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b5a7af3
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My feelings about politics and literature and mathematics and the rest of life's minutiae can only be described through a labyrinthine of six-sided questions, but everything that actually matters can be explained by Lindsey fucking Buckingham and Stevie fucking Nicks in four fucking minutes.
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Chuck Klosterman |
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3eb1721
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I sometimes wonder how many hours of my life I have wasted bitching about keyboards. The use of keyboards and synthesizers is the Roe v. Wade of '80s metal. It was-without question-the lamest instrument a band could use.
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Chuck Klosterman |
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9eabc67
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We all convince ourselves of things like this- not necessarily about Say Anything, but about any fictionalized portrayals of romance that happen to hit us in the right place, at the right time.
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romance
love
truth
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Chuck Klosterman |
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9f47585
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Jewel moved 432,000 hardcover copies of A Night Without Armor, thereby making her the best-selling American poet of the past fifty years.
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Chuck Klosterman |
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6ca3a62
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Leadership is a word people use to reconcile any kind of charisma that was impossible to otherwise explain.
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Chuck Klosterman |
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cb9753b
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We spend our lives learning many things, only to discover (again and again) that most of what we've learned is either wrong or irrelevant. A big part of our mind can handle this; a smaller, deeper part cannot. And it's that smaller part that matters more, because that part of our mind is who we really are (whether we like it or not).
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futility
learning
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Chuck Klosterman |
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9524654
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The main problem with mass media is that it makes it impossible to fall in love without any acumen of normalcy. There is no "normal," because everyone is being twisted by the same sources simultaneously. You can't compare your relationship with the playful couple who lives next door because they're probably modeling themselves after Chandler Bing and Monica Geller."
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Chuck Klosterman |
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216cddd
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I never feel weird about being the main character in the nontransferable, nonexistent movie of my life. That's totally fine. What makes me nervous is a growing suspicion that this movie is fucked up and devoid of meaning. The auteur is a nihilist.
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Chuck Klosterman |
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2836207
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The reason so many well-considered ideas appear laughable in retrospect is that people involuntarily assume that whatever we believe and prioritize now will continue to be believed and prioritized later, even though that almost never happens. It's a mistake that never stops being made.
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Chuck Klosterman |
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66e0305
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Within these strangely specific conditions, everything is perfect. We are perfect.
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Chuck Klosterman |
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1cf4b49
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I tend to equate sadness with intelligence.
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Chuck Klosterman |
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bcb8dd0
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We were just old enough to be warped by childhood and just young enough not to realize it.
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Chuck Klosterman |
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00ac4b5
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F. Scott Fitzgerald believed inserting exclamation points was the literary equivalent of an author laughing at his own jokes, but that's not the case in the modern age; now, the exclamation point signifies creative confusion. All it illustrates is that even the writer can't tell if what they're creating is supposed to be meaningful, frivolous, or cruel. It's an attempt to insert humor where none exists, on the off chance that a potential re..
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online-writing
social-networking
internet
twitter
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Chuck Klosterman |
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e8c938e
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What music "means" is almost completely dependent on the people who sell it and the people who buy it, not the people who make it. Our greatest artists are the ones who understand how they can be interesting and unique within those limitations."
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Chuck Klosterman |
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c098209
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And this, of course, is the central problem with conspiracy theorists -- once you inflexibly accept that something is a conspiracy, any contrary evidence has the paradoxical effect of making your case stronger. Every contradiction deepens the conspiracy.
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politics-of-the-united-states
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Chuck Klosterman |
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064829b
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I care about strangers when they're abstractions but feel almost nothing when they are literally in front of me. They seem like unnamed characters in a poorly written novel about myself, which was poorly written by me.
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Chuck Klosterman |
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9825576
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What those anti-cookie-baking mothers wanted me to do was turn baseball into soccer.
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Chuck Klosterman |
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138d78e
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Fake love is a very powerful thing.
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Chuck Klosterman |
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8f1e545
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Up until the mid-eighties, there was always a shared assumption that the Right controlled the currency of outrage; part of what made conservatives "conservative" was their discomfort with profanity and indecency and Elvis Presley's hips. But then -- somewhat swiftly, and somehow academically -- it felt as if the Left was suddenly dictating what was acceptable to be infuriated over (and always for ideological motives, which is why the modifi..
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Chuck Klosterman |
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0931e55
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The main problem with mass media is that it makes it impossible to fall in love with any acumen of normalcy. There is no 'normal' because everybody is being twisted by the same sources simultaneously.
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truth
media
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Chuck Klosterman |
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7fcf198
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Is there anything more attractive than a polite person with limitless self-belief? There is not. Avoiding villainy is not that different from avoiding loneliness: First, you must love yourself. And if you do that convincingly enough, others will love you too much.
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Chuck Klosterman |
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4ec0a7b
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If a problem is irreversible, is there still an ethical obligation to try to reverse it?
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ethics-and-moral-philosophy
global-warming
hard-questions
climate-change
nihilism
ethics
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Chuck Klosterman |
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a4c511e
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Nothing can be appreciated in a vacuum.
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perspective
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Chuck Klosterman |
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2b4dc9a
|
We must start from the premise that--in all likelihood--we are already wrong. And not "wrong" in the sense that we are examining questions and coming to incorrect conclusions, because most of our conclusions are reasoned and coherent. The problem is with the questions themselves." --
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Chuck Klosterman |
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4e1fceb
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This is the difference between the fox and the hedgehog. Both creatures know that storytelling is everything, and that the only way modern people can understand history and politics is through the machinations of a story. But only the hedgehog knows that storytelling is secretly the problem, which is why the fox is constantly wrong.
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Chuck Klosterman |
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4194122
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Sometimes I fantasize about the US head of state as a super-lazy, super-moral libertarian despot and think, "That would certainly make everything easier," even though I can't think of one person who'd qualify, except maybe Willie Nelson."
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politics
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Chuck Klosterman |
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0781ec0
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There is not, in a material sense, any benefit to being right about a future you will not experience. But there are intrinsic benefits to constantly probing the possibility that our assumptions about the future might be wrong: humility and wonder.
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future
wonder
humility
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Chuck Klosterman |
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76435fe
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Every night, we're all having multiple metaphysical experiences, wholly constructed by our subconscious. Almost one-third of our lives happens inside surreal mental projections we create without trying. A handful of highly specific dreams, such as slowly losing one's teeth, are experienced unilaterally by unrelated people in unconnected cultures. But these events are so personal and inscrutable that we've stopped trying to figure out what t..
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dreams
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Chuck Klosterman |
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0795d7d
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I think there's a greater detriment with our escalating progression toward the opposite extremity--the increasingly common ideology that assures people they're right about what they believe. And note that I used the word "detriment." I did not use the word "danger," because I don't think the notion of people living under the misguided premise that they're right is often dangerous. Most day-to-day issues are minor, the passage of time will d..
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Chuck Klosterman |
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9acdaf2
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So often does it happen that we live our lives in chains, and we never even know there is no key.
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Chuck Klosterman |
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d5f2091
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And all I could do while I listened to this dude tell me how punk rock saved his life was think, Wow. Why did my friend waste all that time going to chemotherapy? I guess we should have just played him a bunch of shitty Black Flag records.
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life-saver
saved-my-life
cancer
punk-rock
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Chuck Klosterman |
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c98279f
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the future is a teenage crackhead who makes shit up as he goes along.
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metaphor
future
crackhead
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Chuck Klosterman |
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5efe892
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Nora Ephron accidentally ruined a lot of lives.
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Chuck Klosterman |
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8e320d0
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It's nice to think that the weirdos get to decide what matters about the past, since it's the weirdos who care the most.
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history
weirdos
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Chuck Klosterman |
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54f1531
|
I rarely remember the names or faces of nonfictional people
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Chuck Klosterman |
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a3b432d
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The most villainous move any person can make is tying a woman to the railroad tracks.
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Chuck Klosterman |
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8ecb025
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So if you've seen Twelve Monkeys more than twice, you're probably a Calvinist.
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Chuck Klosterman |
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552f0c9
|
The Eagles' song "Take It Easy") is clearly a problem of a young man, as no one over thirty-five could sustain interest in seven simultaneous relationships unless they're biracial and amazing at golf."
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Chuck Klosterman |
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a446a82
|
I wake up, I feel the inescapable oppression of the sunlight pouring through my bedroom window, and I am struck by the fact that I am alone. And that everyone is alone. And that everything I understood seven hours ago has already changed, and that I have to learn everything again.
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loniliness
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Chuck Klosterman |
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9d77eb5
|
Ignorance is not bliss. That platitude is totally wrong. You will not be intellectually happier if you know fewer things. Learning should be a primary goal of living. But what if ignorance feels better--not psychologically, but physically? That would explain a lot of human incongruities.
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Chuck Klosterman |
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c74de40
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Regardless of how liberal Massachusetts may seem, the Celtics were totally GOP. Like Thomas Jefferson, K. C. Jones did not believe in a strong central government: The Celtic players mostly coached themselves. They practiced when they felt like practicing and pulled themselves out of games when they deemed it appropriate, and they wanted to avoid anything taxing. They wanted to avoid taxes. And they excelled by attacking the world in the sam..
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Chuck Klosterman |
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fe3976d
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I enjoy hating musicians far more than I enjoy appreciating them. As far as I'm concerned, when someone becomes a rock star, he quits being a person.
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Chuck Klosterman |
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7be63f9
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Booze is the greatest of all equalizers. Rich drunks and poor drunks both pass out the same way.
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Chuck Klosterman |
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79f3966
|
And when they finally demanded that I had to stop keeping score and that I needed to play every future contest as an exhibition, I casually made the kind of statement sixteen-year-olds should not make to forty-six-year-old Midwestern housewives: "Why are you telling me how to do my job?" I asked. "It's not like I show up in your kitchen and tell you when to bake cookies." --
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Chuck Klosterman |