Chuck Klosterman thinks everything is wrong: I'm wrong, you're wrong, and the future will prove this. Probably. Maybe. Or we could be right? Such is the elliptical premise of Klosterman's latest book, But What if We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present as if It Were the Past, which considers how the people of the future will look back on the time we live in, and learn about the minutiae of our daily lives (spoiler: it involves watching Roseanne).
I've read a LOT of Chuck Klosterman, from Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs (I put it on the syllabus of a freshman comp class I taught as a graduate student) to his stint as the New York Times magazine's ethicist to now-shuttered Grantland. In college, Klosterman was one of the first writers I encountered who considered low culture worth writing about, before it became deeply trendy to the point of needlessly ubiquitous, and I'd still rather read his thoughts on Mad Men or dinosaurs or conspiracy theories than almost anyone else's. If you're also a Klosterman acolyte (and if you're reading this, you probably are), But What If We're Wrong? delivers what it needs to: the footnotes, the overthinking (and a defense of overthinking), and familiar Klosterman truisms—like the one that states all professional sports games are exhibition games. These familiar hallmarks make reading it like dropping in on an old friend and having an argument over a beer about something that doesn't ultimately matter.