“My Klout score is an 83, which makes me a Thought Leader. There’s a lot of pressure to stay relevant and forward thinking, when you’re that influential. A few sub-par tweets and I could be downgraded to Specialist. I mean, not that there’s anything wrong with being a Specialist… you’re not a Specialist, are you?”

“I know you’re a complete stranger, but I’d gladly waste one of my Spotify invitations on you. Give me your number and I’ll throw in a Google+ invite. I’d put you in my ‘Babe’ Circle.”

“That gorgeous woman over there keeps looking this way, like she recognizes me or something. I do maintain a mildly successful YouTube account with over sixty subscribers, so I’m used to this sort of unwelcome attention. Are you an actress?”

“You’ve been published by The Atlantic? That’s cool. My name is frequently used as a tag on Tumblr. We have all the makings of a modern power couple.”

“My U.S. Alexa ranking is 22K, which is fairly impressive for a blog about soft cheeses. It’s not always smooth sailing, though. It can be difficult coming up with compelling content. Brie sort of loses its luster after a few years, you know? How many times can one reinvent mascarpone? I feel optimistic, though – I’ve received great feedback from prospective advertisers and I really think things are about to take off. What I’m saying is, I’d love to take a look at your website and give you a few pointers. If you want.”

“According to this app, only four people in the past sixteen hours have found me so tedious that they’ve found it necessary to unfollow me on Twitter. Just saying.”

“As of now, my mother doesn’t have a Facebook account so, if we were to take this thing to the next level, you wouldn’t have to worry about rejecting her inappropriate Family Request.”

“I’d dance to Cher, if it got you that much closer to affording a new Turntable.fm outfit. You deserve the best.”

“Do you come here often? I do. I’m the Foursquare mayor, actually, which means I come here more than anyone else. That reminds me, I need to check-in. Can I have your Twitter handle? You’re so attractive, I want to Shout it from multiple applications. Simultaneously.”

(Editor’s note: Also see A Day In The Life of a Modern San Franciscan.)

When we were in junior high school, my friend Rich and I made a map of the school lunch tables according to popularity. This was easy to do, because kids only ate lunch with others of about the same popularity. We graded them from A to E. A tables were full of football players and cheerleaders and so on. E tables contained the kids with mild cases of Down’s Syndrome, what in the language of the time we called “retards.”

We sat at a D table, as low as you could get without looking physically different. We were not being especially candid to grade ourselves as D. It would have taken a deliberate lie to say otherwise. Everyone in the school knew exactly how popular everyone else was, including us.

My stock gradually rose during high school. Puberty finally arrived; I became a decent soccer player; I started a scandalous underground newspaper. So I’ve seen a good part of the popularity landscape.

I know a lot of people who were nerds in school, and they all tell the same story: there is a strong correlation between being smart and being a nerd, and an even stronger inverse correlation between being a nerd and being popular. Being smart seems to make you unpopular.

Why? To someone in school now, that may seem an odd question to ask. The mere fact is so overwhelming that it may seem strange to imagine that it could be any other way. But it could. Being smart doesn’t make you an outcast in elementary school. Nor does it harm you in the real world. Nor, as far as I can tell, is the problem so bad in most other countries. But in a typical American secondary school, being smart is likely to make your life difficult. Why?