Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of MaximumFun.org and is distributed by NPR.

It's Bullseye, I'm Jesse Thorn. When you're a young, did you feel like your parents missed

the point of the clothes you were wearing or the music you listened to? Like they just

fundamentally misunderstood the things that made you you. Imagine you were a historian

a hundred years from now, looking at the culture of today. What would you get? What

wouldn't make sense? Chuck Closterman has been thinking about it. The way the people who

are alive during a period view the experience of what's going on doesn't seem to be the

view that exists in perpetuity. It's always people who have no first-hand knowledge, who

reinterpret the events and sort of shape what the meaning of history is.

Yeah, me and Chuck are going to get into it. It's Bullseye.

Coming up, I'll talk to author and critic Chuck Closterman about his new book, but what

if we're wrong? He's got some real particular ideas about how technology affects the way

we look at culture. I'm not sure the internet is actually going to do the main thing that

we think it's going to do, which is allow a wider sort of scope of cultural reality.

It might actually make it more inflexible. He's written eight books, countless articles,

and he knows that there is a fundamental difference between writing for print and writing for

the net. When I write a book, I am writing something that's going to be published a year

after I'm done writing with the hope that in 20 years someone can read it again, whereas

when you're writing on the internet, the assumption is that it's really just today, and

tomorrow, the entire internet will overwrite this. Me and Chuck Closterman are the future of

the past. Plus, comedian Debbie Kamau-Bell tells us about the best advice he ever got.

So Kevin Kadoka will always have a place in my heart that is like a guy who planted a

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