Word: brainiac
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...uproar, however, was extraordinary. A Facebook group was created, with the title, “Dear Daily Prince, This Isn’t Funny, It’s Racist.” As of my writing, it has 480 members. Vapid blogs Ivygate and Brainiac, the latter by the staff of The Boston Globe, also accused the newspaper of racism. Asian American groups on Princeton’s campus mobilized, with the president of the campus association saying, “Even in the context of a joke, it made reference to so many stereotypes such as yellow fever...
...Jennings' brainiac (Villard; 269 pages) were a Daily Double on Jeopardy! you would want to bet cautiously. Not only does it have the ugliest cover of any book published so far this year (for what it's worth, the most beautiful is Bruce Wagner's Memorial), but also it is by Ken Jennings--you know, the Mormon computer-programmer celebrinerd who, beginning in 2004, rattled off a record-breaking 74-game Jeopardy! winning streak. Good enough for $2.5 million and 15 minutes of syndicated fame, but a book deal seems like a stretch...
Jennings is hip enough to make fun of his freakish triviaphilia but savvy enough to indulge it too--part of the joy of Brainiac is learning that Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born on the same day and that Charles Bronson was the only member of both The Magnificent Seven and The Dirty Dozen. There's something touching about the world of trivia. It's a place where minutiae have a paradoxical grandeur and no fact is meaningless. Or as the coach of Carleton's quiz-bowl team puts it, "Everything's going to be worth 10 points someday...
...whether a child is sweet-natured and has a few chums. School does no less than expose children to the diversity of human nature. It's where they make, over the course of a decade, thousands of acquaintances. They might not have been friends with the weird kid, the brainiac, the pretty boy, the bully or the one whose sister got expelled, but they're more complete - and less vulnerable - for having known them. It's this vast network of acquaintances that helps to shrink and demystify the wider world, making it easier, when the time comes, to join...
...Efron, a cutie who manages to channel both Michael J, Fox and David Cassidy in their early adorable years) is the resident Anglo basketball star - we said it was a fantasy - and Gabrielle (Vanessa Anne Hutchinson, from the Soledad O'Brien breed of smiling semi-hispanics) is the new brainiac, at a school that might as well be called Rainbow Coalition High. The hero and heroine's best friends are African-American; there's a Hollywood demographer's smattering of other ethnicities; and everyone is cheerfully color-blind...