Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas

by Chuck Klosterman

Let’s say I considered this program a “guilty pleasure,” and let’s say my desire to watch Ashlee explain how her boyfriend ruined Valentine’s Day was something I needed to apologize for. Wouldn’t this imply that The Ashlee Simpson Show was my conscious alternative to something better? Wouldn’t this suggest that—were I not watching The Ashlee Simpson Show—I would be working on logarithms, or studying the liner notes to out-of-print Thelonious Monk records, or searching for factual errors in The Economist? Because these are not things I do (and I don’t think many of the other 2.9 million people watching Ashlee Simpson each week do these things, either). We’re not losing the cure for cancer because of Ashlee Simpson; if we weren’t watching her pretend to be sexy, we’d probably just be going to the bar earlier.