Youth may be wasted on the young but that doesn’t mean the young are impervious to the siren call of nostalgia. That’s what the Canadian cultural critic David Berry argues in his 2020 book On Nostalgia, which sifts through a wide array of history, art and pop culture to examine just what nostalgia really means, and why it affects 20-year-olds and 80-year-olds just the same. Over Zoom, Berry explains the dual nature of nostalgia and why today, with the influence of the internet, it feels more all-pervasive than ever before.  

What first sparked your interest in nostalgia?
Basically, I was seeing it everywhere, but in what I felt like were two very weird ways. I’m a critic for the most part, and I would run across it either as the subject of a work of art, where it was always a ve...