A lecture to sip on

Cool nerds are now chilling in bars, with lectures on science, history, poetry and art. Hold my beer, I'm taking notes

- Christalle Fernandes

You expect a lot of things when you enter a bar. Drinks with names you can't understand. Tipsy friends who are two shots away from deciding to start a podcast. People seriously listening to a lecture on a weekend? Not so much. People holding a beer in one hand while raising the other to pose questions on Martian rovers and game theory? Even less so.

The revenge of the nerds is upon us. City bars now host expert-led, visual-heavy chill lectures about subjects that would have otherwise remained inside college classrooms. And the very people who might have spent undergraduate life bunking lectures are now paying to attend them. The discussions cover science, history, poetry, astronomy and art. They're short; rarely longer than an hour. There's beer to be sipped alongside, and no exam at the end. Why didn't anyone think of this earlier?

Notes in the margin