Quotes from Chuck Klosterman

We secretly know that being seen as nice is the same as being nice in actuality. If you present yourself as a nice person, that becomes the prism for how your other actions are judged. The deeper motives that drive you can only be questioned by those who know you exceptionally well, and (most of the time) not even by them. If you act nice, you're nice.

The 1980 George W. S. Trow essay "Within the Context of No Context" argued that "the work of television is to establish false contexts and to chronicle the unraveling of existing contexts.

It took some time for Boomers to reach their "uncomfortable analysis" phase. This stands in contrast to Generation X, who entered that phase immediately and never left.

Like so many modern people, my relationship with technology makes no sense whatsoever: It's the most important aspect of my that I hate.

The reason things unacceptable in life are acceptable in fiction is because fiction is often the only way we can comfortably examine the morally obscene. For

In any situation, the villain is the person who knows the most but cares the least.

Chumbawamba, a British pop group who promoted Marxist pacifist anarchy, had a massive Top 10 single about getting drunk and falling down.

Tricks Aren't Illusions

We are remember e for the totality of our accomplishments, but we are defined by the singularity of our greatest failure. It does not matter what you have been right about, and it does not matter how often that rightness is validated by others. We are what we cannot so.

the dissonance between the public sensitivity to genetic engineering and the actual progress being made can be seen as a signpost for the modern anti-science movement in Western culture.

But part of me knows there's an intangible downside to having complete intellectual detachment from whatever most Americans consider to be common knowledge.

Clinton instinctually reflected the ambivalence of the era in an optimistic way. Relative to the rest of the twentieth century, the nineties were a good time to be president, and he was a good president for good times.

It was a version of nothing so close to something it accidentally became everything.

So this, it seems, is the key for authors who want to live forever: You need to write about important things without actually writing about them. I

It's been noted that one of the keys to Alfred Hitchcock's success as a filmmaker was that he didn't draw characters as much as he drew character types; this is how he normalized the cinematic experience.

Most live video footage was not permanently saved, often taped over to reduce costs (some of the only material that remains from this period was recorded by one private citizen—Marion Stokes, a Philadelphia woman who compulsively recorded and stored over 40,000 VHS tapes of news broadcasts between the years of 1979 and 2012, eventually donating the collection to the Vanderbilt Television News Archive).

But its more illuminating feature is something that often happens with popular history: An attempt at analyzing the distant past ends up being more astute about the living present.

take solace in the fact that you can quit at any time. I cannot.]

Gravity might just be the manifestation of other forces---not a force itself, but the peripheral result of something else... So if gravity were an emergent force, It would mean that gravity isn't the central power pulling things to the Earth, but the tangential consequence of something else we can't yet explain. We feel it, but it's not there. It would almost make the whole idea of gravity a semantic construction. [Attributed to Brian Greene]

If you aspire to be truly open-minded, you can't just try to see the other side of an argument. That's not enough. You have to go all the way.

Perry wanted to be the villain, probably for strategic reasons. But it didn't take. He wasn't smart enough; he probably didn't even know how "Ayn" was pronounced.

What matters more is what The Phantom Menace has come to represent: the saddest repudiation—and the harshest confirmation—of the entire Generation X ethos. The pop culture lionized by young adults of the nineties was often based on a myth: the dogmatic belief that things they'd loved as children had always been appreciated with adult minds.

Y2K was the maturation of a criticism whose echo would become normative and unyielding: We've lost control of what we have built, and we need to go back. But the road at our heels was already gone. Forward was the only way out.

The possibility of parents and children sharing the same cultural interests has increased dramatically over the past twenty-five years; today, the central bifurcation is how that communal culture is accessed and interpreted and experienced.