Nostalgia Trap

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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.
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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.

What makes John Candy such a unique figure in American pop culture? And why are we still talking about him in 2025? In this episode, Justin and I discuss the new documentary John Candy: I Like Me (dir. Colin Hanks) and reflect on Candy's outsized space in the cultural imagination, while exploring some of the darker elements of our paternal attraction to specific celebrities.
Check out our previous episode all about Planes, Trains, and Automobiles (dir. John Hughes), a key work in the Candy oeuvre.
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It's time once again to sip some eggnog and survey the wreckage of the past 12 months, as Justin joins us for a conversation about the continuing (though anti-viral) insanity of the Russia-Ukraine War and its significance within the larger framework of Europe's decline. We also talk about the strength of the MAGA project in the wake of Charlie Kirk's assassination and the rising cost of living, and consider the disturbing implications of the "Fuck Around and Find Out" philosophy as applied to political violence. Happy Holidays!