Nerd culture is murdering intellectuals - by Erik Hoel

A fact that never ceases to amaze me: due to the Marvel movies, a lot of moms know who Thanos is. No offense to moms! What I mean is that as a teenager in the early 2000s I personally knew why the Avengers were always fighting big purple Thanos because I sometimes read comic books. But back then I never would have expected a mom (mythic figures of great power, actual adults) to share this knowledge. Back then, Thanos existed only in overwrought pages like this: Now I’m one of the adults and suddenly everyone is a nerd. In fact, nerdom is one of our last uniting cultural forces. Thinking back to some of the last big unifying moments of American pop culture things spring to mind like the TV show Game of Thrones, after it had gotten popular but before it “jumped the shark” (post season 5). The entire nation was watching it—everyone suddenly knew what a white walker was, or a dire wolf. Valerian steel. Etc. Yet I remember the first time I cracked the thick tome of the original A Game of Th

A fact that never ceases to amaze me: due to the Marvel movies, a lot of moms know who Thanos is. No offense to moms! What I mean is that as a teenager in the early 2000s I personally knew why the Avengers were always fighting big purple Thanos because I sometimes read comic books. But back then I never would have expected a mom (mythic figures of great power, actual adults) to share this knowledge. Back then, Thanos existed only in overwrought pages like this: Now I’m one of the adults and suddenly everyone is a nerd. In fact, nerdom is one of our last uniting cultural forces. Thinking back t