Is David Brooks’ Next Half-Baked Pop Sociology Book Going To Be About The Super-Geeky “A-Punks”?
Lurking within today’s New York Times‘ op-ed section is David Brooks’ attempt to get in early on calling the rise of the “geek” in society, no doubt because he’s looking for another genre of well-off people to sucker into buying a book that shows “who they really are” in the grand sociological scheme of things. (Oh, for the days when people read and wrote in an effort to experience cultures that may have been at least one degree removed from their own.) Brooks’ column about the “nerd ascendancy” name-drops Tina Fey and Jason Kottke, notes that the new geek uniform eschews pocket protectors for “text-laden T-shirts,” calls Barack Obama “the Prince Caspian of the iPhone hordes,” and, of course, runs down the sort of cultural product that people who experiment with fonts for fun consume in their spare time: Nerds had their own heroes (Stan Lee of comic book fame), their own vocations (Dungeons & Dragons), their own religion (supplied by George Lucas and “Star Wars”) and their own skill se
