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But What If We're Wrong?
- Thinking About the Present as If It Were the Past
- Narrated by: Chuck Klosterman, Fiona Hardingham
- Length: 10 hrs and 7 mins
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Publisher's summary
New York Times best-selling author
But What If We're Wrong? visualizes the contemporary world as it will appear to those who'll perceive it as the distant past. Chuck Klosterman asks questions that are profound in their simplicity: How certain are we about our understanding of gravity? How certain are we about our understanding of time? What will be the defining memory of rock music 500 years from today? How seriously should we view the content of our dreams? How seriously should we view the content of television? Are all sports destined for extinction? Is it possible that the greatest artist of our era is currently unknown (or - weirder still - widely known but entirely disrespected)? Is it possible that we "overrate" democracy? And perhaps most disturbing, is it possible that we've reached the end of knowledge? Klosterman visualizes the contemporary world as it will appear to those who'll perceive it as the distant past.
Kinetically slingshotting through a broad spectrum of objective and subjective problems, But What If We're Wrong? is built on interviews with a variety of creative thinkers - George Saunders, David Byrne, Jonathan Lethem, Kathryn Schulz, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Brian Greene, Junot Díaz, Amanda Petrusich, Ryan Adams, Nick Bostrom, Dan Carlin, and Richard Linklater, among others - interwoven with the type of high-wire humor and nontraditional analysis only Klosterman would dare to attempt. It's a seemingly impossible achievement: a book about the things we cannot know, explained as if we did. It's about how we live now, once "now" has become "then".
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- Length: 1 hr and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Landmark Essays, Volume 2 continues a wonderful journey to the heart of the matter of our lives, to what matters most. It points out what's possible if we step outside of what we know, and recognize and embrace our capacity to bring forth an entirely new possibility for living—not because it is better, but simply because that is what human beings can do.
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A part of this was worth buying
- By goyo on 12-14-11
By: Steve Zaffron, and others
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Breaking the Spell
- Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
- By: Daniel C. Dennett
- Narrated by: Dennis Holland
- Length: 12 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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For all the thousands of books that have been written about religion, few until this one have attempted to examine it scientifically: to ask why - and how - it has shaped so many lives so strongly. Is religion a product of blind evolutionary instinct or rational choice? Is it truly the best way to live a moral life? Ranging through biology, history, and psychology, Daniel C. Dennett charts religion’s evolution from “wild” folk belief to “domesticated” dogma.
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Great Reader Actually Enhances A Great Book!
- By Don Caliente on 07-14-14
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American Sketches
- Great Leaders, Creative Thinkers, and Heroes of a Hurricane
- By: Walter Isaacson
- Narrated by: Cotter Smith
- Length: 9 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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In this collection of essays, Walter Isaacson reflects on the lessons to be learned from Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Bill Gates, Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton, and various other interesting characters he has chronicled as a biographer and journalist. The people he writes about have an awesome intelligence, in most cases, but that is not the secret of their success.
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Not Really Sketches
- By DAVID on 11-04-11
By: Walter Isaacson
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The Landscape of History
- How Historians Map the Past
- By: John Lewis Gaddis
- Narrated by: Jack Chekijian
- Length: 6 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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What is history, and why should we study it? Is there such a thing as historical truth? Is history a science? One of the most accomplished historians at work today, John Lewis Gaddis, answers these and other questions in this short, witty, and humane book. The Landscape of History provides a searching look at the historian's craft as well as a strong argument for why a historical consciousness should matter to us today.
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Excellent Book!
- By Billy on 09-15-18
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Atheism for Dummies
- By: Dale McGowan PhD
- Narrated by: Paul Mantell
- Length: 15 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Atheism For Dummies offers a brief history of atheist philosophy and its evolution, explores it as a historical and cultural movement, covers important historical writings on the subject, and discusses the nature of ethics and morality in the absence of religion. A simple, yet intelligent exploration of an often misunderstood philosophy.
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Great topic...irritating narrator
- By Duke Playbent on 10-26-14
By: Dale McGowan PhD
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Time Travel
- A History
- By: James Gleick
- Narrated by: Rob Shapiro
- Length: 10 hrs
- Unabridged
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James Gleick's story begins at the turn of the 20th century, with the young H. G. Wells writing and rewriting the fantastic tale that became his first book, an international sensation: The Time Machine. A host of forces were converging to transmute the human understanding of time, some philosophical and some technological - the electric telegraph, the steam railroad, the discovery of buried civilizations, and the perfection of clocks.
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Fiction gives us Truth by connecting the dots
- By Gary on 04-21-17
By: James Gleick
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Dark Star Rising
- Magick and Power in the Age of Trump
- By: Gary Lachman
- Narrated by: Jason Culp
- Length: 9 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Within the concentric circles of Trump's regime lies an unseen culture of occultists, power-seekers, and mind-magicians whose influence is on the rise. In this unparalleled account, historian Gary Lachman examines the influence of occult and esoteric philosophy on the unexpected rise of the alt-right.
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Step Right This Way!
- By Brad on 06-03-18
By: Gary Lachman
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Irrationality
- A History of the Dark Side of Reason
- By: Justin E. H. Smith
- Narrated by: Jeff Harding
- Length: 13 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Discovering that reason is the defining feature of our species, we named ourselves the “rational animal”. But is this flattering story itself rational? In this sweeping account of irrationality from antiquity to today - from the fifth-century BC murder of Hippasus for revealing the existence of irrational numbers to the rise of Twitter mobs and the election of Donald Trump - Justin Smith says the evidence suggests the opposite.
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A good brain workout
- By ThomasC on 04-09-19
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Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking
- By: Daniel C. Dennett
- Narrated by: Jeff Crawford
- Length: 13 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Over a storied career, Daniel C. Dennett has engaged questions about science and the workings of the mind. His answers have combined rigorous argument with strong empirical grounding. And a lot of fun. Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking offers seventy-seven of Dennett’s most successful “imagination-extenders and focus-holders” meant to guide you through some of life’s most treacherous subject matter: evolution, meaning, mind, and free will.
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Loved it, but some philosophy background needed.
- By LongerILiveLessIKnow on 11-14-13
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Future Babble
- Why Expert Predictions Fail - and Why We Believe Them Anyway
- By: Dan Gardner
- Narrated by: Walter Dixon
- Length: 11 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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In Future Babble, award-winning journalist Dan Gardner presents landmark research debunking the whole expert prediction industry and explores our obsession with the future. The truth is that experts are about as accurate as dart-throwing monkeys.
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Future Babble Babble
- By Karen on 05-04-11
By: Dan Gardner
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50 Popular Beliefs That People Think Are True
- By: Guy P. Harrison
- Narrated by: Erik Synnestvedt
- Length: 13 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Maybe you know someone who swears by the reliability of psychics or who is in regular contact with angels. Or perhaps you're trying to find a nice way of dissuading someone from wasting money on a homeopathy cure. How do you find a gently persuasive way of steering people away from unfounded beliefs, bogus cures, conspiracy theories, and the like? Longtime skeptic Guy P. Harrison shows you how in this down-to-earth, entertaining exploration of commonly held extraordinary claims.
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Skepticism, so Dull & Condescending
- By Mr Conway on 03-11-13
By: Guy P. Harrison
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Language Intelligence
- Lessons on Persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
- By: Joseph J. Romm
- Narrated by: Drew Birdseye
- Length: 4 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Joseph Romm, one of Rolling Stone magazine’s top "100 Agents of Change", has focused his talents on helping us all to increase our language intelligence and to better understand the art of persuasion. Romm demonstrates that you don't have to be an expert to vastly improve your ability to communicate. He has pulled together the secrets of the greatest communicators in history to show how you can apply these tools to your writing, speaking, blogging - even your Tweeting.
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Liberal Propaganda
- By Craig on 02-05-13
By: Joseph J. Romm
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Too Big To Know
- Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room
- By: David Weinberger
- Narrated by: Peter Johnson
- Length: 8 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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We used to know how to know. We got our answers from books or experts. We'd nail down the facts and move on. But in the Internet age, knowledge has moved onto networks. There's more knowledge than ever, of course, but it's different. Topics have no boundaries, and nobody agrees on anything.Yet this is the greatest time in history to be a knowledge seeker - if you know how.
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Good to know ...
- By John B. Fisher on 01-24-12
By: David Weinberger
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What the Bleep Do We Know
- Discovering the Endless Possibilities for Altering Your Everyday Reality
- By: William Arntz, Betsy Chase, Mark Vicente
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 11 hrs and 25 mins
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With the help of 14 leading physicists, scientists, and spiritual thinkers, this book guides listeners on a course from the scientific to the spiritual, and from the universal to the personal. Along the way, it asks such questions as: Are we seeing the world as it really is What is the relationship between our thoughts and our world? How can I create my day every day? What the Bleep answers this question and others through an innovative new approach to self-help and spirituality.
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Attacking straw men
- By Henrik on 08-06-11
By: William Arntz, and others
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In I Wear the Black Hat, Klosterman questions the very nature of how modern people understand the concept of villainy. What was so Machiavellian about Machiavelli? Why don't we see Batman the same way we see Bernhard Goetz? Who's more worthy of our vitriol - Bill Clinton or Don Henley? What was O.J. Simpson's second-worst decision? Masterfully blending cultural analysis with self-interrogation and limitless imagination, I Wear the Black Hat delivers perceptive observations on the complexity of the anti-hero.
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9.6 out of 10
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Therapist Victoria Vick is contacted by a cryptic, unlikable man who insists his situation is unique and unfathomable. Vick becomes convinced that he suffers from a complex set of delusions: Y__, as she refers to him, claims to be a scientist who has stolen cloaking technology from an aborted government project in order to render himself nearly invisible. Unsure of his motives or honesty, Vick becomes obsessed with her patient....
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For 6,557 miles, Chuck Klosterman thought about dying. He drove a rental car from New York to Rhode Island to Georgia to Mississippi to Iowa to Minneapolis to Fargo to Seattle, and he chased death and rock 'n' roll all the way. Within the span of 21 days, Chuck had three relationships end, one by choice, one by chance, and one by exhaustion. He snorted cocaine in a graveyard. He walked a half-mile through a bean field.
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Good, But Not What I Expected
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Chuck Klosterman X
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New York Times best-selling author and cultural critic Chuck Klosterman presents a unique Audio Companion for Chuck Klosterman X, in which he contextualizes and reads from the collection of his best articles and essays, providing both a fascinating tour of the past decade and an ideal introduction to the mind of one of the sharpest and most prolific observers of our unusual times.
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Buyer Beware
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Pale Rider
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In this gripping narrative history, Laura Spinney traces the overlooked pandemic to reveal how the virus travelled across the globe, exposing mankind's vulnerability and putting our ingenuity to the test. As socially significant as both world wars, the Spanish flu dramatically disrupted - and often permanently altered - global politics, race relations, and family structures while spurring innovation in medicine, religion, and the arts.
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A Predilection for Those in the Prime of Life
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Somewhere in North Dakota, there is a town called Owl that isn't there. Disco is over, but punk never happened. They don't have cable. They don't really have pop culture, unless you count grain prices and alcoholism. People work hard and then they die. They hate the government and impregnate teenage girls. But that's not nearly as awful as it sounds; in fact, sometimes it's perfect.
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A Great Listen
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Sellout
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Seasoned music writer Dan Ozzi chronicles this embattled era in punk. Focusing on eleven prominent bands who made the jump from indie to major, Sellout charts the twists and turns of the last “gold rush” of the music industry, where some groups “sold out” and rose to surprise super stardom, while others buckled under mounting pressures. Sellout is both a gripping history of the music industry’s evolution, and a punk rock lover’s guide to the chaotic darlings of the post-grunge era.
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A pedant’s note
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What listeners say about But What If We're Wrong?
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- zipadyduda
- 06-21-16
WTF Chuck?
Any additional comments?
Dear Chuck,
I was delighted to see a new release from you pop up. And I hear your words in the unique style that is all your own, but instead of your familiar snarky nasally voice, it's a text to speech bot modeled after one of the spice girls. This voice is completely out of place and I keep rewinding it in my head to imagine what it sounds like when you say it.
Next time please just narrate it yourself, even if it takes longer.
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8 people found this helpful
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- Matthew
- 07-14-16
Meandering at points, but interesting
Klosterman takes a look at our present presumptions about music, literature, politics, and science and asks the title question "What if we're wrong?" What if The Beatles are not going to be remembered as the greatest rock band? What if football dies away? What or who would replace them?
It's a fun thought experiment, but one that ultimately ended up being too long. I frequently found my mind wander away from the book, and even as I read it my attention was drawn to other things.
Unfortunately, even immediately after finishing the book, there are parts that I have forgotten already. I think a large part of this is because this is a novel with no consequence. Yes, it is important to remain inquisitive about the world; however, this book read like a super-long clickbait article.
There are some interesting theories in here, but I wonder if I'll even remember them when I look back on my 2016 booklist, let alone in the murky future Klosterman writes about.
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- Nils Berglund
- 03-24-18
His best work yet!
an addicting, provocative and well researched piece of media archeology, pop science and cultural anthropology!
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- Holly
- 08-29-18
Wish Klosterman self-narrated!
This was good but would be even better of Klosterman narrated it himself. The narrator is fine though.
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- MC Lars
- 08-23-16
Chuck is back with greatness
Loved this book! Amazing connections and narrative flow, connecting everything from Elvis to tsunamis. Wish Klosterman had read it though, his moments in the narration (very beginning and end) add delicious personality to the text. Download this book!
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- Larissa Bean
- 04-15-18
Eye opening
This is one of the greatest books I've "read" ... Some real eye-opening information that helps you look at reality and your assumptions differently and challenge the status quo.
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- J. Bickett
- 06-11-16
klosterman goes long...
This book is more dense than his erlier work and is driven I suspect by an ambition to go deeper. While full of interesting ideas as always, I bet some would be turned off by this books tone and the less joke peppered conversational style the author is known for. All in all tho I think this is a great effort from a towering intellect. well done sir!
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4 people found this helpful
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- John Gunter
- 10-25-16
This book makes you talk a stoner for a few weeks
But What If We're Wrong is a book that humbles you because confronts you not only with how much you don't know, but that so much of what you do know is subject to change and reinterpretation.
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2 people found this helpful
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- S. Yates
- 05-23-17
A quirky provoker of thoughts
Any additional comments?
Quirky and whimsical set of essays (at least they feel like essays) framing how we think about ideas (literature, music, historical events, science), and how those thoughts morph over time. Into this broad thought experiment, Klosterman explores some beliefs from the past that now seem ridiculous as a way to question what we believe now and how it will be viewed in the future. He admits the impossibility of coming to any firm or even likely conclusions -- for example, he notes that we cannot help but frame future discussions in the parameters of the present day, and attempts to imagine the future are almost always doomed to fail. But the near impossiblity of the task doesn't make the mental gymnastics any less interesting. After logical contortions, extensive hypotheticals, and discussions with experts in a variety of areas, you come away knowing how much you likely don't know and how tenuous our current vantage point is.
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1 person found this helpful
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Performance
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Story
- Kindle Customer
- 01-25-17
Great concept, hard to follow.
It makes me feel terrible to rate the book low, I was very excited to read it based on the description. It was difficult to stick with, I usually don't abandon a book but I could not finish this one. It felt disjointed, like the author went off on a tangent, beat the dead horse, and then finally picked back up. I suppose reading this in the traditional sense would be a better experience. It might just not be a book to have in the audible format.
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