"Walz only seemed like a football coach to voters with no preexisting relationship to football. His image embodied the liberal conception of nontoxic masculinity, a reverse Margaret Thatcher."

Writes Chuck Klosterman in his new book "Football," reviewed in "Is Football Doomed? Chuck Klosterman Thinks So. In his new book, the writer goes deep on a sport that dominates American cultural life — but possibly not for long." The review is by Dwight Garner in the NYT.

Garner says: "I like reading Klosterman. He’s a dorm-room philosopher and, on pop topics, the overthinker’s overthinker." Despite the headline for the review, Garner is less interested in the prediction of doom — which "takes up a relatively small portion of his book, mostly at the beginning and at the end" — and more interested in what else is in there: "The 'football is doomed' material is like a pancake that arrives alongside an order of Peking duck. The tastiest stuff is mostly tucked inside." Like that Walz material.

I've read a few Chuck Klosterman books. Click my Chuck Klosterman tag. I like the writing style. Here's an example from the NYT review: "[Football] will never completely disappear, in the same way you can still hear jazz on NPR and you can still smoke Lucky Strikes inside a casino."

"There are things forgotten by chance, and there are things forgotten on purpose. But then there are things that aren’t really forgotten as much as they are deliberately ignored..."

"... usually because the memory has come to necessitate an elephantine level of discomfiting rationalization. America’s involvement with the 1996 Russian democratic election falls into this third category. Boris Yeltsin, the boozehound incumbent, overcame mass unpopularity to win reelection as Russian president, significantly due to assistance from clandestine United States operatives and the support of Bill Clinton. When the news of this subversion first surfaced, it was hailed as a masterstroke of U.S. statecraft. The July 15 cover of Time magazine pulled no punches: 'Yanks to the Rescue: The Secret Story of How American Advisers Helped Yeltsin Win.' Decades later, the concept of interfering with another country’s election (and particularly an election in Russia) has adopted a more sinister overtone, and there’s a revisionist temptation to claim the role America played in the affair was exaggerated. But it did happen, and it’s almost inconceivable to imagine Yeltsin winning reelection had it not..."

Writes Chuck Klosterman on page 307 of "The Nineties." 

Speaking of Bill Clinton, here's a fascinating quote from Bill Clinton:

"Alternative music expanded into the umbrella of alternative culture, meaning the prefix 'alt' could now be applied to almost anything for an instant jolt of reconsideration."

Writes Chuck Klosterman on page 307 of "The Nineties." 

Yes, my name was cooler in the 90s/early 00s. I remember. It makes me think about the time a law professor told me:

[Y]ou should call your blog "alt.house" (alt-dot-house), which simultaneously (a) uses your name, (b) uses "house" more directly to suggest a place, (c) is a cyber-pun, riffing on the old "alt-dot-whatever" names for usenet newsgroups, and, relatedly, (d) with the "alt" prefix, implies the ever-so-slightly offbeat nature of what you write about and how you write about it.

And as long as I'm talking about that book again, let me quote something else that jumped out at me.... Oh, no, this needs to be a new post, otherwise it will seem as though I'm burying it. Hang on.

"In 1997, the alt-rock band Harvey Danger had a minor hit with the song 'Flagpole Sitta.' One of the lines from the song was, 'And I don’t even own a TV'..."

"... which was a phrase a certain kind of person used to say a lot during this era. It was a sign of pretension, but also code for brainpower and maturity—a person without a television was not a slave to passivity, since passivity was the only possible outcome from interacting with a medium whose job was to fill time. Though accepted as true by virtually every knee-jerk intellectual of the time, it’s increasingly difficult to understand why TV was considered so inferior to not just film, but to almost every other variety of entertainment from this era. The prevalence of that dismissive view clearly had no relationship to its popularity—statistically speaking, television was more popular than everything. But here again: In the nineties, that was its own kind of problem. If everyone enjoyed something, how good could it possibly be?"

From Chuck Klosterman's "The Nineties" (pp. 232-233)(noting that critics considered "Frasier" brilliant television because it had characters who were the kind of people who would never watch television).

"Generation X—as presented through albums like 'Nevermind' (1991), novels like 'Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture' (1991), and films like 'Reality Bites' (1994), and then amplified ad nauseam..."

"... by a vapid clutch of contemporary trendspotting articles.... Klosterman has come not to bury these stereotypes but to praise them.... 'Among the generations that have yet to go extinct,' Klosterman writes, 'Generation X remains the least annoying.' Its nihilistic blend of lassitude and disaffection, in his analysis, guarantees a minimum of whinging, quite unlike the 'self-righteous outrage,' 'policing morality,' and 'blaming strangers for the condition of one’s own existence' typical of other generations. For the rusted youth of the nineties, 'solipsism was preferable to narcissism'; later, he contrasts their 'anti-commercialism' (discerning, optimistic) with the supposed 'anti-capitalism' (totalizing, pessimistic) of millennials.... If Gen X disengagement and ironic fence-sitting were brought up short by Bush v. Gore and 9/11 and the rise of social media, he wants to preserve the nineties as a safe space for his cohort.... He has no patience for partisan rashness, for passionate convictions that would break upon his ghostly solitude."

From "Chuck Klosterman Brings Back the Nineties/In a nostalgic tour through the decade, Klosterman defends Gen X as today’s 'least annoying' generation" by Frank Guan (The New Yorker).

"Your wife is having an affair with a person you happen to respect. Why would that last detail change the way you respond to her cheating?"

"Do you admire this man so much that you haven’t asked your wife why she keeps having sex with him? I halfway suspect you’re writing this letter because you want specific people to read this column and deduce who is involved and what’s really going on behind closed doors (without actually addressing the conflict in person). That’s not ethical, either."

Said the NYT Ethicist, last July, responding to "NAME WITHHELD," who some people are now speculating is the husband cuckolded by Petraeus.

ADDED: I'm surprised to see the NYT Ethicist is Chuck Klosterman. I know him as the author of the book "Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto." Excerpt:

I’m having a crisis of confidence, and I blame Jesus.

Actually, my crisis is not so much about Jesus as it is about the impending rapture, which I don’t necessarily believe will happen. But I don’t believe the rapture won’t happen, either; I really don’t see any evidence for (or against) either scenario. It all seems unlikely, but still plausible. Interestingly enough, I don’t think there is a word for my particular worldview: “Nihilism” means you don’t believe in anything, but I can’t find a word that describes partial belief in everything. “Paganism” is probably the closest candidate, but that seems too Druidesque for the style of philosophy I’m referring to. Some would claim that this is kind of like “agnosticism,” but true agnostics always seem too willing to side with the negative; they claim there are no answers, so they live as if those answers don’t exist. They’re really just nihilists without panache. Not me, though. I’m prone to believe that just about any religious ideology is potentially accurate, regardless of how ridiculous it might seem (or be). Which is really making it hard for me to comment on Left Behind.

That's the beginning of an essay on the Left Behind series.

"Without a soundtrack, human interaction is meaningless."

"I once spent an evening chatting about the complexity of modern relationships with a male acquaintance, his ex-girlfriend, and her roommate. When I went to bed that night, I thought our conversation had been wonderful. Twelve hours later, I was informed that the ex-girlfriend spent the entire evening 'in a rage,' apparently becasue the other male in our foursome had been 'brooding and surly,' creating a tension that subsequently made the ex-girlfriend's roommate 'completely uncomfortable' with the nature of our dialogue. I never noticed any of this. .I never have any idea how people feel; they always appear fine to me. But if somebody had pointedly played Pat Benatars 'Love is a Battlefield' that night, I'm sure I could have constructed some empathy."

From Chuck Klosterman's  "Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto" (comparing the TV shows "Big Brother" and "The Real World")