Chuck Klosterman on Parsing Weird Ideas, Social Media, and “Raised in Captivity”

Best-selling author, Chuck Klosterman, is known for his sharp, pinpoint intellect. Part-philosopher, part-journalist, Klosterman is adept at picking apart nuances, offering opinions on both sides of the issue and doing so with humor, care, and precision. If there were surgeons for linguistics, he’d be an M.D. Klosterman, who was a New York Times columnist and has written a dozen books, recently released his latest, Raised in Captivity, on paperback. The work, which features nearly three-dozen short stories, explores often-complicated ideas that are discussed between two or three people in conversation. They’re almost like Socratic dialectics. 

We caught up with Klosterman, who rarely shies away from parsing a complicated idea, to ask him about how he started writing, what he thinks about modern television, when he began thinking so uniquely and so much more.