But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past
Chuck Klostermanamazon.com
But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past
He believes specialists are the people who galvanize history. Music critics have almost no impact on what music is popular at any given time, but they’re extraordinarily well positioned to dictate what music is reintroduced after its popularity has waned.
Chuck Klosterman • But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past
What people appreciate about rock and pop is less cerebral—the subjective notion of cool is the most critical aesthetic factor, and any emotional exchange can trump everything else.
Chuck Klosterman • But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past
The reason something becomes retrospectively significant in a far-flung future is detached from the reason it was significant at the time of its creation—and that’s almost always due to a recalibration of social ideologies that future generations will accept as normative.
Chuck Klosterman • But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past
He was also prolific, which matters almost as much.
Chuck Klosterman • But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past
I’m simply wondering if the overall state of society is—very slowly, and almost imperceptibly—moving toward a collective condition where team sports don’t have a place. In other words, a distant future where football disappears, followed by every other sport with vaguely similar values.
Chuck Klosterman • But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past
The ultimate failure of the United States will probably not derive from the problems we see or the conflicts we wage. It will more likely derive from our uncompromising belief in the things we consider unimpeachable and idealized and beautiful. Because every strength is a weakness, if given enough time.
Chuck Klosterman • But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past
only the hedgehog knows that storytelling is secretly the problem, which is why the fox is constantly wrong.
Chuck Klosterman • But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past
If we think about the trajectory of anything—art, science, sports, politics—not as a river but as an endless, shallow ocean, there is no place for collective wrongness. All feasible ideas and every possible narrative exist together, and each new societal generation can scoop out a bucket of whatever antecedent is necessary to support their contempo
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Everyone concedes it exists, but it’s not a popular prejudice (at least not among the mostly white liberals who drive these conversations).
Chuck Klosterman • But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past
Round and round this goes, with both sides claiming to occupy the spiritual center of the same philosophy, never considering the possibility that the (potentially real) value of their viewpoint hinges on the prospect that patriotism is not absurd and democracy is not simply the system some wig-wearing eighteenth-century freedom junkies happened to
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