Why Nerds Are Unpopular : "If you're too cool for school, you're probably not very smart. Some of us would rather build rockets than friendships. [...] It's no wonder, then, that smart kids tend to be unhappy in middle school and high school. Their other interests leave them little attention to spare for popularity, and since popularity is a zero-sum game, this in turn makes them targets for the whole school. And the strange thing is, this nightmare scenario happens without any conscious malice, merely because of the shape of the situation."