In her article about transgender teens in the magazine this week, Margaret Talbot quotes Annette Bening and Warren Beatty’s son Stephen calling himself, among other things, a “nerd fighter.” It might escape the average reader’s notice that this term is more than the sum of its parts. In the teen-age population, “nerdfighter” (as a compound word) has a very specific meaning and etymology. Primarily, it identifies the teen-ager in question as a follower of John Green…

Michelle Dean on John Green and the nerdfighters: http://nyr.kr/XJiBAo