In this brilliant polemical rampage, Owen Hatherley shows how our past is being resold in order to defend the indefensible. From the marketing of a "make do and mend" aesthetic to the growing nostalgia for a utopian past that never existed, a cultural distraction scam prevents people grasping the truth of their condition. The Ministry of Nostalgia explodes the creation of a false history: a rewriting of the austerity of the 1940s and 1950s, which saw the development of a welfare state while the nation crawled out of the devastations of war. This period has been recast to explain and offer consolation for the violence of neoliberalism, an ideology dedicated to the privatisation of our common wealth. In coruscating prose-with subjects ranging from Ken Loach's documentaries, Turner Prize-shortlisted video art, London vernacular architecture, and Jamie Oliver's cooking-Hatherley issues a passionate challenge to the injunction to keep calm and carry on.

A new collection of essays exploring class, whiteness, family, and nostalgia, for better and for worse. I have a nostalgia problem, and I'm not the only American who does. So writes Jennifer Niesslein in the introduction to Dreadful Sorry. But what, exactly, is the problem? Having grown up hand-to-mouth in small-town Pennsylvania and suburban Virginia, Niesslein is keenly aware of both past challenges and relative privilege. In this set of engaging, personal stories, Niesslein digs into how her own sense of self is rooted in nostalgic narratives of her upbringing and of American history writ large. With often wry candor, she address thorny questions of family trauma and the problematic calculus of respectability politics--as well as the lighter nostalgias offered by high school reunions and the plain fact of a long and enduring marriage. In an era of widespread re-evaluation of Confederate monuments and the apparatus of white supremacy, Niesslein aims to diligently scrub out nostalgia that casts the past in a rosy glow, while remaining open-hearted and hopeful that nostalgia--our shared longing for a lost time--can help illuminate our understanding of the present and point the way toward a better future. Charming and frank, this suite of personal essays digs deep, offering truths that will resonate with readers across the spectrum curious about the persistence of memory and our collective longing for days gone by.

Since the end of the cold war, Africa has seen a dramatic rise in new political and religious phenomena, including an eviscerated privatized state, neoliberal NGOs, Pentecostalism, a resurgence in accusations of witchcraft, a culture of scamming and fraud, and, in some countries, a nearly universal wish to emigrate. Drawing on fieldwork in Togo, Charles Piot suggests that a new biopolitics after state sovereignty is remaking the face of one of the world’s poorest regions. In a country where playing the U.S. Department of State’s green card lottery is a national pastime and the preponderance of cybercafés and Western Union branches signals a widespread desire to connect to the rest of the world, Nostalgia for the Future makes clear that the cultural and political terrain that underlies postcolonial theory has shifted. In order to map out this new terrain, Piot enters into critical dialogue with a host of important theorists, including Agamben, Hardt and Negri, Deleuze, and Mbembe. The result is a deft interweaving of rich observations of Togolese life with profound insights into the new, globalized world in which that life takes place.

Generation Chef is the story of Jonah Miller, who at age twenty-four attempts to fulfill a lifelong dream by opening the Basque restaurant Huertas in New York City, still the high-stakes center of the restaurant business for an ambitious young chef.

Can one be nostalgic for the home one never had? Why is it that the age of globalization is accompanied by a no less global epidemic of nostalgia? Can we know what we are nostalgic for? In the seventeenth century, Swiss doctors believed that opium, leeches, and a trek through the Alps would cure nostalgia. In 1733 a Russian commander, disgusted with the debilitating homesickness rampant among his troops, buried a soldier alive as a deterrent to nostalgia. In her new book, Svetlana Boym develops a comprehensive approach to this elusive ailment. Combining personal memoir, philosophical essay, and historical analysis, Boym explores the spaces of collective nostalgia that connect national biography and personal self-fashioning in the twenty-first century. She guides us through the ruins and construction sites of post-communist cities -- St. Petersburg, Moscow, Berlin, and Prague-and the imagined homelands of exiles-Benjamin, Nabokov, Mandelstam, and Brodsky. From Jurassic Park to the Totalitarian Sculpture Garden, from love letters on Kafka's grave to conversations with Hitler's impersonator, Boym unravels the threads of this global epidemic of longing and its antidotes.

Mixtape Nostalgia: Culture, Memory, and Representation tells the story of the mixtape from its history in 1970s bootlegging to its resurgence as an icon of nostalgic analog technology. Burns looks at the history of the mixtape from the early 1980s and the rise of the cassette as a fundamental aspect of the music industry. Stories from music fans collecting hip hop mixtapes in the Bronx or recording songs off the radio permeate the book. She discusses the continued contemporary appeal of the mixtape as musicians, novelists, memoirists, playwrights, and even podcasters have used it as a metaphor for connection and identity. From Rob Sheffield’s Love is a Mix Tape to Questlove’s Mixtape Potluck Cookbook, Burns analyzes how the mixtape can function as a plot point, a stand-in for emotional connection, or an organizing structure. The book shows how creators use the iconography of the mixtape cassette to create ephemera, from coffee subscriptions to board games, which speaks to the appreciation of the tangible and the analog. The desire to find connection through sharing a physical artifact permeates the various creative uses of the mixtape. From blockbuster films like Guardians of the Galaxy to mixtape throw pillows, Burns highlights the mixtape as a site of collective memory tied to youth culture, community identity, and sharing music.