Results tagged “nerd”

In American Nerd: The Story of My People, Brooklyn-based writer Benjamin Nugent combines a peripatetic history of the word “nerd” with accounts of the various kinds of people it is most often used to describe. The book includes an autobiographical dose; one section called “My Credentials” details Nugent’s early 90s adolescent exodus from d20-style probabilities. On page 3, Nugent fittingly discloses: “when I was eleven, I had a rich fantasy life in which I carried a glowing staff.” But American Nerd isn’t a massive, single subject history, and it isn’t straightforward memoir. The book is often poignant, especially when Nugent revisits the proving grounds of his young nerd-hood, and more often than that it is funny. The nerd you recognize in its pages may very well be yourself.

There was no avoiding Kanye's epic and ego boosting Glow in the Dark Tour as it rolled through New York this week. The hip hop space opera was one for the ages, walking the fine line between Spinal Tap and R. Kelly in terms of the laughing at/with ridiculousness; it included campy stage props, dry ice, and holographic strippers. The concept's absurdity was breathtaking: Kanye crash lands alone on an alien planet, with only his female talking spaceship, Jane, alongside him. He needs "star power" for the spaceship to launch again, since he's the biggest star in the universe, he is able to power up and get the ship back home. Kanye might not win a Pulitzer for the story, but that's not to say it wasn't mind-blowingly enjoyable.