Chuck Klosterman: To be honest, right now, it seems like pop culture is the only culture anyone cares about. I don’t see a lot of interest in things that would be considered high culture, even sort of by academics. It seems like even the “New Yorker” basically covers popular culture. It seems to be more central to the way people living than any other tier of arts and entertainment.

JM: What role has the Internet played in driving the whole pop culture craze?

CK: When I say this, it will sound bad, and I don’t know if it’s good or bad. What the Internet has proven that people are more interested in gossip than news. I do think pop culture in America is taken more seriously than it was even 10 years ago.

The fact that it’s now totally acceptable to write about Twilight seriously, or Britney Spears seriously ... has prompted a lot more people who would have felt uncomfortable focusing their career on that. So now, there’s smarter people writing about technically dumber things.

JM: Where do you see the journalism field heading? Do you think people will have to be generalized like yourself and dabble in everything?

CK: Probably the opposite. One thing I feel lucky about is I might be the last of the generalists, who writes about music and then writes about sports and writes about film and writes about politics. Now the expectation is that if you want to be in journalism, you have to be an expert in a very thin slice of culture.

In music coverage, for example, the big rock writers would write about all genres of music that were important. They would write about rock, they would write about hip hop, if disco was happening, they’d write about disco; if metal was big, they’d write about metal.

Now the expectation is you will be somebody who is the person who really knows about dance hall music. and you will write about exclusively about dance hall. I feel very lucky that just by chance I started my career just before the internet really happened; it existed ... just before blogging really took off.

Because of that, I was able to position myself as someone who writes about things in kind of an abstract, big way. I don’t have to be a specialist. I think specialization is the probably more the future than a multi-purpose writer.

JM: Your new book, “Eating the Dinosaur,” is your first return to the essay format since “Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs.” How has your writing changed since then?

CK: Hopefully, I’m smarter. Did the style change? My style is no style. I try to figure whatever is the clearest, most entertaining way to write about whatever I’m interested in. I don’t really have a style. When I wrote “Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs,” I was 28, and now I’m 37, I got married in September. I moved from Ohio to Manhattan.

I sort of became involved with a lot of friends who were frankly just smarter than I was. And I learned a lot of stuff from them in very short of amount of time, particularly about the relationship between music and politics and film and class; things that I had thought about, but not as sophisticated as these people did.

Hopefully, I made these essays smarter although, you know, they may be less entertaining.

My main goal always is to entertain people, more than anything else. I think “Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs” probably was funnier, even if the essays weren’t as good. If you’re going to be a commercial writer, people want to enjoy the experience of reading the book more than learning anything.

JM: Besides 9/11, what will people remember the current decade about?

CK: The last presidential election will become very significant over time for three reasons. One, the obvious, we elected a black president, kind of a game-changing moment.

Two, I think that Sarah Palin as a character, when people look back on that, is going to seem as though a real sort of low point in the American conservative movement. Where basically every cliché people have about the Republicans was sort of manifest through this one person, who was completely unqualified. It was almost like a Hail Mary pass thrown in the third quarter of that election.

The third thing, this applies to Palin and Obama, was, it was the first time in my lifetime where the biggest factor in the success of both of those people was their relationship to popular culture. Obama became this figure that people who had never been interested in politics before were suddenly obsessed with. And that Palin was this figure who the fact that she was a moose hunter was more important than anything she had done politically.

Actually, it sort of makes me a bit nervous. I’m glad Obama won, but it does make me nervous that a lot of people suddenly became very politically active despite the fact that they knew almost nothing about politics, but they liked this guy. I think that causes a lot of social confusion over time, when people sort of think that this person is going to change my life and have no idea why.

I think that that election, people will probably look back quite a bit and say that was an interesting moment to be an American.