October 1, 2014 9:25 pm

Be Part of the Smartest Audience in NYC this Friday Night

Credit: Navid Baraty, courtesy of http://www.navidbaraty.com

The crowd at The Bell House in Brooklyn, NY on 9/22/14. Credit: Navid Baraty, courtesy of http://www.navidbaraty.com

After the recent back-to-back StarTalk Live! shows at The Bell House, I was talking to Mike, the club’s manager. These were his first STLs and we chatted a little about how great the audience was. He was a bit surprised at the intensity of the crowd.

I know what he meant. I can still remember my first StarTalk Live! and how it felt to hear an entire crowd cheering for science.

After all, we’re used to hearing crowds cheer for football teams and rock bands… but science?

Not just cheering, but also, laughing their heads off. There aren’t many live events like STL where you can hear people laughing at jokes about poison or climate change or bosons or dark matter or human consciousness.

The shows we do at The Bell House feel homey and comfortable… kind of like coming home. But it turns out that even in the bigger venues we’ve been playing, with much larger capacities, you, our fans, still make us feel like we’re among friends.

This Friday we’re in another new location: The Hammerstein Ballroom at the Manhattan Center on 34th St, NYC.

If a new venue isn’t exciting enough, we’ve got the hilarious Wyatt Cenac back on stage. He was a guest for Live at the Bell House: “The Space Between Your Ears” back when he was also a Daily Show correspondent, but it’s my first time seeing Wyatt live and I can’t wait.

It’s also my first time seeing Malcolm Gladwell, which is even cooler for me. I’ve loved everything I’ve read of his, from The Tipping Point to blink to Outliers. I’ve heard him speak on Radiolab and seen him on The Colbert Report, and the idea of watching Malcolm and Neil together, live onstage with Eugene Mirman and Wyatt has me pretty stoked.

Plus, a new guest was just announced this morning: Alondra Nelson, the Dean of Social Science and professor of sociology and gender studies at Columbia University. Alondra is an interdisciplinary social scientist who writes about the intersections of science, technology, medicine, and inequality. You can find out more about Alondra here.

If you’re going to be in NYC this Friday and you’d like to be part of the smartest audience in town, why don’t you join us? And if you know someone who has not seen StarTalk Live! and is looking for an intelligent evening’s entertainment, bring them along, too.

I’m sure they’ll fit right in.

Tickets are still available here. The show starts at 8:00 PM, Friday, Oct. 3rd. Doors open at 7:00 PM.

Hopefully I’ll see some of you Friday night.

That’s it for now. Keep Looking Up!

–Jeffrey Simons

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