But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking about the Present as If It Were the Past

Good book. It really makes you think about the significance of what you think is important in your life. Versus, what will actually be long lasting importance in the future. Helps you to appreciate the random and rare.

great read recommend it to anyone who wants to be confused

The author use a question mark. The answer is an exclamation point: yes, we are wrong. absolutely a recommended reading

Chuck Klosterman's newest book "But What if We're Wrong" is awesome. Its out there but it continues a trend I find with him where reading his writing is almost like finding a better articulated and more edited version of some of my deep meandering thoughts. but maybe even more so in this book because of the topic. Guess i'm admitting i too am out there ;) The general question he asks is this: What will future generations see when they view this generation? What books will be studied from our century (as he puts it, who is going to be our century's kafka)? What about music; what will really define "rock n roll", or the even less defined genre of "Rock"? And as the title suggests: what if we're wrong about what we think is defining our generation? It seems we think history repeats itself, but then how could we ever predict how different today is compared to even 50 yrs ago? When he starts to delve into the sciences, he tackles the idea of paradigm shifts (taken from Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions) and the question of what can we expect next. This is where its almost freakish how similar this section gets with what i discuss in some of my honors classes (i.e. can we make predictions? Will we see the atom? Will we see the proton? Will we see the strings?) Highly recommending this book to all, sciencey or non sciency peeps. There are interviews with some amazing people: rockstar scientisits Neal De Grass Tyson, Brian Greene, director Robert Linklater, talking heads founder David Byrne, authors Jonathan Lethem and Junot Diaz and more. There are some classic Klosterman off the wall theories about pop culture (probably my favorite part is his coming to the conclusion that the tv show Roseanne may be what future generations will study when looking at the definitive 20th century television programming) and how the future might view it, there is some conspiracy theories, a lot of well crafted "let's pretend" scenarios, and most importantly there is a lot of epistemological questions that at the end of the day make for the difference between living without. To the negative reviewers: much of what you say is that you felt that it rambled, lost its way, provided no strong foundation for the arguments.... Unfortunately, epistemology is often characterized by that. Even Klosterman discusses this in the book: as he puts it the difference between a physicist and a philosopher is the difference between what and why? (one cares about what is the cause, the other about the meaning behind it) Thank you Chuck for putting in the time with this one. Seems you spent quite sometime interviewing, researching, and you put together a great read. Maybe not the definitive book of this generation (hahaha, sorry) but still an excellent book.

EXCELLENT BOOK