All of the RA's presented a short class tonight, showing off that we're not only here because we're huge goofs, but because we've got some sharp academics as well. I chose to lead a short non-fiction workshop entitled "What You Know Doesn't Suck: Writing Real, Cool Nonfiction."

The following was one of my example pieces, and may be one of my all-time favorite articles.

Confessions of a Nerd

By Ben Stein

(Cosmopolitan Magazine, January 1991)

Think of this as the report of a geologist announcing a major new oil
find. Or of a securities analyst discovering a highly undervalued stock
that's bound to go up and make money for the investor. Only this report
is about nerds -- and why they are worth your attention. And it's by
someone who ought to know, since I make a good part of my living playing
one on TV (most recently on the sitcom The Wonder Years) and play the
role from life experience.

Every young woman knows that there is a gigantic shortage of
interesting men. Masses are married. Other masses are nasty and cruel.
Still others have sexual preferences that render them unavailable. But
-- and this is a but -- big there is one large pool of men who are
habitually passed over as boyfriend material. These are your basic
nerds, the kind of men whose mere mention makes many women's lips curve
with disdain.

Now, to define my terms, a nerd -- for the purposes of this
investigative report -- is a guy who is shy, bookish, not cool, not
cooly dressed, tends to lack certain social graces, and maybe carries a
white plastic pocket protector in his shirt pocket to shield the
cotton-Dacron mix from the blue ink of his six ballpoint pens. (I do
not include men who are repellently fat, pick their noses in public or
private, have terrifyingly bad acne, or chew beef jerky. Someone else
will have to defend them.)

As I said, the normal woman (who is not herself a nerd) has nothing but
contempt for the kind of men I'm pitching here. How vividly I recally
the female friend who told me about a date with a nerd from her history
class at UCLA: "On our first date, I thought that if he tried to kiss
me, I'd throw up."

But consider these few facts about nerds. . . .