I own Klosterman’s Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs and recently had the good fortune to borrow IV from a coworker.  It’s brilliant.  Mostly reprints of articles published in SPIN and Esquire, the short essays muse on sundries such as Britney Spears, Val Kilmer, pirates, television, if man can live on McNuggets alone, Bono, The Streets, LOST, video games, the goth invasion of Disneyland, Wilco, various classic rock icons, psychics, etc., etc., etc.  There’s a piece of fiction at the end, but — while still sporting Klosterman’s particular hilarious brand of humor — it leaves something to be desired (also, I skip the articles about basketball players, but they’re probably very great).  Since many of the articles were originally published a few years ago, Klosterman includes periodic footnotes explaining things like, “I regret writing this sentence,” “Ha!” and my personal favorite, “Because I write about popular culture in the present tense, it’s not uncommon for things I write to become inaccurate over time.  This sentence, however, is a particularly insane example of that phenomenon.  At this point, I would be pretty surprised if anyone reading this book has not seen Britney Spears’s vagina.  Modernity!”

It’s hard for me to describe Klosterman’s genius without quoting vast expanses of the book. Chuck Klosterman is a (or maybe the only) pop culture philosopher par none.  He tackles the tough questions, like: is Bono for real, or is Bono full of shit?  Yeah, that’s right, he goes there.  And he takes no prisoners.

PS. Guess what, Vampire Weekend?  I give a fuck about the Oxford comma.