Will Byrnes's Reviews > How to Win Friends and Influence Fungi: Collected Quirks of Science, Tech, Engineering, and Math from Nerd Nite

Nerd Nite is an event usually held at a bar or other public venue where usually two or three presenters share about a topic of personal interest or expertise in a fun-yet-intellectual format while the audience shares a drink. It was started in 2003 by then-graduate student (now East Carolina University professor) Chris Balakrishan at the Midway Cafe in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston. In 2006 Nerd Nite spread to New York City, where Matt Wasowski was tasked with expanding the idea globally. - from Wikipedia

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Be There and Be Square - Nerd Nite logo

There was a nerd magazine in 2012, a Youtube presence, and occasional podcasts. This is the first Nerd Nite book.

Misophonia can attach itself to any repetitive sound, but the most common ones are things, like chewing, breathing, sniffing, and throat clearing. It can be hard for sufferers to talk about because of how difficult it can be to tell someone politely that the sound of them keeping themselves alive is repulsive to you.

There are 71 entries, taken from live presentations done by the authors of each piece. (TED talks for those with short attention spans and a need for alcohol?) Nerd Nites have been held in over 100 cities across the globe. The material here covers eleven scientific areas. (see below) All the entries are brief, so if one does not appeal to your mental tastebuds hang on a couple of minutes for the next one, or just skip past.


Chris Balakrishnan and Matt Wasowski - editors - image (from some time ago) from Facebook

You can digest this book a few morsels at a time, and not have to worry about the fate of a fictional hero or put-upon victim. Nope. The heroes here are the scientists, the presenters. One of the great failings of popular science books, IMHO, is the absence of humor, or poor attempts at it. Not here. There are many moments in this one, and humor in almost all of them. That made me very happy. Of the 71 pieces, almost all are very pop-sciency, understandable by most readers, even me. There were only one or two that made my head hurt. It makes an excellent bed-side read. It was an upstairs book for me, to be read before nodding off, hopefully. Sometimes that takes a while. This is not an all-inclusive list of the articles, but lets you know what might be in store in its eleven sections

1 - Creature Features - on weird animals
2 - Mmmm...Brains - strangeness with how we learn and adapt
3 - Bodily Fluids - on things like coping with poo in space. (In space, no one can hear you fart?)
4 - Doing It - like it suggests, on sex, human and non-human, (no, not with each other. Don't be weird.)
5 - Health and (un)Wellness - human smells (See Paul Giamatti in The Holdovers) - on therapeutic maggots, adolescent medicine, et al
6 - Pathogens and parasites - on birds, bacteria in birds, zombies, the scotch tape test (don’t ask), viruses
7 - Death and Taxes - mass extinction, cancer, algae
8 - Space, the Big and the Beautiful - ignorance, asteroid avoidance and use, life on Europa?, artificial gravity, studying a pristine meteorite, Webb telescope
9 - Tech (High and Low) - GMOs, dating app, human powered flight, cyborging humans, domesticating bacteria, nuclear fusion
10 - Math is fun - a seminal experiment, the math of gossip, the golden ratio, infinity, cryptography
11 - Careers – things removed from dogs, useless inventions, myths about death, animals CSI, amputations, fermentation, flames.

there are approximately 100 trillion microorganisms (mainly bacteria), representing as many as 30,000 different species, living in every crevice, nook, and mucosal cranny of your body that you can imagine.

I would include a list of my favorite articles, but it would wind up as long as the parts list above. But ok, because I have the sense of humor of a twelve-year-old, the one that made me laugh the most was To Boldy Go: Dealing with Poop and Pee in Space. Apollo 10 astronauts were gifted with the visual, and no doubt olfactory, treat of a turd meandering about in their capsule. This begins a talk about how one handles bodily waste in zero G. Another on bladder control, or the absence thereof, was sidesplitting. Others, on camel spiders and hangovers, generated a fair number of LOLs.

Some were fascinating, like one having to do with making a brain on a chip. (Can it be served with Salsa?) The pieces on bacteria and their importance to human life, heck, to all life on Earth, were fascinating.

There is plenty of weirdness, about diverse forms of milk, the proper use of maggots in healing, zombie parasites, asteroids, artificial gravity, and here we go with another bloody list. Sorry. Take my word, there is a wealth of material here that will broaden your knowledge base, and serve up plenty of conversational hors d'oeuvres for cocktail party chatter.

It worked quite well for me. There is a downside, though. Because all the articles here are very short, one is often left hungry for more. On the other hand, that limitation might provoke you to sate that desire with a bit of extra research, which is always a good idea. So, never mind.

If science piques your curiosity, if learning new and diverse things makes your heart race, or if you like to laugh, then this book is for you. How to Win Friends and Influence Fungi is a very filling read, one nibble at a time.


Review posted - 06/14/25

Publication date – 02/01/24


I received a hardcover of How to Win Friends and Influence Fungi from St. Martin’s Press in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks.




This review will soon be, cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi!

=============================EXTRA STUFF

Author/Editor links

Chris Balakrishnan - Program Director at the National Science Foundation - His personal and FB pages
A list of his articles

Matt Wasowski - Director of New Business and Product Development, Events at SAE International – His FB, LinkedIn and Twitter pages

Items of Interest from the authors (really editors)
-----Soundcloud - excerpt - 5:01
-----Birdsong: How the Twittering Set Learns to Speak
-----"Nerd Nite Published a Book!" by Matt Wasowski - Nerd Nite Austin 155, January 2024