Ur-nerd Bill Gates is now only the world’s third-richest man, Forbes announced in March. His fall from first place does not, however, seem to have hurt the status of nerds nationwide, who are enjoying a period of unprecedented cultural supremacy. The current television season features a veritable gallery of nerd-heroes: eggheads (The Big Bang Theory), geeks (Beauty and the Geek), a dork (Scrubs), a square (Two and a Half Men), a brainiac (Numb3rs), and so on. Programmers, systems analysts, software architects, and other tech-masters continue to rake in impressive salaries. Enthusiasms once thought to be nerd-only have entered the mainstream: a renaissance of comic-book movies has drawn billions of dollars into Hollywood coffers, and what can be cooler, even for hardened jocks, than the latest electronic gadget? One would be forgiven for thinking that the geek is inheriting the earth. Although the pure breed of the nerd seems recognizable enough in nature, its traits turn out to be oddly difficult to delineate in the abstract. Enter two new books that attempt to bring analytical rigor to the subject. Differing in approach and conclusions, both implicitly argue that today’s nerd moment may be less auspicious than it seems.

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