“Nerd culture” may be, at this point, thoroughly subsumed into the capitalist mainstream (see: The Big Bang Theory, the explosion of Comic-Con’s popularity, they’re seriously gonna make more Star Wars movies, etc.), but there’s still a group of geeks out there swapping obscure bits of knowledge for knowledge’s sake.
They’re high-level quiz-bowl players, and a recent cheating scandal has brought their insular world into major news sources’ spotlight in all the wrong ways.
Read Alan Siegel’s story at Slate for more surprisingly dramatic details, including the declaration that “[e]verything you touch you destroy.”
