In my place of work I noticed that the manager was not very well up on current affairs in general (he was genuinely a very busy person) but at staff meetings he would always talk confidently on current affairs; it seemed to me that before (possible for a few days before) he deliberately listened to current affairs programmes on tv and radio or read the papers so that he could handle the situation and have conversation that was not work related. Another trick is to view a tv programme that features "human interest" stories and bring the conversation around to an interesting topic. If the academics let each topic you bring up drop when you are making the effort and they either cannot see this or are too backward to respond then Id just say
to myself, "I'll be damned if I'll let these social morons make me feel inadequate".