This New Jersey Town is Top 10 for Most Nerds in the Country
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA - MAY 08: Kim Kardashian attends a playoff basketball game in an I love nerds t-shirt. The game is between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Golden State Warriors.
It’s been a long time since nerds were a rare group of fellow classmates who wore pocket protectors, had a band-aid repair on their glasses, and were occasionally stuffed into a locker. It really sounds like a not-very-nice thing to do. That’s because it wasn’t. I remember only a handful of kids who were considered nerds, and it wasn’t considered a good thing. Today, according to a new survey, there are more nerds in this country than you might think.
Perhaps that’s something you’re already aware of because you consider yourself a nerd. Many people do if you check out the poll of 2,000 people from Casino.org. It shows that 72% of Americans identify themselves as “nerds, geeks, or dorks.”
Using about “10,000 raw data points,” the website ranked the top nerdiest cities in the United States. According to the poll, the winner is Austin, Texas, but Newark, New Jersey is 8th on that list. My daughter just started her college education in the nerdiest state, Rhode Island. In Maine, 75% of the population said they weren’t nerds.
Maybe you assume the tech industry has the most self-identifying nerds. That would be incorrect. The poll data shows that it’s actually law and legal, with 85% of the people in that line of work claiming to be nerds, geeks, or dorks.
The Survey revealed that dressing up as a character from a movie, book, or video game was considered the number one nerdiest activity. It found that almost 70% of respondents classified it as a nerdy hobby.
The survey even discovered what we geek out about, and broke it down by state. In New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and 20% of the country, “Internet geeks” were found to be most common. New York has more “movie geeks.” Others include books, movies, sports, history, and gaming geeks.
According to the poll, Columbus, Ohio, had the second-highest concentration of geeks, nerds, and dorks, followed by Arlington, Virginia; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and Burlington, Vermont.
Adam Sandler's Best Movies Ranked
Adam Richard Sandler is one of the funniest comedic actors of our time. Sandler was born in Brooklyn, New York, on September 9, 1966. He grew up in Manchester, New Hampshire, after moving there at the age of six. Sandler graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 1988. A year prior, he played Theo Huxtable’s friend Smitty on The Cosby Show and was on the MTV game show Remote Control. His film debut was in the 1989 comedy Going Overboard.
Sandler also performed in comedy clubs, first taking the stage when he was 17. He was discovered by comedian Dennis Miller, who recommended him to Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels. Sandler was hired as a writer for SNL in 1990 and became a featured player the following year. By 1995, NBC hired Sandler and Chris Farley, but in 2019, he hosted the show and was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award.
Career Success
In 1993, Sandler appeared in the Coneheads with Farley, David Spade, Dan Aykroyd, Phil Hartman, and Jane Curtin. In 1994, he co-starred in Airheads with Brendan Fraser and Steve Buscemi. Sandler’s comedic roles include Billy Madison (1995), Happy Gilmore (1996), The Waterboy (1998), The Wedding Singer (1998), Big Daddy (1999), Mr. Deeds (2002), 50 First Dates (2004), The Longest Yard (2005), Click (2006), Grown Ups (2010), Just Go with It (2011), Grown Ups 2 (2013), Blended (2014), Murder Mystery (2019) and Hubie Halloween (2020). He has also taken on dramatic roles such as in Punch-Drunk Love (2002), Reign Over Me (2007), The Meyerowitz Stories (2017), Uncut Gems (2019), and Hustle (2022), with the latter three ranked as his major career highlights.
Besides acting, Sandler is also a lover of basketball and often plays pickup basketball games across the country, sometimes with other celebrities like J. Cole and Timothee Chalamet. As for his personal style, in 2021, Vogue named Sandler as the year’s fashion icon for popularizing a “grocery-run look.” This is characterized by oversized T-shirts, XXL pants, and Nike sneakers. Speaking of the title with Esquire, Sandler said in deadpan, “It took a while. I was working that angle for years. For a while I was like, ‘Please accept me and the way I dress.’ And 30 years later, they finally came around.”
Take a look below at our top picks of Adam Sandler’s best movies, ranked.
Joel Katz is the Morning Show Personality, Assistant Program Director, Podcast Host, Voiceover artist, audio producer, and Digital Content Writer for Magic 98.3. Joel has been working in New Jersey radio since college and started at Magic in 2002 as the Morning Show Host, “I can’t think of another place where I’d fit more perfectly; it’s just a great company with awesome people.” Joel is married to Kathleen, his elementary school sweetheart (they were each other’s first dates at age 9), shares a birthday with his oldest son, Ty, and has twins, Kiera and Liam. Joel runs at least 3.1 miles every day and enjoys playing basketball, doing laundry, saving his turn signal for when he really needs it, kissing dogs through a fence, using coasters, making that cool noise by rubbing his fingers on balloons, and chasing after ping pong balls on a windy cruise ship.
