Let's do this thing. To kick off 2015, let us meet the latest Angry Reader of the Week, spotlighting you, the very special readers of this website. Over the years, I've been able to connect with a lot of cool folks, and this is a way of showing some appreciation and attention to the people who help make this blog what it is. This week's Angry Reader is Arthur Chu.
Who are you?
Arthur Chu, 11-time-Jeopardy winner, 4th-winningest regular season player of all time, and increasingly getting tired of starting all my bios that way. That's the main reason to do something big like write a book -- it tends to displace whatever dumb pop culture thing originally made you famous.
What are you?
Asian guy, nerd, Clevelander, person who rants about things on Twitter. Recently I've become less shy about actually saying "Writer" now that I get paid for my writing regularly.
Where are you?
At the moment that I write this I'm in the same two-bedroom house in Broadview Heights, OH that I was in before all this happened.
Where are you from?
I was born in Albany, NY. Spent my childhood in Cranston, RI, then my dad lost his job and we moved to Boise, ID for a year (not a great year) before then moving to Cerritos, CA, where I spent my teen years. Then I went back to the East Coast for school (Swarthmore College) where I met my wife Eliza. She got a job at the EPA so we lived in Alexandria, VA for a few years before moving back to her home territory of Northeast Ohio.
This is a very complicated question to answer for how uninteresting it is.
(To answer what people often mean when they ask that: My PARENTS are from Taiwan, but I myself have spent less than three months combined in Taiwan so I can't say that much about it.)
What do you do?
I had a lot of thoughts about how best to present myself to the world upon being catapulted to fame by being a controversial quiz show champion, but I mainly just kept talking about the same angry social-justice stuff I'd been talking about on Facebook and Twitter before, and now apparently that's my "brand." Someone called me "the ombudsman of the nerd community" on Twitter and I guess I'll take it.
I write for The Daily Beast, Salon and other outlets on a semi-regular basis, on whatever Nerd Culture Issue is raising my blood pressure that week. Usually something about feminism, race and how nerd culture is incredibly awful about both of those subjects.
What are you all about?
I'm interested in all kinds of things -- or I wouldn't be the kind of person to win a lot of money on a trivia show -- and I can't seem to stop myself from having opinions about it. The latter is what gets me in trouble.
What makes you angry?
Well, what doesn't?
Seriously, the world we live in is fundamentally fucked. Our society is built on the strong pushing down the weak, on people lucking into unearned advantage and fighting to defend it tooth and claw, on patterns and structures that just kind of exist due to ancient accidents -- or worse, ancient crimes -- that we just keep on following blindly because it's easier than changing things.
It's trendy now to complain about "outrage culture." Well, people should be outraged. Anyone who's reading this is living a life that's built on the privileges purchased by the endless needless suffering of millions, dead and alive.
To paraphrase the movie Network, I don't know how to fix any of this. But we can't fix anything at all while we're sitting around being comfortable. The first step is always getting mad.
