Today’s Atlantic TriviaNEWS | 15 October 2025Atlantic Trivia reaches Week 3, which is by definition the most trivial of all: The word trivia originally referred to places where three (tri-) roads (-via) met in a crossing. If those slouch Romans had been more industrious builders, we might be playing quintivia or even septivia today.
That three-way intersection semantically drifted to mean “an open place,” which morphed into “public,” which turned into “commonplace”—hence, trivial. Read on for questions that are anything but.
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Tuesday, October 14, 2025
From the edition of The Atlantic Daily by Will Gottsegen:
What actor wrote in one of her memoirs that it was second nature for her to play “birdbrains,” including characters whose sentences were full of “ums,” “you-knows,” “oh-wells,” and, perhaps most famously, “la di da, la di das”?
— From Adrienne LaFrance’s “The Romantic” Russia’s new messaging, file-sharing, and money-transferring app, Max—now required by government order to come installed on every new phone sold in the country—has prompted analogies to what Chinese “everything app”?
— From Justin Sherman’s “Putin Has a New Tool to Monitor Russians” Along with the less acidic, more bitter robusta bean, what species of coffee makes up almost all global coffee production?
— From Ellen Cushing’s “The Drink That Americans Won’t Give Up Without a Fight”
And by the way, did you know that some of the ancient writer Sappho’s poetry—most of which was lost—was discovered on bits of papyrus stuffed inside a mummified crocodile? I would like to think that this was to imbue the mummy with a love of beauty or some other virtue, like putting a charm in a Build-A-Bear. More likely, the stuffer just wanted the croc to keep its shape, and Sappho’s verse was handy scrap paper. Please nobody tell her.
See you tomorrow!
Answers:
Diane Keaton. The star, who died Saturday, often “unconvincingly” downplayed her talents, Adrienne writes. Insecurity dogged Keaton, but she readily saw beauty in the people and things around her, and spent her whole life chasing it. Read more. WeChat. Sherman writes that Russia’s app is a step toward the device-level surveillance China achieved with WeChat, which its citizens use for social media, digital payments, and a thousand other elements of daily life—and from which the government can pluck what data it likes. Read more. Arabica. Thanks to tariffs, futures for the species have gone up nearly $1 since July, Ellen reports, and coffee generally is almost 40 percent more expensive in the United States than it was a year ago. Policy makers are scrambling because, I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Americans need their coffee. Read more.
How did you do? Come back tomorrow for more questions, or click here for last week’s. And if you think up a great question after reading an Atlantic story—or simply want to share a striking fact—send it my way at [email protected].Author: Drew Goins. Source
