Let’s say you’re flipping through a magazine sometime in the early 2000s and stumble upon an essay that asks, “What if Luke Skywalker is actually the villain of Star Wars?” or “Is it morally wrong to like Billy Joel ironically?” Odds are, that essay was written by Chuck Klosterman—a man who turned overthinking pop culture into a full-time career, and somehow made it seem noble.
Chuck Klosterman was born in Minnesota in 1972, then immediately moved (with help from his parents) to rural North Dakota, where he spent his formative years doing what most kids do: listening to Mötley Crüe, contemplating death, and wondering if Saved by the Bell was a secret government experiment. These activities would later become the foundation for his entire literary career.
After earning a degree in journalism—presumably because no school offered a major in “philosophy via Star Wars and cereal”—Klosterman began writing for small newspapers, slowly climbing the professional ladder until he could finally publish Fargo Rock City, a book-length love letter to 1980s hair metal. This was his first major work and also the last time anyone would accuse him of being cool in a traditional sense.
But it was with Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs (2003) that Chuck really became Chuck™. The book tackled critical questions like: “Why does everyone think The Real World is deep?” and “Can you base a worldview on The Sims?” It was a bestseller among people who had never heard of French existentialism but had very strong opinions about Star Wars Episode I.
In the years since, Klosterman has written about sports without knowing much about sports (yet still being right), philosophy without being pretentious (somehow), and rock music as if every lyric ever written by Axl Rose contained a hidden message from the universe (it doesn’t… or does it?). His other books—Killing Yourself to Live, Eating the Dinosaur, I Wear the Black Hat—all sound vaguely like indie movie titles starring Jason Schwartzman, and all blend memoir with cultural analysis in a way that makes you feel smarter for having read them, even though one chapter might be entirely about Van Halen.
Then there’s But What If We’re Wrong?—a book in which Chuck asks whether future generations will think we were all idiots. (Spoiler: Yes.) And The Nineties, which reads like an NPR podcast transcript if the host was also trying to process their unresolved feelings about Woodstock ’99.
Klosterman has written for Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, GQ, Grantland, and every other publication that pays people to write 5,000-word think pieces on whether watching The Bachelor counts as nihilism. He’s also interviewed people more famous than him, often tricking them into saying philosophical things by asking offbeat questions like, “Do you think reality is a simulation?” or “Do you ever think about your legacy while eating a burrito?”
Stylistically, Klosterman’s writing includes footnotes, asides, long-winded hypotheticals, and analogies that may or may not involve 1980s sitcoms. He’s the only writer alive who could compare the JFK assassination to the narrative arc of Back to the Future and somehow make you nod along like, “Yes. Obviously.”
Today, Klosterman lives somewhere unassuming (because of course he does), possibly surrounded by stacks of VHS tapes, sports almanacs, and his own back issues of Spin. He’s married, he’s written novels, and he probably has a very strong opinion about whether Seinfeld is still relevant (it is).
In conclusion: Chuck Klosterman is the kind of person who can—and will—spend 2,000 words explaining why your nostalgia is wrong, but in a way that makes you feel grateful for the correction. He’s smart, weird, and accidentally brilliant, like a rock critic who wandered into a philosophy class and decided to teach it anyway.
