One-of-a-kind cultural critic and New York Times bestselling author Chuck Klosterman “offers up great facts, interesting cultural insights, and thought-provoking moral calculations in this look at our love affair with the anti-hero” (New York magazine).
Chuck Klosterman, “The Ethicist” for TheNew York Times Magazine, has walked into the darkness. In I Wear the Black Hat, he questions the modern understanding of villainy. When we classify someone as a bad person, what are we really saying, and why are we so obsessed with saying it? How does the culture of malevolence operate? What was so Machiavellian about Machiavelli? Why don’t we see Bernhard Goetz the same way we see Batman? Who is more worthy of our vitriol—Bill Clinton or Don Henley? What was O.J. Simpson’s second-worst decision? And why is Klosterman still haunted by some kid he knew for one week in 1985?
Masterfully blending cultural analysis with self-interrogation and imaginative hypotheticals, I Wear the Black Hat delivers perceptive observations on the complexity of the antihero (seemingly the only kind of hero America still creates). As the Los Angeles Times notes: “By underscoring the contradictory, often knee-jerk ways we encounter the heroes and villains of our culture, Klosterman illustrates the passionate but incomplete computations that have come to define American culture—and maybe even American morality.” I Wear the Black Hat is a rare example of serious criticism that’s instantly accessible and really, really funny.
Chuck Klosterman is the bestselling author of many books of nonfiction (including The Nineties, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, I Wear the Black Hat,and But What If We're Wrong?) and fiction (Downtown Owl,The Visible Man, and Raised in Captivity). He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, GQ, Esquire, Spin, The Guardian, The Believer,Billboard, The A.V. Club, and ESPN. Klosterman served as the Ethicist for The New York Times Magazinefor three years, and was an original founder of the website Grantland with Bill Simmons.
Hometown:
New York, New York
Date of Birth:
June 5, 1972
Place of Birth:
Wyndmere, North Dakota
Education:
Degree in Journalism, University of North Dakota, 1994
Read an Excerpt
I Wear the Black Hat One should judge a man mainly from his depravities. Virtues can be faked. Depravities are real.
— Klaus Kinski, super nihilist.
I’m gonna quote a line from Yeats, I think it is: “The best lack all conviction, while the best are filled” . . . oh, no. It’s the other way around. “The best lack all conviction, and the worst are filled with a passionate intensity.” Now, you figure out where I am.
— Lou Reed, super high.
I’m not a good guy. I mean, I don’t hurt anybody. But I don’t help, either.
— Louis C.K., super real.
Table of Contents
Preface 1
What You Say About His Company Is What You Say About Society 9
Another Thing That Interests Me About the Eagles Is That I [Am Contractually Obligated to] Hate Them 23
Villains Who Are Not Villains 39
Easier Than Typing 59
Human Clay 77
Without a Gun They Can't Get None 89
Arrested for Smoking 107
Electric Funeral 131
"I Am Perplexed" [This Is Why, This Is Why, This Is Why They Hate You] 149
I always feel like somebody’s watching me. Unlike Rockwell, however, I know who that somebody is. It’s Chuck Klosterman. Klosterman (you may know him as Kris Kringle’s understudy in Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town) is that most wonderful kind of essayist, journalist, and critic, who can take the gobbledygook that’s hiding in the recesses of […]