Were you a geek? A nerd? Did you play Magic: The Gathering, paint Warhammer miniatures, learn to speak Klingon or Elvish, or memorize whole scenes from Star Trek? If so, then good news: it might have taken a few broken eyeglasses and shoves in high school, but geek culture has finally triumphed. Dragons are cool, Star Wars has never had more fans, and everyone is geeking out over the latest sci-fi release on Netflix. How did this happen? And how have the changing demographics of geekdom affected it, for better or worse? Lifelong nerd and critic A. D. Jameson, whose geek cred is stronger than the Force itself, joins us to figure it out. This episode originally aired in 2018.

Go beyond the episode:

• A. D. Jameson’s I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing: Star Wars and the Triumph of Geek Culture
• Read A. D. Jameson and Justin Roman’s article on sexism in gaming, “If Magic: The Gathering Cares About Women, Why Can’t They Hire Any?”
• For more on how franchises have changed Hollywood’s structure, check out Stephen Metcalf’s article, “How Superheroes Made Movies Expendable”
• If you’re looking for an escape this holiday weekend, please binge watch Marvel’s Jessica Jones (reading a book would be fine, too)
• Listen to the queer history of comics in our second ever podcast episode, “Superheroes Are So Gay!”

Tune in every other week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.

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Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes!

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Zayd Ayers Dohrn was born underground, the son of Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, two cofounders of the Weather Underground, a militant, radical leftist group of the 1970s that used tactics like the after-hours bombings of government buildings—including the Capitol, the State Department, and the Pentagon—to protest the Vietnam War and racial injustice. “When I was just 3 years old, I learned to recognize plainclothes police officers and undercover agents in a crowd,” Dohrn writes, “It was a bit like playing a game—a grown-up version of dress-up or make believe—that only my family was good at or knew all the rules.” By the time Dohrn was born in 1977, his parents had been hiding from the FBI for close to a decade, working cash jobs from San Francisco to Harlem using assumed names and forged papers. Their decision to have a family while on the run is just one of the tangled contradictions that Dohrn writes about his new book, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young, which is both a family memoir and a social history of a forgotten chapter of American activism.

An acclaimed playwright and screenwriter, Zayd Ayers Dohrn is a professor at Northwestern University and director of the MFA in Writing for Screen and Stage at Northwestern University. He is the creator of the narrative podcast Mother Country Radicals and the rock protest musical Revolution(s).

Go beyond the episode:

• Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground
• Listen to Mother Country Radicals
• In 2022, we interviewed another member of the underground: Laura Kaplan, a member of the Jane collective that provided abortions before Roe v. Wade

Tune in every other week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.

Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora

Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes!

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.