface of the American economy. Plus, Christmas nostalgia for all the boys and girls!

Full episode: patreon.com/posts/livestream-12-2-75429714 

This week Yasmin and I watch Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968) and Birth (Jonathan Glazer, 2004),  two films about trapped women, pixie haircuts, beautiful New York apartments, stifling bourgeois social norms, and creepy children born of Satan. There’s plenty for us to chew on here—from architecture and occult power to deeply unsettling notions of childhood, death, and sexuality—as we consider how these films locate an atmosphere of dread and horror in the fantastic spaces of elite New York.

Chad E. Pearson is a labor historian and writer whose work focuses on ruling class organizations and violence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this episode we discuss his latest book, Capital’s Terrorists: Klansmen, Lawmen, and Employers in the Long Nineteenth Century (UNC Press, 2022), which explores how elite capitalists evolved new strategies of violence and repression during the Second Industrial Revolution, employing extralegal terror—from book burning and blacklists to kidnappings, arson, and murder—as a means of securing their power over a rising population of wage workers. 

This week Justin and I consider the possibility that news of Twitter's imminent demise may be premature, which leads to a discussion of tech bro culture's connection to the wider history of consumer capitalism and the series of swaggering men who promise utopian escapes from the very nightmare they've created, producing an endless cycle of technological baubles that attempt to remove us from linear time and distract us from the inevitable march toward death. Does it work? You tell me!

Listen to the whole episode 

On Episode 5, we take a look at the period 1956-1963, when the United States attempted to create an anti-communist state called South Vietnam, with a well-connected Catholic-Confucian politician named Ngo Dinh Diem as its president. When JFK takes over in 1961, Diem's violent repression of the Vietnamese population accelerates, and a homegrown resistance called the National Liberation Front begins organizing a military and political movement to oust Diem and unify Vietnam. For full episode subscribe at patreon.com/nostalgiatrap. 

Elizabeth Becker is an award-winning author and journalist; her latest book, You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War (2021), profiles three journalists whose groundbreaking work rearranged the history of the Vietnam War. In this conversation, Becker explains how Kate Webb, Catherine Leroy, and Frances Fitzgerald each developed critical journalistic practices that brought new insights to the conflict, and offers some jaw-dropping stories (spoiler: she met Pol Pot!) from her own extraordinary career.

Donald Borenstein is a freelance video director, editor, and one of my favorite online friends, whose posts on politics, culture, and media have been a highlight of my feed for years. This week we finally get to meet face to face (on Zoom) and talk about two of our respective favorite films, Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames (1983) and Slava Tsukerman’s Liquid Sky (1982), both of which are essential viewing for anyone interested in radical politics and radical filmmaking practices. As works of sci-fi queer punk feminism, Born in Flames and Liquid Sky occupy a totally unique territory in the history of American politics and culture. In this conversation, Donald and I reflect on what makes these films “important” but also what makes them feel so fun and alive, and how they reshape the aesthetic and narrative boundaries of “political cinema.” For full episode subscribe at patreon.com/nostalgiatrap. 

On this week’s episode we explore the world of CIA spookery unleashed in Vietnam as the French exited the region and the United States began escalating its involvement in Vietnamese affairs. From the gangster-style machinations of the Dulles brothers to the psychological warfare practiced by characters like Edward Lansdale and Dr. Tom Dooley, this is the story of America’s covert war to manipulate the situation in Vietnam in the years 1954-1956, as it tried desperately to build an anti-communist alternative to Ho Chi Minh and to undermine the existence of a united, independent Vietnam. For full episodes of NAM-TV go to patreon.com/nostalgiatrap. 

The kids are crazy for Columbo! This week our friend Bill Black drops by to talk about the long-running detective show starring Peter Falk that’s seen an unlikely resurgence in the COVID era. From its weird class dynamics and parade of villainous guest stars to Falk’s truly iconic performance, we explore what makes Columbo’s stories, characters, and rhythms so different from the binge-watchable content of the digital era, and try to wrap our minds around its sudden popularity among a new generation. To listen to the whole episode, subscribe at patreon.com/nostalgiatrap.