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American Nerd: The Story of My People
American Nerd: The Story of My People
American Nerd: The Story of My People
Ebook251 pages3 hours

American Nerd: The Story of My People

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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Most people know a nerd when they see one but can't define just what a nerd is. American Nerd: The Story of My People gives us the history of the concept of nerdiness and of the subcultures we consider nerdy. What makes Dr. Frankenstein the archetypal nerd? Where did the modern jock come from? When and how did being a self-described nerd become trendy? As the nerd emerged, vaguely formed, in the nineteenth century, and popped up again and again in college humor journals and sketch comedy, our culture obsessed over the designation.

Mixing research and reportage with autobiography, critically acclaimed writer Benjamin Nugent embarks on a fact-finding mission of the most entertaining variety. He seeks the best definition of nerd and illuminates the common ground between nerd subcultures that might seem unrelated: high-school debate team kids and ham radio enthusiasts, medieval reenactors and pro-circuit Halo players. Why do the same people who like to work with computers also enjoy playing Dungeons & Dragons? How are those activities similar? This clever, enlightening book will appeal to the nerd (and antinerd) that lives inside all of us.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherScribner
Release dateMay 13, 2008
ISBN9781416565512
American Nerd: The Story of My People
Author

Benjamin Nugent

Benjamin Nugent's nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, and n+1, and his fiction has appeared in Tin House. He holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was an Iowa Arts fellow. Director of Creative Writing at Southern New Hampshire University, he teaches fiction and nonfiction in its MFA and undergraduate programs. He grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts.

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Rating: 3.2537314186567166 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The Premise: Former nerd Benjamin Nugent sets out to “take a serious approach to a subject usually treated lightly, which is a nerdy thing to do.” American Nerd is a sociological exploration of the history, subcultures, rules, and rituals of nerdiness in which Nugent examines media depictions of nerdiness and their impact on how we conceptualize nerds and nerd culture(s).The Bottom Line: American Nerd is a fun read that is part sociological exploration and part memoir. Though a bit dry at times, it is generally enjoyable, always interesting, and rather creative. Recommended for readers who enjoy a modern take on niche cultural anthropology and for anyone who has ever felt nerdy. Isn’t that all of us?Read my full review at The Book Lady's Blog.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I would have appreciated fewer childhood anecdotes and a more coherent and cohesive structure. (If you must include personal anecdotes and self-confession in an accounting of a sub-culture, just make the entire thing a memoir. The weird transition from the mostly non-personal beginning to the "please-forgive-me" latter half of the book is what makes this so irritating. Consistency is a good thing.)
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Here's where I wish there were half stars.
    The book was sort of interesting, but...well, not nerdy enough?
    It didn't give me that "oh, this is awesome" that I was looking for.

    I kind of felt like he was all excited about writing a book about the history of nerds, but he couldn't find enough material so he filled in with stuff about his own nerd years.
    Or possibly he wanted to write a memoir and filled in with historical information.

    Either way, it felt a little bit lacking somewhere. I did enjoy the historical portion, at least. Personally, I'm not much of a memoir fan.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is a surprisingly well-researched non-fiction that explores how certain things, like debate club, became associated with nerds, the origins of nerdy literary characters, the part that race plays and whether nerdiness is actually autism or Asperger's syndrome. Woven throughout, and especially at the end, are Nugent's personal memories of being a bullied child who grew into a nerd with friends who gathered to play D&D in the library, carefully avoiding discussions of each boy's unhappy home life.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A light, readable cultural history, meditation, and memoir on an infamous cultural type, "American Nerd" shouldn't be mistaken for a comprehensive study of the species. Still, Nugent is a likable writer and does a good enough job of tracing nerdiness along various historical, social, cultural, medical and economic axes to make this a useful tool for readers looking to better articulate or understand their own nerd identities. The two character sketches he includes here, which describe friends of his who used typically nerdy pursuits to escape from painful and chaotic home lives, can even be said to be moving, and he's admirably honest about his own experiences with socially undignified pastimes. Still, I'm disappointed that the "Revenge of the Nerds" movies earned several mentions while "Real Genius," a movie that feels truer to the nerd experience and treats it much more kindly, didn't even rate one. I'm certain that many of the readers who pick up "American Nerd" will see a lot of themselves in the monomaniacal geeks and socially awkward superfans it describes. In an odd way, though, the book also made me question my own status as a nerd, a designation I've applied to myself at different points throughout my life. Nugent posits that an attraction to systems involving unambiguous rules and order and an aversion to the subtleties of human emotion and social interaction are the foundation of a nerd's worldview. Since I was a very average math student and am hopeless with machines, I just don't fit the profile. I'm a books-and-records dweeb exclusively, consider myself more intuitive than rational, and simply can't relate to most of the computer programmers, sci-fi fans, and gamers described in "American Nerd." This doesn't mean I'm always socially adept or that I don't have my obsessions, mind you, but Nugent's book made me think that it might be time to find myself a more accurate subcultural designation. Maybe I'll be the one to write "American Bookworm?"
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    "American Nerd" takes an entertaining and insightful leap into the realm of nerds, their origins, habits and habitats, and evolution. The personal stories and case studies are interesting and the history of the evolution of nerds is very good. There is a chapter that diverges off into speech and debate teams which was rather dry, but overall it was a good read. I especially enjoyed the discussion of the split between thinking and feeling, the divide and separation between the rational and the intuitive that encompasses society, aiding in the marginalization of nerds and nursing feelings of self-loathing within the nerd population. I also heavily identified with the descriptions of otaku (fans of Japanese cartoons and comics), the fun atmosphere of conventions, and the safety appeal of the rigid hierarchy offered by medieval role-playing.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    It's not exactly a bible of all things nerdy, but this book is a light overview of how nerds came to be and how they fit into our society. There are a few case studies of specific groups of nerds and the things they do, as well as anecdotes from the life of the (nerdy) author. There was a whole chapter on the relation of Asperger Syndrome to nerdiness which I found fascinating. All-in-all, it was a pleasant read, and left me feeling reassured that I'm not alone in the world.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Benjamin Nugent wrote a book that Benjamin Nugent would enjoy reading: an affirmation of the computer obsessed, role-playing, male teenager as a valuable member of society with nothing wrong with them. Which, most of us already knew. I was hoping for a wider range of coverage: discussion of nerds with less binary interests, an admission that there are more than two females who fall into this category, and, well, an interest in anything that doesn't completely apply to the author. I think I would have been better informed if the book was touted as a biography.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I will point you to the Learned Fangirl’s review for more detail. Like her, I was struck by how male “my” people were. When he does notice women as other than girlfriends providing lunch to SCA attendees, he treats them with the welcome-to-the-zoo attitude he he fights for male nerds. “[T]here are a lot of nerds out there,” he reports, “who read romance novels the same way people read Hundred Years War-between-France-and-England-only-with-dragons novels.” Actually, they’re often the same people! This inability to see female nerds/fans I think actually has something to do with the otherwise puzzling repeated reference to Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series without the name. It’s like he senses that she’s sitting there, with the rest of us, at the intersection of fantasy about dragons and fantasy about hot man-on-man action, but he still can’t really see us and so we are (she is) unnameable. Aside from the media fan stuff, the same thing happens with his coverage of policy debate. He even notes that policy debate tournaments are hotbeds of heterosexual mating rituals, which logically necessitates that there are also girls there! I was one of them! Yes, it’s a peculiarly and nerdily masculinized subculture, but that doesn’t mean there are no girls. What did he think we were doing there? It surely wasn’t figuring out how to negotiate masculinity as identity, at least not in anything like the way he talks about.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A little slow in places, but I thought it was really interesting. The point is not scholarship, nor is it memoir; for me, the point is to take a new look at an old phenomenon. The author ties together P.G. Wodehouse, Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein, Freaks and Geeks, Weird Science, D&D, the SCA, video games, Howards End, Revenge of the Nerds, and Saturday Night Live. We learn about how Muscular Christianity and Lord of the Rings both contributed to modern nerdhood (nerdity?). There is also at least one anthropologist, and a little Dr. Seuss. I found it rather fascinating, even if I didn't agree with all of it. This edition has a random short story at the end, which has nothing to do with anything but isn't bad.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This book is an interesting cultural history of the nerd. The definition of nerd is a socially awkward intellectual who remind people of a machine. They tend to be passionate about technology, speak in standard English, avoid emotional confrontation, and communicate logically instead of nonverbally. More than just a definition is covered in this book. The author discusses where the term "nerd" originated and where the classic look of the nerd comes from. Media is shown to have influenced the rise of the nerd in pop cultural through Saturday Night Live sketches and movies such as "Revenge of the Nerds" and "Weird Science." He also delves into the social history of why athletic males or jocks are revered. There are interviews with people labeled as nerds and an interesting chapter on Asperger's syndrome.The author pulls from his own childhood experiences and those of his friends to flesh out the nerd. The young men in his social group had problems at home that contribute to their personalities. They escaped into the world of Dungeons & Dragons with it's rules for characters and stories; a structured existence they do not get from their family life.I enjoyed reading this book. It was informative and a quick read. I learned a lot about myself. I'm still not sure if I am truly a nerd or a nerd by association, but either way I don't believe there is anything wrong with being a nerd.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Make no mistake, this book is more of an autobiography than a social science piece. That said, the autobiographical portions of the book are amusing and highly self-aware. As a fellow American nerd I found I could relate many of my own experiences closely to those described by Nugent.The social science portions of the book are somewhat thought provoking at times, particularly the sections on nerds throughout various historical periods.Benjamin also does a good job of conveying the quirkiness of the various vastly different nerd sub-cultures that he encounters in the book while maintaining an affectionate, non-condescending voice. The only part of the book I don't particularly appreciate is the connection Nugent attempts to make between nerdiness and Asperger's Syndrome. However, that is mostly because I personally do not believe Aspergers is a legitimate mental illness, and not due to the quality of Mr. Nugent's writing.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The author sets out to write about the history, sociology, anthropology and psychology of the nerd confessing that he is taking "a serious approach to a subject usually treated lightly, which is a nerdy thing to do," (p. 11). Early on Nugent defines the nerd:I believe there are two main categories of nerds: one type, disproportionately male, is intellectual in ways that strike people as machinelike, and socially awkward in ways that strike people as machinelike... p. 8The second type of nerd probably consists equally of males and females. This is a nerd who is a nerd by sheer force of social exclusion. p. 9I would argue with his definition of the first category and the evidence he presents in the book even runs counter to the definition at time. The second category is such a broad catchall as not really have much meaning. Nevertheless, Nugent usually sticks to his thesis pretty well and the results are fascinating and informative.Nugent looks to the history of nerds, finding examples in literature (such as the bookish Mary Bennett of Pride & Prejudice) to show that the type has existed for some time. He also derives the history of the term nerd from college humor publications to Saturday Night Live. The history of nerds is one of standing outside of the expected norm. In late 19th/early 20th Anglo-American history, the expectation was "muscular Christianity" with an emphasis on the man of action over the man of books. Over time, the qualities associated with nerds have often been the same that have come up in stereotypes of Jewish and Asian immigrants that ran contrary to the white muscular Christianity. Various chapters focus in on aspects of the nerd subculture including Debate Club, the Society for Creative Anachronism, and nerd chic which Nugent argues isn't nerdy at all. Nugent also touches on the parallels between nerds and people with autism and Asperger's Syndrome.The best parts of this book are autobiographical. Nugent confesses that he was a nerd until a dramatic makeover halfway through his teens which resulted in abandoning many of his nerdy friends. For the book, Nugent revisits many of these friends as adults and discusses them as case studies who are both inspiring and heartbreaking. Nugent uncovers a lot of self-loathing in these parts of the book and at times I found myself agreeing with him. One of the more interesting observations to come out these discussions is the idea that - unlike in Revenge of the Nerds where we see a cheerful, helpful nerd parent - many real life nerds come unstable family situations. The nerd child found escape in fantasy and the structure it provided. "It was no coincidence, I think, that we generally came to D&D from home lives that tended toward the unpredictable and confounding. We wanted a place where you knew where you stood, where everything was laid out so you could see it," (p. 176).I found this book interesting because its a topic I've never seen written about before and I enjoyed the multi-disciplinary approach but Nugent's writing style leaves a lot to be desired.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    American Nerd is an ode to geekdom by an author who feels guilty about abandoning his nerd status in high school. The book bounces between interviews and sociological commentary to tales of Nugent's nerdy childhood. He talks about Halo 2 competitions, the SCA, and this history of nerds, among other things. It's a pretty interesting book, and a quick read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I hope this book didnt have a proofreader, as there were some instances of grammatical errors and just incorrect facts. It was still a very enjoyable book; however, as a book about nerds, you would think he would fact check =)
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    American Nerd is a very entertaining but informative look at several nerd subcultures in American culture. Ben Nugent looks at the history of the term "nerd," the transition of studiousness or obsessiveness to undesirable culture, and the roles race and gender play in nerdiness. If you are a nerd or love a nerd, this is the book for you.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This book was interesting and entertaining enough, but pretty repetitive and often directionless. It talks about "nerd" culture and why it exists, including topics such as gaming, hipsters, athletics, machine-like rationality vs. emotionalism, empathy, autism...It's a lot in a short book, and it doesn't always add up to a coherent thesis, but there are insights here and there. There's a lot about his own childhood, nerdhood, and subsequent rejection thereof (yeah right, nerdface; this was a really contradictory section) as well as information gleaned from interviews and observation. Not a hardcore analysis, but it doesn't claim to be.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    although lacking in scholarship and relatively superficial, this is an entertaining read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The Internet is awash with 'Nerd'. Nerd groups, nerd forums, definitions, delineations, 'What-Kind-Of-Nerd-Are-You' quizzes, on and on and on. Lots of casual chat and banter and bandwidth. Lots of fun, tempered by the occasional angry rage of nonacceptance and societal chagrin. All and all, nothing very significant.Luckily, we have print.Nugent is a nerd, and fully admits that it is a very nerdy thing to take seriously something usually treated very lightly, but no one has really done it before, so he might as well. Roughly the first half is spent defining the word 'nerd' and trying to figure out where it came from, which is probably the only time you will ever see Pride and Prejudice and Saturday Night Live as being a common influence for anything. He goes on to explore the world of the nerd both through active exploration and introspection on to his own dice rolling, Atari wielding childhood. He unexpectedly jumps from thought to thought, one moment looking at the Romantic disdain for intense intellectualism, to the Muscular Christianity of the 1880s, to Bill Murray with an almost ADD-like presentation. Indeed, the first half often feels unfinished and spare, more like a college paper than a book. For me, it came into its own when he got out of the socio-history and went into finding and talking to other nerds across the country. Most telling and heart wrenching are the childhood friends he finds, a decade and a half after he abandoned them to their nerdieness in an attempt to become 'normal'. Never before have I really thought that nerdy behavior and proclivities are not just casual preferences, but for many a survival tactic.Nugent himself is a rather good young journalist. He clearly has all of the intelligence, cultural literacy, and wit as the likes of Klosterman without the painfully in-your-face irony and conceited pretension Chuck and his ilk tend to project. On a whole, American Nerd is not a stellar work of scholarship, nor a shining beacon of enlightenment for the socially inept of the nation; however, it is a readable, entertaining, thought provoking, and surprisingly moving treatise on the people who drive the technology, innovation, and imagination of much of the modern world. As he points out, all the great American heroes, the cowboys, jocks, surfers and gangsters, were created by the people sitting at the wrong lunch table in highschool.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    As I continue my reconnecting with my inner nerd, American Nerd provided an interesting stroll down memory lane. The book chronicles the history of nerdiness and the many pursuits and passions that makes one a nerd. Nugent does a good job of outlining the history of the term and shows how such literary giants as Mary Shelly, Jane Austin, and E.M. Forester set the standard for future depictions of the nerd.The most powerful theme of the book explores the contrast between the nerd and the jock stereotype. The jock is the child of the movement known as "muscular Christianity" in the 19th century. Teddy Roosevelt and "Tom Brown's Schooldays" set the standard for the idea of a "well-balanced" gentleman who stood in stark contrast to the weak and effect intellectual. This contrast reflects the 19th and early 20th century fears that elite W.A.S.P.s were being overwhelmed by more intellectually capable Jews and East Asians. The book is a bit uneven and Nugent's treatment of video games, and debating don't really add up to much. Still in all, the book is thought-provoking and his discussion of "cool nerds" is pretty funny.

Book preview

American Nerd - Benjamin Nugent

part 1

a history of the nerd

Before I launch into a discussion of what a nerd is and where the idea of nerds comes from, I’d like to disclose that when I was eleven, I had a rich fantasy life in which I carried a glowing staff. On earth I ran to class under an L.L.Bean backpack erupting with books that I was too distracted by my medieval life to put in my locker, as I was pursued by an actual medieval-style warrior society of lacrosse players. When I saw them, I would blend with the crowd or run. They, in turn, established a pretty good Nugent impersonation: you bend forward at the waist to signify the burden of the swollen backpack and stick out your elbows, funky-chicken style, with your hands bunched into fists on your chest to signify the straps of the backpack clutched close to the body. Running through the halls with a backpack that was capable of doing real harm to others didn’t do much to draw sympathy, so nobody raised serious objections when every once in a while somebody hit me in the crotch with a clarinet case or hockey stick. All of which is to say my journalistic objectivity with regard to my subject matter is seriously compromised. But I am trying my best.

That means I’m not writing a defense of nerds or a celebration of nerds or a polemic against the nerd stereotype. There is a rationale, I think, for despising the young me. I empathize with nerds and antinerds alike.

what is a nerd?

As of this morning, Wikipedia states that "nerd, as a stereotypical or archetypal designation, refers to somebody who pursues intellectual interests at the expense of skills that are useful in a social setting such as communication, fashion, or physical fitness." That sounds about right, but it’s wrong.

If an art critic arrives at your get-together in khakis and an undershirt, helps himself to six fingers of Jameson, tries to flirt with your teenage daughter, and then urinates with the bathroom door open, he’s behaving like a socially awkward intellectual and exhibiting a pronounced disengagement with fashion and physical fitness. But nerdy doesn’t feel like the best description of his behavior. The graphic designer you’ve recently met, who visits your apartment for the first time and talks for three hours about the suicidal impulses she’s weathered since she dropped out of grad school, then describes your Klimt poster as sort of freshman year of collegey, is also a socially awkward intellectual. But she isn’t acting like a nerd. The problem with the current Wikipedia entry, in other words, is that nerdiness isn’t really a matter of intellectualism and social awkwardness.

I believe there are two main categories of nerds: one type, disproportionately male, is intellectual in ways that strike people as machinelike, and socially awkward in ways that strike people as machinelike. These nerds are people who remind others, sometimes pleasantly, of machines.

They tend to remind people of machines by:

1. Being passionate about some technically sophisticated activity that doesn’t revolve around emotional confrontation, physical confrontation, sex, food, or beauty (most activities that excite passion in non-nerds—basketball, violin, sex, surfing, acting, knitting, interior decorating, wine tasting, etc.—are built around one of these subjects).

2. Speaking in language unusually similar to written Standard English.

3. Seeking to avoid physical and emotional confrontation.

4. Favoring logic and rational communication over nonverbal, nonrational forms of communication or thoughts that don’t involve reason.

5. Working with, playing with, and enjoying machines more than most people do.

Do I mean that nerds in this category are robots made of flesh and blood? No.

Brian Wilson is not into the ocean. I’m afraid of the water, he says when people ask him about surfing. One interviewer has described his Rain Man–like personality as being reminiscent of a voice-mail menu. Wilson is from Hawthorne, California, ten minutes from the Pacific, which makes his hydrophobia impressive. But his mother, Audree, has long maintained that he hummed the entire melody of The Marines’ Hymn before he could talk, and that his mastery of musical instruments proceeded apace. When his younger brother Dennis persuaded him to write a song about a new teen pastime, he came up with Surfin’, which became the Wilson brothers’ first hit and led to their reinvention as the Beach Boys. Wilson proceeded to paint a fantasia in song, an amber-encased America ruled by athletes with multiple vehicles and multiple girlfriends. In the mid-1960s, as the rest of the Beach Boys toured Asia, he surrounded himself with studio musicians and recorded Pet Sounds, making Coke bottles into percussion instruments, recording in a pit of sand to get the right sound, writing string charts, and letting other people write his lyrics. The more the world fell for his make-believe, the more time he spent alone in his studio, sequestered from the world, living with equipment.

Wilson did things a machine cannot do. His work was more intuitive than logical. Nerds of this kind, crucially, are not actually like machines; they just remind people of them. They get stuck with the name nerd because their outward behavior can make them seem less than, and more than, human.

The second type of nerd probably consists equally of males and females. This is a nerd who is a nerd by sheer force of social exclusion.

In 1959, a twelve-year-old ninth grader named Anne Beatts moved from a small, cozy private school in Dutchess County, New York, to a public high school in Somers, then one of the more remote New York City commuter towns.

That was when I first heard the expression ‘nerd,’ says Beatts. "The joke definition of nerd was someone who farts in the bathtub and bursts the bubbles. But really it was a person considered by the popular kids to be uncool. A lot of things would make you a nerd, and they were basically being thought of as someone who worked, who did homework in study hall. Teenage acne was a qualification, appearance. I was wearing undershirts and everyone else was wearing training bras, at least."

Friendless, she tried to get her homework done at school instead of at home, so she would work during homeroom and lunch. The only other person who opted for that isolation was a mathematical genius who muttered to himself. His name was Marshall.

"So somebody noticed this and they said, ‘Do you like Marshall?’ And I didn’t know high-school vocabulary, and I didn’t know the loadedness of the word like. I didn’t want to go, ‘No, I don’t like him,’ or ‘I dislike him,’ so I said, ‘Sure.’ And they went, ‘Oh, she likes him. There goes Marshall’s girlfriend.’ And so this became an epithet and a cry of humiliation to me in my first year of high school, Marshall’s Girlfriend. And so I’d been labeled as a nerd."

By the time grade-skipping had made her a fifteen-year-old senior in 1962, Beatts had become editor of the high-school newspaper, and by pursuing every activity that might engender acceptance, up to and including cooking hot dogs for the football game, she had attained a perch where she was no longer mocked as a matter of routine. She chose this time to publish an editorial in the paper called Leave the Nerds Alone, which caused her to be suspended from her editorship for its controversial subject matter.

In the early 1970s she wrote for National Lampoon, and she landed at Saturday Night Live in 1975. There, she created the Nerds sketches with her sometimes writing partner Rosie Shuster, helping to bring the word nerd into mainstream usage, which will be discussed more thoroughly later. Marshall Blechtman became a character on the sitcom about nerds Beatts created, Square Pegs.

Anne Beatts is an example of the second kind of nerd. Beatts became a nerd not because she was like Marshall but because she got shoved into the same category as Marshall (a type-one nerd) by peers who were looking for somebody to exclude.

The heroes of American popular culture are surfers, cowboys, pioneers, gangsters, cheerleaders, and baseball players, people at home in the heat of physical exertion. But so many of the individuals who make these images are more like Anne Beatts. Their voyeurism—their sense of staring from the wrong lunch table at a radiant nation—makes for a vision of America that appeals to the whole world, including America itself. There’s a globe full of outsiders thirsty for glimpses of the land of myth, and American nerds have gratified them with adoring images. Wilson—the bodiless studio addict who spent days refining drum sounds for songs about high-school football and girls on the beach—was the rule, not the exception, for North American fabulists, for DreamWorks as much as Microsoft. In this book, I’ll try to catalog the way a largely nerdy chain of media figures has affected the way we think about nerds.

I’ll also address the relationship between nerdiness and ethnicity. You don’t need to belong to any particular class or ethnicity to be a nerd, but some ethnic stereotypes are nerdier than others. In the late nineteenth century, educators strove to nourish the primitive in white middle-class boys and thus mold them into athletic men of character, the opposite of the greasy grinds who studied their way out of the Lower East Side. In the 1980s, opinion columnists warned that the Japanese were taking over the world through their unrivaled love of machines and their mechanistically corporate cast of mind. If a propaganda artist of the Third Reich had time-traveled to 1984 and watched Revenge of the Nerds, he might have interpreted the hero, Louis Skolnick, as a traditional age-old caricature of a Jew, and Ogre and his band of overwhelmingly blond-haired and blue-eyed jocks as the image of ideal Aryans (in appearance, if not conduct), even though the film never explicitly raises the question of ancestry or religion. The linguist Mary Bucholtz has observed that some contemporary high-school students who consider themselves nerds cleave so tightly to American Standard English, even as the popular white kids cultivate hip-hop affectations, that they engage in what she called hyperwhiteness—whiteness so white it destroys the aura of normality that usually attends white people. The history of the concept of nerdiness helps show some of the ways we have thought about the primitive, the Oriental, white people, Jews, nature, and the machine.

We here does not mean Americans. Rosie Shuster, Lorne Michaels, and Elvis Costello—two Canadians and an Englishman—all made their mark on the history of the nerd at the same pivotal moment. Tokyo is the city where otaku, a type similar to the American nerd, has its own neighborhood, Akihabara, known for waitresses who dress as manga characters.I In England, the word boffin has been around for centuries. Theories about the fine differences in meaning between geek, dork, and nerd in Silicon Valley and other tech hives are all over the Internet, but, internationally, the nerd/otaku/geek/dork is a concept that involves: loneliness; the rote, mechanical nature of work in the industrial and postindustrial ages; the way modernity allows the body to fall into disuse; and the way contemporary mass media invite people into voyeuristic relationships with simple fictions and numb them to the pleasures of real life. To understand nerds is to enrich our understanding of many demons.

Beyond the traits that fit into an intellectually defensible definition of nerd, there’s a nerd tone, a nerd aesthetic. You know it when you see it: the indestructible-looking but nonetheless largely destroyed glasses, the pair of pleated shorts that exposes thigh, the childlike laugh, the intense self-seriousness. These are the universally acknowledged symptoms, and it’s worth tracing how they come together in a chain of pop-culture images.

What is the history of the nerd? What are the different nerd subcultures like, and what are the rules and rituals that hold together the communities within those subcultures? What do the stories of two of my friends from childhood have to do with all this?

I will take a serious approach to a subject usually treated lightly, which is a nerdy thing to do.


I. One such restaurant described in The New York Times had them address customers as master.

the mark of greatness

On a soccer field beside a nature preserve, a dozen boys stand in a circle holding lengths of piping converted into blunt weapons. A brisk wind sings through the dying leaves; these are the last days of fall in Amherst, Massachusetts, and the chill puts us in an Arthurian cast of mind. There are few smiles in our ring of scrofulous faces. We know this is not serious, but for some reason we are serious.

Our weapons are called boff swords, our purpose here boffing. To craft the instruments in our hands, we’ve purchased PVC pipe from Aubuchon Hardware at the despondent mall off Route 9, encased the ivory plastic tube with soft pipe insulation, and sealed together the bludgeon with duct tape. We’re about to fight a melee, last-man-standing. Get hit in the arm, you lose the use of that arm. Lose one leg, you hop. Lose both, and you are on your knees. A hit to the skull or torso, and you fall dead. For a moment, there is no sound but the inconsolable wind. Then Jon L., with his freckles and his orange vest, looks at each of us and speaks calmly: One, two, three.

Nobody is so naïve as to rush into the center. We all want to win. Some boys back up and walk sideways in order to stab somebody from behind. Some boys move with two hands on a long sword trembling four feet before them; some wave two shorter swords, some a sword and shield. We are thirteen, fourteen; it’s possible for each of us to believe that, for all intents and purposes, this soccer field might as well be a glade set aside for the resolution of disputes among the aristocracy of the sword. If the sons of the Prince of Wales had fallen into a conflict over farmland in the thirteenth century, we reason, it would have looked like this, basically.

We also know it’s a game, and the kind of game geeks would play, but we are proud of the fact that we are above labels. In fact, people often use labels for us, like total fucking loser, and they bounce right off. Who are they to find us so contemptible? How long would they last in this contest of intense young men, this gauntlet of pipe and tape? In my heart, I believe life will eventually favor those of us in this field. We’re the ones intent on making a game of combat, and the career world, I anticipate, will be a combat realm. Who cares about our detractors? We’ll bury them.

Thinking about this sort of thing makes me excited, and like the rest of the boys, I start to swing and parry as the circle tightens and we begin to attack our neighbors. Jon falls upon me with his long sword. I swipe it away and spring back into an ingenious defensive posture, crouching low to the ground with my sword ready at a diagonal before me, so that my torso is out of reach and I can knock an opponent off balance when he goes on the attack, then spring forward for the kill.

He’s taking a shit! He’s taking a shit! says Jon, pointing at me. I know I shouldn’t mind, and I pretend not to, but I rise up from the crouch and must have a vengeful look in my eyes because Jon begins to laugh hysterically, like a girl, stealing backward glances as he runs, and I chase him and cut him all to pieces, in the game.

As I turn over my memory of the incident, I remember a feeling of righteousness. Each boy in that ring knew what was expected of him: to fight, honorably, and to treat opponents as equals. Nobody was picked in order of preference; nobody was captain; nobody was on a team. You could speak in slang and joke around if you wanted to, but you could also speak like somebody out of Ivanhoe, formally, with politeness unfettered by irony. Nobody would make fun of you—not really make fun of you—if you spoke that way. We couldn’t decide for ourselves if we wanted to play an elaborate game of make-believe or if we just wanted to swing swords, but we weren’t going to deny one another the right to either choice. There were rules that came with boffing, and while we didn’t talk about them, we knew what they were and we knew how to follow them. This was not the case with the rules that governed life beyond the circle we’d drawn in the field.

Everybody knows that boffers, like nerds who play fantasy role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons and attach latex points to their ears to make themselves more elflike, are engaged in a game of pretend, a chance to inhabit another body. They’re voyeurs. But sports nerds play online rotisserie baseball games in which they’re managers of real teams. High-school debaters do the same thing, only they’re role-playing cabinet secretaries. Even music nerds, who sometimes pretend to be cool, seem to hope that a familiarity with defunct record labels and one-hit wonders creates kinship between musicians and themselves.

In all these cases, the beloved activity is one that involves little or no physical or emotional confrontation—whether it’s collecting singles from the 1980s, pretending to be a medieval warlord, developing software, or delving into the statistical patterns of the 1937 World Series. It’s socially inclusive and embraces logical frameworks, structuring play with points, hierarchies, and categories. And if you are a deeply nerdy person, your nerdy activity dictates who your friends are and are not, so that it becomes evident from just being around you that you prefer abstract physics or policy debate or computer games to skateboarding or going to parties or playing soccer.

All these generalizations applied to my friends and me in ninth grade. More remarkable, we all fit the look people usually associate with nerds. We were a slow-drifting cloud of glasses, high pants, and trench coats. We liked that we had a look. I used to call us the Darknerds, because I actually thought we were menacing, which, this being pre-Columbine, was funny to people who overheard me. I often wondered whether there had been people like us in other centuries. The answer is yes.

newt envy, and were there nerds in the nineteenth century?

How did we get these rule-loving, unathletic men and women? How long has the type been around?

There are nerds in literature going back at least two hundred years. Mary Bennet, in Pride and Prejudice, published in 1813, is a good example. She’s one of the younger sisters of Elizabeth, the main character. Her nerdiness first becomes evident in

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