Humans are delightfully complicated. Our tastes and sensibilities grow as we grow. Therefore, the February 2026 edition of Nerd Nite NYC explores different ways we evolve to understand how we love, rule, and think of others. Join us on Saturday February 28, 2026 at Caveat NYC in the Lower East Side for three fun-yet-informative presentations about the science of attraction, how dictators are built, and stereotypes in classic video games. Maybe you’ll learn how to find love, and if you can’t, at least how to rule a country as a way to compensate. So that’s a win, right? Tickets here.
Nerd Nite NYC
Saturday February 28, 2026 at 7pm
Caveat NYC: 21A Clinton Street (Lower East Side)
$16 early bird (until Feb 21, 2026 at 7pm) | $21 standard | $26 at the door
Tickets here: https://www.caveat.nyc/events/nerd-nite-2-28-2026
Back to the Lectures At-Hand:
*Presentation #1
What I Like About You: Relationship Science and Interpersonal Attraction
by Marisa Cohen
Description: Get ready to decode the science of love and attraction! This presentation dives into what really drives our romantic choices and the surprising research behind it all. You’ll also learn a clever, science-backed formula to estimate how many potential partners are actually in your dating pool (yes, math meets matchmaking!). You will (hopefully) walk away with fresh insights and practical tools to make smarter, more intentional choices in your love life and maybe even become a more discerning and confident dater.
Bio: Dr. Marisa T. Cohen (PhD, LMFT) (she/her) is a relationship scientist, marriage and family therapist, sex therapist, and teaches psychology courses at the college level. She founded Embracing Change Marriage and Family Therapy, which provides therapeutic services to individuals, couples, and families. She conducts relationship science research and consults with dating, relationship, and mental health apps. She is also the author of From First Kiss to Forever: A Scientific Approach to Love, and was a two time TEDx Speaker. She also dated a bot. Spoiler: it didn’t end well.
*Presentation #2
Pre-Internet National Stereotypes Through the Lens of Nintendo’s ‘Punch-Out’
by Brian Dillon
Description: In a time before the internet was widely accessible, the most brilliant minds in the world’s most ethnically homogenous nation endeavored to create a new video game for American children. Their task: design a rogue’s gallery of international villains that prepubescent Americans would be eager to punch in the face. Instead, what their years of labor and technological genius produced was a video game that managed to offend more distinct demographics than any to exist before. Except of course… one.
Bio: Brian Dillon has been bartending in the E.V for 16 years and is grateful for a Saturday off. Along with his piece of trash best friend Alex he hosts The Brian & Alex Show at the nearby REDACTED Lounge. The decade-long running weekly live game show masquerading as trivia is his proudest accomplishment, which says whatever you think it does about him (and you’re probably right).
*Presentation #3
How a Dictator Is Built and Broken: My Time Living With Noriega’s Right-Hand Man
by Cillian Dunne
Description: The United States has spent more than a century shaping who holds power in Latin America, beginning with the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. This talk uses Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega as a case study to show how dictators are not born but carefully engineered through intelligence agencies, money, and foreign policy. Drawing on extensive research from his time in Panama, writing the book The Right Hand Man, author Cillian Dunne takes the audience behind the scenes of how the same system that builds strongmen eventually turns on them.
Bio: Cillian Dunne is an Irish-American author who writes about crime, intelligence, and political power, usually by going places he probably should not. He is the author of The Right Hand Man, based on hundreds of original documents once owned by Manuel Noriega and months of reporting inside the former dictator’s inner circle in Panama. His work has appeared in The Times (UK), The Boston Globe, The Sunday World, and The Irish Sun.
