Quotes from Chuck Klosterman

We live in an age where virtually no content is lost and virtually all content is shared. The sheer amount of information about every current idea makes those concepts difficult to contradict, particularly in a framework where public consensus has become the ultimate arbiter of validity. In other words, we're starting to behave as if we've reached the end of human knowledge. And while that notion is undoubtedly false, the sensation of certitude it generates is paralyzing.

In 1992, bragging about your area code was a collective expression of the community where you were. By 2002, it was an individual connection to the place you had left.

If a society improves, the experience of growing up in that society should be less taxing and more comfortable; if technology advances and efficiency increases, emerging generations should rationally expect to work less. If new kids aren't soft and lazy, something has gone wrong.

Woody Allen made it acceptable for beautiful women to sleep with nerdy, bespectacled goofballs; all we need to do is fabricate the illusion of intellectual humor, and we somehow have a chance.

I don't understand this whole thing about computers and the superhighway," sci-fi novelist Ray Bradbury told an audience of college students in 1995. "Who wants to be in touch with all of those people?

his lazy eye drifting around the room like a child looking for the bathroom.

everything I understood seven hours ago has already changed, and that I have to learn everything again.

It also creates a problematic reflection: If a villain is the person who knows the most and cares the least, then a hero is the person who cares too much without knowing anything. It makes every hero seem like Forrest Gump. But it's not the intelligence that people dislike; it's the dispassionate application of that intelligence. It's the calculation. It's someone who views life as a game where the rules are poorly written and designed for abuse.

Klosterman's Razor: the philosophical belief that the best hypothesis is the one that reflexively accepts its potential wrongness to begin with. _____________________________

According to population expert Dr. Paul Ehrlich, we should currently be experiencing a dystopian dreamscape where "survivors envy the dead," which seems true only when I look at Twitter.

Her nomination for vice president in 2008 represents the most desperate inclinations of the Republican Party. In two hundred years, I suspect historians will use Palin as an example of how insane America became in the decade following the destruction of the World Trade Center, and her origin story will seem as extraterrestrial and eccentric as Abe Lincoln jumping out of a window to undermine a voting quorum in 1840.

The nineties were not an age for the aspirant. The worst thing you could be was a sellout, and not because selling out involved money. Selling out meant you needed to be popular, and any explicit desire for approval was enough to prove you were terrible.

So think how this might alter the memory of The Matrix : In some protracted reality, film historians will reinvestigate an extremely commercial action movie made by people who (unbeknownst to the audience) would eventually transition from male to female. Suddenly, the symbolic meaning of a universe with two worlds—one false and constructed, the other genuine and hidden—takes on an entirely new meaning.

The video for 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' was not more consequential than the reunification of Germany. But Nevermind is the inflection point where one style of Western culture ends and another begins, mostly for reasons only vaguely related to music.

The flavor was nothing like beer. It was closer to cheap champagne mixed with Sprite, and—unlike beer—it was the opposite of an acquired taste. Every new Zima went down slightly worse than the previous Zima. There was, however, something perversely enticing about a drink that seemed to come from a post-apocalyptic wasteland in which color did not exist.

One of the minor tragedies of human memory is our inability to unwatch movies we'd love to see (again) for the first time.

If you want to experience a free-flowing discourse devoid of limitation, you need to seek the darkest fringes of the Internet (and none of that anonymous bile can bleed back into proper society, because the interpretation always ends up being worse than the original sentiment).

Mass media has convinced us to think that silence is only supposed to happen as a manifestation of supreme actualization, where both parties are so at peace with their emotional connection that it cannot be expressed through the rudimentary tools of the lexicon; otherwise, silence is proof that the magic is gone and the relationship is over (hence the phrase "We just don't talk anymore").

I believe that time is like a train, with men hanging out in front of the engine and off the back of the caboose; the man in front is laying down new tracks the moment before the train touches them and the man in the caboose is tearing up the rails the moment they are passed. There is no linear continuation: The past disappears, the future is unimagined, and the present is ephemeral. It cannot be traversed.

It will come to be seen as the persecution of a culture. This makes football akin to the Confederate flag, or Christmas decorations in public spaces, or taxpayer-supported art depicting Jesus in a tank of urine—something that becomes intractable precisely because so many people want to see it eliminated. The game's violence would save it, and it would never go away.

machine powering the modern world is too complicated for the average person to fix or calibrate. And they know this. This is what makes an IT guy different from you. He might make less money, he might have less social prestige, and people might look at him in the cafeteria like he's a morlock — but he can act however he wants. He can be nice, but only if he feels like it. He can ignore the company dress code. He can lie for

The nineties were a golden age for metropolitan newspapers and glossy magazines, yet most copies were destroyed or recycled within a month and never converted to digital files. It was a decade of seeing absolutely everything before never seeing it again.

I don't think we have any idea who we are. I think we're engaged in a constant battle to figure out who we are.

Life is fucking confusing. I don't know anything, and neither do you.