nerds

About Bullying

Joel Johnson · 10/22/14 02:52PM

About a week ago, one of our writers made a bad joke. "Ultimately #GamerGate is reaffirming what we've known to be true for decades: Nerds should be constantly shamed and degraded into submission." It was a joke, sure, but a stupid one, and he apologized.

Collector Opens a Magic Card Worth $25,000, Absolutely Flips His Shit

Jay Hathaway · 10/14/14 10:00AM

There's a good reason the guy in this video is completely losing his shit over the Magic: The Gathering cards he just opened. The deck he's unwrapping, from Magic's very first set, now sells for nearly $6,000—and he just turned an enormous profit.

A Brief History of Rihanna Giving Her Fans Lap Dances

Jay Hathaway · 07/11/14 05:05PM

A video of Rihanna giving a lap dance to a bespectacled, "nerdy" audience member made the rounds yesterday, as the guy was declared both the luckiest and the most awkward Rihanna fan of all time. Awkward, maybe, but this ain't exactly Rihanna's first lap dance rodeo—at least a half-dozen other fans have gotten just as lucky.

Patton Oswalt's Wife: Dungeons & Dragons Is Creepier Than Strip Clubs

Aleksander Chan · 05/20/14 09:34AM

Appearing on the Pete Holmes Show last night, King of Queens' absurdly most-famous alum, Patton Oswalt, regaled to Holmes how his wife is not a fan of Dungeons & Dragons and him playing it. Upon learning that he had assembled a few other comedy nerdlings for a D&D group, his wife told him what's up:

Tom Scocca · 03/18/14 11:45AM

FiveThirtyEight is puzzled: Its computer analysis of Shakespeare finds that Romeo and Juliet speak less to each other than to other characters, or than Lady Macbeth speaks to Macbeth. Chosen mascot: the flexible-thinking fox, of fox-and-hedgehog fame. Better mascot: a hammer bashing anything vaguely nail-shaped.

Watch Two Teachers Rap Their School's Snow Closing Announcement

Taylor Berman · 02/13/14 09:07AM

Nothing says "cool" like being in charge an elite private school in suburban North Carolina. So it's fitting that Durham Academy's Head of School Michael Ulku-Steiner and his assistant Lee Hark would announce the school's closing today in the coolest way possible: with a cover of Vanilla Ice's "Ice, Ice, Baby."

David Brooks Wishfully, Wrongly Believes the Chinese Have No Word for 'Nerd'

Tom Scocca · 03/02/13 03:07PM

New York Times columnist and culture scholar David Brooks had some thoughts this week about the difference between hardworking Chinese students and lazy American students. The Chinese, he wrote, see education as a moral enterprise, built around the cultivation of discipline and other internal virtues, while Westerners focus on learning about things and are hung up on "critical inquiry" and "sharing ideas."

'Things as Bad as Hitler' and More of the Most Cringe-Worthy Posts from National Novel Writing Month

Max Read · 11/12/12 05:31PM

We're now 12 days into "National Novel Writing Month," the annual event in which thousands of people, encouraging and guiding each other online, pledge to write entire novels over the course of November. The official "NaNoWriMo" forums are abuzz with encouragement and advice, testifying to the power of group support in achieving your goals. They are also filled with some of the worst ideas you will read in your entire life.

Is James Holmes a Nerd?

Max Read · 07/24/12 10:00AM

Here's something that almost all the mass killers of the last fifteen years or so have in common: they've been called "nerds." James Holmes, who allegedly murdered 12 people in a crowded Colorado movie theater on Friday morning, was described as a "nerd" by his uncle within hours of the shooting. Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik is, in the Telegraph, a "puffy-faced computer game nerd." Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were "innocuous nerds," the Los Angeles Times claimed in 1999.

Happy Pi Day, Nerds! Here's Pi to Around 100,000 1 Digit

Max Read · 03/14/12 10:14AM

Today is Pi Day, for obvious reasons. Pi is a Greek letter representing the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, a mathematical constant. If a circle's diameter is one, its circumference is approximately 3. Happy Pi day.