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The Lavin Agency Speakers Bureau

A speakers bureau that represents the best original thinkers,
writers, and doers for speaking engagements.

Pop Culture Guru Chuck Klosterman Announces New Music Podcast for Spotify

Beloved pop culture philosopher and author Chuck Klosterman is taking his sharp wit and wry observational humor off the page and onto the airwaves, with his new 12-week music podcast on Spotify.

With co-host Chris Ryan of The Ringer, Klosterman will delve deep into his love of music, and the power music has to elicit emotions, memories and feelings. But the new Spotify series won’t be one to tell listeners what to listen to, examine what’s happening on the scene right now, or predict tomorrow’s next big thing. As Klosterman puts it: “This is a podcast about thinking about music even when it’s not playing.”

 

Discussing artists from Drake to Pavement and CCR to Billie Eilish, the first three episode topics have already been announced. The first is, “Do Opinions Matter?” followed by “What’s the Point of Live Music?” and “Does Music Sound Like a Place?”. Sure to be true to Klosterman’s fun, philosophical tone as an essayist and writer, these episodes will drop February 19th.

 

The Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs author’s most recent written offering, the short story collection Raised in Captivity: Fictional Nonfiction, was called “The kind of strange, sharply detailed and often slyly funny examination of cultural behavior and norms [Klosterman] does unlike anyone else” by the LA Times, and “An engagingly sardonic collection” by The Washington Post.

 

To book speaker Chuck Klosterman, contact his exclusive speakers bureau, The Lavin Agency.

Re-imagine the Past Decade of Pop Culture with Chuck Klosterman X: A New Selection of the Author’s Best Essays and Interviews

Klosterman’s 10th book takes us on a hilarious and intellectually thrilling tour of his favorite works from the past decade. No matter his subject—from Taylor Swift to Tim Tebow, Kobe Bryant to KISS—Klosterman helps us see the present moment, and our place in it, like few other cultural critics. 

Prolific to a staggering degree, Klosterman has never fancied himself an academic, but rather, a servant to his own expansive tastes. Pop culture is his bouncy castle, and his talks invite audiences in on the thoughtful, yes, thoughtful fun. Whether talking movies, music, or sports, Klosterman’s bestselling books, (most notably Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs and I Wear the Black Hat) and two novels (Downtown Owl and The Visible Man) have something for everyone. Chuck Klosterman X—released in May 2017—compiles and contextualizes the best of his essays from the past decade, with pieces written on Breaking Bad, Lou Reed, zombies, the Cleveland Browns, and many more cultural figures and pop phenomena. 
 

Praise for Chuck Klosterman X: 
 
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“Highly entertaining … honest, unpredictable, and fun … addictively readable … surprisingly poignant.”

Booklist

“Chuck Klosterman has become a cultural observer of our time,” writes the Los Angeles Times. “[He] roams the junk drawer we call popular culture, providing shockingly keen insight into how our absorption of culture reflects on us.”

 

To Playboy, “Klosterman may well be the most influential pop culture writer of our generation. Certainly, he was among the first to dive headfirst into close reading of celebrity and art in the way that has since become de rigeur for internet writers.” The Associated Press calls the book “a hilarious new essay collection,” that’s able to take “the ‘inflexibly personal’ and make it true.”

 

“Klosterman is a master of the high-low,” raves Paste. “He injects a level of intellectual rigor into subjects that receive precious little … With X, Klosterman wallows in the trivial … but he’s not trivializing … proving that culture essays can teach us something about ourselves and the people around us … Each of his essays is a love letter to a moment.”

 

To book keynote speaker Chuck Klosterman for your next conference or panel, contact The Lavin Agency, his exclusive speakers bureau. 

 

“Put regular folks on TV, tell interesting stories”: Rick Mercer Report Returns Tonight

Canada’s favourite comic—the one-of-a-kind Rick Mercer—returns to CBC tonight (Oct 4) for the fourteenth season of perennial standout the Rick Mercer Report. Check out the trailer below.

RMR SEASON XIV PREVIEW

 

Mercer, one of Canada’s sharpest political satirists, also dropped by CBC Radio’s Metro Morning to discuss RMR’s longstanding success. He sums it up best himself: 

 

We’ll do tonight what we started out doing fourteen seasons ago—that’s to take one part of the country, show another part of the country, put regular folks on television, tell interesting stories, and just be unapologetically Canadian.

 

Undoubtedly, the long-running Canadian institution will once again remind us all what a vibrant, diverse, and fascinating country we live in.

 

ABC Picks Up Bestselling Author Reza Aslan’s Iranian-American Family Comedy

On the heels of successful sitcoms like Black-ish and the Eddie Huang-created Fresh Off the Boat, ABC has purchased a new single-camera comedy from Lavin’s own Reza Aslan and former Friends executive producer/co-showrunner Andrew Reich. 

Executive-produced by Aslan and Reich, the as-yet-unnamed show will center on an Iranian-American family living in San Jose, CA—one that takes “a very different approach to questions of tradition and identity,” according to Deadline Hollywood. The show is far from Aslan’s first foray into television; the celebrated author is a consulting producer on HBO drama The Leftovers and stars in his own Ovation talk show, Rough Draft with Reza Aslan. And he may yet be moving into film: his #1 New York Times bestselling book, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, has been optioned by Lionsgate and producer David Heyman (of Harry Potter and Gravity fame.) 

 

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Beyond the screen (silver or small), however, Aslan’s books and keynotes leave audiences informed, enlightened, and primed for debate. And be on the lookout for more from Aslan—he’s an adviser for the upcoming PEN America series The M Word, which focuses on American Muslim storytellers and issues of race, identity, and representation.

 

To book a keynote from Zealot author Reza Aslan, contact The Lavin Agency, his exclusive speakers bureau.   

First Look: Chuck Klosterman’s New Book, But What If We’re Wrong?

Exciting news! The New York Times bestselling author Chuck Klosterman has a new book on the way—and it’s slated for publication in June. But What If We’re Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past—and its topsy-turvy cover design—were unveiled yesterday by Vulture. This sharp-looking new release is being described as a study of which “ideas that we take for granted today will be disproven in the years ahead,” and “an attempt to imagine what the textbooks of 100, 300, or even 1,000 years from now will say about American culture at the start of the 21st century.”

Klosterman brings a combination of infectious curiosity, uncommon wisdom, and insightful accessibility to all his works—including his riveting keynotes. Whether writing on music, sports, celebrity, social media, literature, television, or any other facet of pop culture (see his recent profiles of Taylor Swift and Tim Tebow, just for starters), he finds the living pulse of our media-obsessed moment. This new book, combining both heady speculations and broad-based appeal, seems to offer more of what makes Klosterman one of our most tuned-in cultural critics. 

According to Vulture, But What If We’re Wrong? promises a tour of our current philosophical milieu: how we interpret science, reason, dreams, literary culture, sports, politics—even the very basis of thought itself. All in all, it’s both an earnest attempt to speculate on what, and how, our culture might transform over time, and a rational inoculation against the dangers of assumption: the uncritical presumption that what we believe today will endure forever. “We live in a period of extremely high certitude about what we believe, and we're completely obsessed with the present tense, as if the present will always be this way,” he tells Vulture. Of course, history will probably prove otherwise: and though disabusing ourselves of assumptions may mean embracing some uncomfortable changes, Klosterman’s wit, humor, and captivating style will no doubt make reading about it a genuine pleasure.

Chuck Klosterman is of the most singular and exciting cultural critics of our generation. For more information on booking Klosterman for your next keynote event, contact The Lavin Agency speakers bureau.