SantaCon. Safety testing your holiday gifts. Stealing the corpse of good ol’ Saint Nick. Nerd Nite NYC’s holiday show on December 3, 2026 at Caveat NYC features three fun-yet-informative presentations that take a look at both the dark side and unintended comedy of the holiday season. Tickets here: https://caveat.nyc/events/nerd-nite-2026-12-03

Nerd Nite NYC
Thursday December 3, 2026 at 7pm
Caveat NYC: 21A Clinton Street (Lower East Side)
$16 early bird (until Nov 26, 2026 at 7pm) | $21 standard | $26 at the door
Tickets here: https://caveat.nyc/events/nerd-nite-2026-12-03

Back to the Lectures At-Hand
*Presentation #1
SANTACON: The Proliferation of Felt as a Contributing Factor in Clausian Multiplicity and Urban Disorder
by Seth Porges

Description: Today, Santacon is known as perhaps the single most hated event on the planet. A dreaded day in which tens of thousands of drunk idiots dress like Santa and invade countless cities around the world to live out their drunkest and most violent instincts. But it began as something else entirely: A piece of absurdism designed to shock people out of their everyday existence by creating a sense of awe and confusion. The folks who started Santacon in the ’90s are the same people who started Burning Man and who served as the real-life inspiration for Fight Club and Project Mayhem. And Today, they want nothing to do with their Christmas creation. Filmmaker Seth Porges has spent the past several years producing a film about this most hated of holidays, and it’s coming out this December. With the aid of never-before-seen home movie footage from the 1990s, this immersive presentation will take us back in time to the original Santacons, and offer a sneak peek at the upcoming movie.

Bio: Seth Porges is a journalist and filmmaker who produced, directed, and originated the documentaries Class Action Park (HBO Max), How To Rob A Bank (Netflix), and the upcoming Santacon. How To Rob A Bank reached the Netflix Global Top 10 and holds a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Class Action Park was nominated for a Critics’ Choice Documentary Award and won “Best Documentary” at the 2021 Hollywood Critics Association Film Awards. He is also the co-author of Our Polyvagal World: How Safety and Trauma Change Us (W.W. Norton). Both Class Action Park and Our Polyvagal World began as Nerd Nite talks, and he currently holds the world record for delivering the most unique Nerd Nite talks.

*Presentation #2
Rocket Sleds, Chicken Cannons, and a Very Destructive Grizzly: Inside the Hidden World of Test Engineering
by Alex Davies

Description: In 1954, an Air Force colonel strapped himself to a rocket sled to simulate ejecting from a fighter jet at full speed. Today, engineers fire chickens out of cannons into jet engines, crash cars using dummies modeled on the average American man of the 1970s, and, in Montana, grizzly bears decide whether a cooler is truly “bear-resistant.” Journalist Alex Davies takes audiences inside test engineering, the hidden profession that decides what “safe” actually means before a product ever reaches you. Along the way, he shows how every test is a negotiation between realism and practicality, and why that matters more than ever as AI and self-driving cars leave the laboratory and start testing themselves on us. You’ll never look at a crash-test rating, or a chicken, the same way again.

Bio: Alex Davies is a journalist and author who has reported for and led editorial teams at Wired, The Athletic, and Business Insider, covering everything from autonomous vehicles and electric aviation to Formula 1 and the engineers behind the systems we rely on every day. His debut book, Driven: The Race to Create the Autonomous Car (Simon & Schuster, 2021), was an award-winning inside account of the self-driving industry. His new book, Kobuk the Destroyer: And Other Tales from the Wild, Unseen World of Test Engineering (W.W. Norton, 2026), explores the hidden world of product testing and has been named a best book of the year by The New Yorker. He lives in New York’s Hudson Valley.

*Presentation #3
The Santa Claus Heist
by M.T. Anderson

Description: “Santa Claus is real. Or he was. He lived in Turkey. He died. Two gangs of Italian thieves raced to be the first to steal his body from his tomb. His corpse oozed a liquor that could heal anything. National Book Award-winning author M. T. Anderson will tell the story of that heist and the bizarre life of Santa Claus himself.”

Bio: New York Times Bestselling author M. T. Anderson writes books for children, teens, and adults, including The Pox Party, which won the National Book Award; Elf Dog & Owl Head, which won a Newbery Honor Award, and the science fiction satire Feed, which was a Finalist for the National Book Award and which won the L.A. Times Book Prize. Another science fiction satire, Landscape with Invisible Hand, was made into a movie starring Tiffany Haddish and Asante Blackk. His nonfiction book Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad was one of the Wall Street Journal’s Best Books of the Year. His most recent books are Nicked, a queer rom-com romp based on the historical heist of Saint Nicholas’s corpse from its tomb, and a nonfiction book that came out of the research for that novel, Stealing Saint Nick. He divides his time between the sofa and the floor.