Fires in Los Angeles unleash a wave of online hate from the left and right. What chance do we have to mitigate the coming climate change disasters if the population's reactions are driven by algorithms that massage and indulge our worst impulses?

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This week I talk with David Humphries, a professor of English at Queensborough Community College in New York City, about his excellent project Happy Nostalgia: Making Connections with the Music of the ‘90s, which collects essays from CUNY scholars on the last “analog” moment of music fandom, the beautiful and tragic 1990s. We get a chance to trade nostalgic stories about our own music obsessions of the ‘90s, and try to frame how things changed for us (and everyone else) when streaming music blasted a whole lifestyle into oblivion. What died, and what remains alive? And are we just being cranky old men about Spotify’s algorithmic nightmare? This is an intense and fun conversation about the meaning of nostalgia and how music gives us a constant pulse through the decades of technological and cultural evolution.

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A critical but often overlooked chapter in American labor history, the animator’s strike that shook the Walt Disney Corporation in 1941 was part of a wave of labor struggle in World War II era Hollywood. Jake S. Friedman’s book The Disney Revolt: The Great Labor War of Animation’s Golden Age chronicles the strike in colorful detail, and includes plenty of eye-popping images of the strike’s particularly cartoonish aesthetic. Friedman joins me for a conversation about his book, the strike, and the wider history of the Disney project, which shifted dramatically in the wake of the rebellion by its key artists. From communist infiltrators to mafia-connected union leaders, this is a fascinating picture of the intersection of art, industrial capitalism, and pop culture.

For more on the book, including lots of great images from the strike: https://www.thedisneyrevolt.com/

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This week we watched the excellent Apple TV series Severance and put it in conversation with Naomi Klein’s latest book Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. Both texts explore how the concept of “doubles” plays out in capitalist culture, and we have fun talking about the ways they did (and didn’t) blow our minds. From Klein’s refreshing take on the left’s severe mistakes of the COVID era (and how Steve Bannon greedily lapped up the detritus) to Severance’s terrifying vision of a corporation that aims to replace your entire identity, we take the opportunity to look into the mirror at the selves we make, and that are made for us.

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A United Healthcare CEO is assassinated and the world laughs, fitness and nutrition culture goes fascist, Europe in collapse while China salivates, Trump's tariffs portend new global shockwaves.

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It's Black Friday, so between insane binges of online shopping, Justin and I sat down to record a conversation about the Netflix documentary The Antisocial Network: From Memes to Mayhem, as we consider the path from Occupy Wall Street and Bernie Sanders to 1/6 and Donald Trump's triumph in the 2024 election. What role has internet culture played in shaping our current reality, and what can we expect in the future?

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Musk's endgame on environmental regulations, universities bracing for a war on DEI and critical race theory, Houthi pirates drawn to their deaths in Ukraine, national economies bracing for world war. Happy Thanksgiving!

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Tim Keogh is an Associate Professor of History at the Queensborough Community College in New York City. His book In Levittown’s Shadow: Poverty in America’s Wealthiest Postwar Suburb turns a common American story on its head, giving us a picture of life at the economic bottom of the postwar suburban housing boom. This conversation features challenges to political orthodoxies of the right and left, and gave me a lot to chew on as we reflect on Trump’s stunning gains among urban and suburban New Yorkers.

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