Nostalgia Trap

This week we check out the explosive Ronan Farrow piece on Sam Altman and consider the intersection of AI, climate crises, and sociopathic personalities that defines this historical moment. Who is really in the driver's seat of our collective future? Listen to the full episode here

Did Bernie's loss break the left's brain? Listen to the full episode here

By joining Israel in a reckless attack on Iran, Trump has put the entire global system in the kill box, which begs the question, what's more dangerous: Trump when he's winning or Trump when he's trapped like a dog? And what happens when the material realities unleashed by this attack come home to roost? Click here to listen to the whole episode

This week Justin and I game out scenarios unfolding from the U.S./Israel attack on Iran. Is it all about Epstein? (LOL) Or might China and Russia have something to do with Trump's latest insane wager? Let's take a look at the imperial chessboard. Listen to the whole episode here.

My late night adventures into the local jazz underworld have introduced me to some fascinating new friends, and I wanted to bring two of them into the Nostalgia Trap universe. Monte Montgomery and Alan Burgess are old pals whose frequent conversations often veer into the uncomfortable territories of race, culture and politics that will be familiar to Trap listeners. In this first episode in a series with Monte and Alan, we tackle the idea of "cultural appropriation" within the context of "race music," from Elvis to Eminem. Check out Monte's first appearance on Nostalgia Trap here. Subscribe to the Nostalgia Trap Patreon for access to our regular News Trap episodes and a whole world of bonus content: patreon.com/nostalgiatrap

This is a preview clip from a subscribers-only episode. Check out our Patreon and subscribe to listen! On this week's News Trap Justin and I talk about the delicious crash of the crypto hustle, the sinister promise of "agentic AI," the human wreckage of Silicon Valley's utopian projects, the sad fall of Noam Chomsky, and the larger implications of Jeffrey Epstein's legendary run as the elite's favorite BFF.

When I was growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, Rolling Stone magazine was an indispensable resource for discovering the hip edge of American pop culture. Of course, I didn't realize at the time that the magazine had its roots in the 1960s counterculture, crafted by entrepreneur Jann Wenner as a subversive Trojan horse within the staid landscape of Cold War America. On this episode, historian Charles L. Ponce de Leon joins me for a conversation about his new book Rolling Stone and the Rise of Hip Capitalism: How a Magazine Born in the 1960s Changed America (UNC Press 2026), as we explore the magazine's complex evolution and the ironies of "counterculture" becoming "mainstream." Check out my '90s music podcast/video series with John Lombardo, 120 MONTHS: https://substack.com/@120months Subscribe to Nostalgia Trap to listen to our News Trap freakouts and other bonus content: https://patreon.com/nostalgiatrap   

This is a brief clip from a full episode on our subscribers feed. Subscribe to hear the whole thing! This week Justin joins me to consider what would happen if the post-1945 "rules based order" really does collapse -- something that seems more inevitable with each passing moment. With the Trump administration acting in severely irrational ways, how will the global system react? In addition to thinking about Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney's dire warning at this week's Davos conference, we talk about the wider chaos unleashed by ICE in Minnesota, Trump's attack on the Fed, and the continued dive into the abyss of 19th century imperial logic.

This week we're talking with Aaron G. Fountain, Jr. about his new book High School Students Unite! Teen Activism, Education Reform, and FBI Surveillance in Postwar America (UNC Press, 2025). By shifting focus from college campuses to American high schools, Fountain's work uncovers a whole world of 1960s and 1970s activism by young people around the country, who fought for their own rights within a larger struggle for social, racial, and economic justice. In this conversation, he shares some of the most compelling revelations he's discovered in oral history interviews, underground newspaper archives, and FBI records, and reflects on the role that high schoolers play in today's chaotic political landscape. Become a Nostalgia Trap Patron to access all our bonus episodes, including weekly News Trap updates.  

This is a preview of a subscribers-only episode. Click here to listen to the whole thing, and access our big library of bonus content. 2026 is leaping out of the gate with a flood of chaotic news stories, from Minneapolis to Greenland, from Venezuela to Iran. Justin joins me to look for the patterns uniting this increasingly jarring geopolitical reality, and to consider the poisonous cocktail of psychological, economic and historical forces that are launching us into a seemingly bleak future.