Nostalgia Trap

Hunter S. Thompson’s 1971 novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas remains a classic of American drug literature, a haunting reflection on the cultural and political hangover of the revolutionary 1960s. I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced a more resonant portrait of the American id than the carnival of vile, deranged American archetypes Thompson describes in these pages. Justin Rogers-Cooper has been similarly influenced by Fear and Loathing over the years, and joins me this week to talk about Thompson’s legacy, his dark take on the “meaning” of the 1960s, and his view of America as a debased post-Nazi hellscape.

Check out our new SCREENSHOTZ news chat on the Trap Patreon page, where we share a curated stream of excerpts from global news sources — a relentless, delicious feast of doom, with commentary!

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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Trump and Elon Musk are actively working to destroy the global economic order, but to what end? This week Justin and I consider the wacky cartoon reality that Americans inhabit, and speculate about the different forms "blowback" might take when the punishment gets real.

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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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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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