The anthropology of the pocket protector

MAYBE THE time for revenge really has come: "American Nerd: The Story of My People," by Benjamin Nugent, is one of the season's most talked-about cultural studies. A New York-based music journalist and the author of "Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing," Nugent, 30, has produced a book both comic, in its recollections of the author's nerd childhood, and dead serious, in its anthropological excursions into the nerd's origins.

He visits a faux-medieval club and deciphers the work of Mary Bucholtz, a UC Santa Barbara linguist who sees nerdy students as defined by "hyperwhiteness" -- their tendency to ignore the African American slang and styles used by the popular kids. (Nugent seems to have recovered: He's dating actress-writer Mindy Kaling of "The Office.")

We spoke by phone to Nugent, who talks in a flat style, part self-deprecation, part too-cool-for-school, from a tour stop in Portland, Ore.

What made you want to write about one of the most loathed creatures in contemporary American history?

Being that loathed character, in short. When I was a kid, everyone called me a nerd. I grew up in Cambridge, Mass., and Amherst, Mass., which are sort of Berkeley-esque towns where the history of prejudice and categorization was a big part of our education.

But nobody could offer an explanation of where this apparently arbitrary category I'd been placed into came from. So instead of studying a real thing, I wanted to study the genealogy of a construct. I wanted to figure out why I was so despised and, if possible, empathize with the people who despised me.

The places you grew up were about as tolerant as anywhere in America.

I say at one point in the book, "It's really hard to be not tolerated in Amherst." And somehow I managed it. I think what happens with nerds is this cycle where they're rejected, and then they start thinking of themselves as this elite race -- cutting themselves off deliberately as a defense mechanism. And then the cycle repeats itself.

How far did you find the nerd went back?

I went back to the early 19th century. Romanticism was blossoming in England at the dawn of the Machine Age, and the movement called Muscular Christianity, espoused by Thomas Hughes and Charles Kingsley, started out in England and only then became popular among the Protestant establishment in the United States. So we get our ideas of romanticism, the soul versus the machine, and the gentleman athlete, from England.