Review: A herculean human effort plus two cute robots equals triumph for ‘Good Night Oppy’
Linda Fairstein, star of the television series “Fringe,” has a new book out called “Rapture of the Nerds: The Story of the Nerd Herders.” The book is a long-awaited look at the nerd culture of the 1980s, when the social media sites and comic book companies of the ’90s and early 2000s had the world at their feet.
Fairstein grew up with the internet. “My mother and her first husband bought an Atari 2600, and my father built computers, and we were exposed to electronic communications on a daily basis,” she told me earlier this month. “I never grew up in a world that was not connected to the internet.”
When Fairstein was a kid, her father’s computer lab had a “comics lab,” with a collection of “Star Wars” and “Star Trek” trading cards and video games. “We would play those games until 10 or midnight, and then go home and watch movies and TV shows, and eat,” she said. “Mostly, we just talked to each other and played games.”
While she may be a nerd herself, Fairstein says she doesn’t feel any different because of her experience with technology. “I don’t have the ability to do things,” she told me. “I am comfortable doing what I am doing and have to find the joy in it.”
I got the chance to ask Fairstein a few questions about her new book and the nerd culture in general.
How did you research this topic? I researched it on my own, trying to uncover as much about the nerd culture that I could. But the truth is, it was really a collaborative process. I had access to lots of material, but many of them were behind a firewall, and I didn’t know where to find them.
How did you
