Inside the head of Chuck Klosterman

Anyone who writes for a living or seriously for pleasure can sympathize with the accompanying challenges: inspiration, effectively creating your message and how readers interpret that work. 

And anyone who has ever read the wildly diverse work of Chuck Klosterman can probably guess he experiences angst at every step of the way.

Chuck KlostermanIndeed Klosterman -- who got his start as a newspaper music critic, before evolving into a gonzo journalist and best-selling author before settling into his role as The Ethicist columnist for The New York Times -- does just that on a Grantland podcast with Brian Koppelman. 

Over the course of an effectively meandering 67-minute discussion, Koppelman enters deep corners foreign to most interviewers, almost playing amateur psychologist in drawing Klosterman into exchanges about whether he's cool, whether and when he consciously writes for critics or the public, the bright spotlight of The Ethicist and a half-dozen other pop culture topics.

As I noted, the discussion periodically meanders to the point of frustration, but ultimately delivers a greater reward than an edited version might have. Klosterman's best work follows that same path, an untidy route whose detours add rich detail to a longer but more rewarding journey.