Quotes from Chuck Klosterman

So I surrendered. I joined Facebook. And you know what? It turns out the only reason they wanted me to join was so they could show me pictures of their children without having to ask if I was interest in seeing them. This is why Facebook caught on with adults: It's designed for people who want to publicize their children without our consent.

Sampson wanted to be "a seven-foot-four guard." He was too pretty to be a soldier. Against the profoundly overmatched Chaminade, he took just nine shots and let his unbeatable team lose to a bunch of beach bum nobodies. He was the greatest, but he wasn't that great.

What society classifies as "credible" is almost always a product of whichever social demographic happens to be economically dominant at the time of the classification.

If you don't quit following me, I will kill every man you've got. I'll burn down your house and rearrange your furniture. I will not pray for you and not for your children and not for your children's children. I'll get inside your dreams. I will contact Roberto Duran. We're very close friends. Did you know that? Do you understand me? Good.

The drive to Santa Fe on I-25 is midly zen. There are public road signs that say Gusty Winds May Exist. This seems more like lazy philosophy than travel advice.

There is no alternative universe where Ralph Sampson is a beloved symbol of excellence. There's no Philip K. Dick novel where he averages a career double-double and gets four rings. He could never be that guy. He was needed elsewhere, for other reasons. He was needed to remind people that their own self-imposed mediocrity is better than choking on transcendence.

The middle class does not exist. If you believe you are part of the middle class it just means you're rich and insecure or poor and misinformed.

flaws that didn't seem unacceptable until they were already eradicated.

A ten-year-old boy doesn't want a hyper-dexterous giant to choke, just as a ten-year-old girl doesn't feel good when Britney Spears has a nervous breakdown on live TV. Only an adult can feel good about someone else's failure.

The Net was built without a central command authority. That means that nobody owns it, nobody runs it, nobody has the power to kick anybody off for good. There isn't even a master switch that can shut it down in case of emergency. "It's the closest thing to true anarchy that ever existed

The matter forever, you have to matter to those who don't care.

There was a pedantic tedium to the way the internet was described—a continual onslaught of jargon that insisted something important was happening without fully elucidating what the important thing was.

Normal consumers declare rock to be dead whenever they personally stop listening to it (or at least to new iterations of it), which typically happens about two years after they graduate from college.

Studied objectively, Luke Skywalker was not very cool. But for kids who saw Empire, Luke was The Man. He was the guy we wanted to be. Retrospectively, we'd like to claim Han Solo was the single-most desirable character—and he was, in theory. But Solo's brand of badass cool is something you can't understand until you're old enough to realize that being an arrogant jerk is an attractive male quality.

The uncomfortable, omnipresent reality within any conversation about representation is that the most underrepresented subcultures are the ones that don't even enter into the conversation.

The practical reality is that any present-tense version of the world is unstable. What we currently consider to be true—both objectively and subjectively—is habitually provisional.

There are three facts about Fugazi you must know: It only plays shows where age IDs are not required. It charges $5 admission to its shows, always. It will never, ever sign with a major record label.

I have always tried to live by a simple principle: if I am sober enough to drive, I am too sober to dance.

Being interesting has been replaced with being identifiable

The most popular single in the world was "Livin' la Vida Loca," a song about how Pro Tools made Puerto Ricans gay.

This is a very common paradigm held in small towns. If somebody who grew up in your community wins a Nobel Prize, you cut out the newspaper story and put it on the bulletin board; if someone from your town grows up and becomes America's most depraved serial rapist, you cut out the newspaper story and put it on the bulletin board. It's just nice to see someone doing anything.

A book becomes popular because of its text, but it's the subtext that makes it live forever. For

But I can't deny my heart: I like to drink, and I like to rock. You think I'm an idiot? Fine. You don't have to come over.

Unless cataclysmic events are actively breaking, the purpose of cable news is emotional reassurance.