Will Violence Save Football?
In an excerpt from his book, But What If We’re Wrong?, Chuck Klosterman wonders if the sport that defines America will survive not in spite of its brutality but because of it.
Which Rock Star Will Historians of the Future Remember?
What will the history of rock music look like in 300 years, and which artist best represents the entirety of rock ‘n’ roll? Chuck Klosterman makes the case for one musician.
Noel Gallagher After Oasis
I want to hear about Be Here Now. “At the time, I was taking a lot of fucking drugs, so I didn’t give a fuck,” Gallagher says. “We were taking all the cocaine we could possibly find. But it wasn’t like a seedy situation. We were at work. We weren’t passed out on the floor with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. We were partying while we were working. And when that record was finished, I took it back to my house and listened to it when there wasn’t a party happening and I wasn’t out of my mind on cocaine. And my reaction was: ‘This is fucking long.’ I didn’t realize how long it was. It’s a long fucking record. And then I looked at the artwork, and it had all the song titles with all the times for each track, and none of them seemed to be under six minutes. So then I was like, ‘Fucking hell. What’s going on there?'”
Three-Man Weave
In this particular game, a team won with only three players on the floor. And this was not a “metaphorical” victory or a “moral” victory: They literally won the game, 84-81, finishing the final 66 seconds by playing three-on-five. To refer to this as a David and Goliath battle devalues the impact of that cliché; it was more like a blind, one-armed David fighting Goliath without a rock. Yet there was no trick to this win and there was no deception — the team won by playing precisely how you’d expect. The crazy part is that it worked.
The Jonathan Franzen Award for Jaw-Dropping Literary Genius Goes to… Jonathan Franzen
Say what you will about his cockiness. With the heavy weight of lit-er-ah-ture on his shoulders, the man delivered the greatest all-American novel since… since… well, you get the idea. Chuck Klosterman talks branding, ex-wives, and rock ‘n’ roll with the Updike of our time
Greatest. Indie-est. Band. Ever.
Pavement made some of the finest, most influential slacker noise of the ’90s, racking up an almost obscene amount of critical love along the way.