Today’s Atlantic Trivia
NEWS | 18 October 2025
Updated with new questions at 4:05 p.m. ET on October 17, 2025. Atlantic 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. Find last week’s questions here, and to get Atlantic Trivia in your inbox every day, sign up for The Atlantic Daily. Friday, October 17, 2025 From the edition of The Atlantic Daily by Will Gottsegen: In the sci-fi novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, travelers can instantaneously understand any language by placing into their ear a fictional species of fish named after what biblical structure? — From Matteo Wong’s “Adiós, AirPods” What D.C.-area building is famous for, among other things, its 17.5 miles of hallways? — From Nancy A. Youssef’s “The Last Days of the [REDACTED] Press Corps” The comment “easily one of the top 5 movies about taxes” is a viral micro-review on the website Letterboxd for what 2022 film that’s about, well, a lot of other things too? — From Spencer Kornhaber’s “Traditional Criticism Is in Trouble. Here’s What’s Replacing It.” And by the way, did you know that there is a small island in the Bidasoa River between Spain and France that belongs to one nation for half of the year and to the other for the rest of it? It’s called Pheasant Island, and there are no people who live there; weirdly, there are also no pheasants, as Victor Hugo noted when he visited in 1843. Maybe if there were, Spain or France would fight a little harder to hold on to it. Have a great weekend! Answers: The Tower of Babel. The fantastical Babel Fish works like a charm, but Matteo says the Apple AirPods’ promise of seamless Live Translation remains far off. As he writes, his attempt to navigate New York using the beta feature made him look “stiff and bumbling at best, terribly rude at worst.” Read more. The Pentagon. Nancy, who has reported on the Defense Department for 18 years, will be seeing somewhat less of those hallways after leadership evicted most of the press corps from the building. The biggest loser here, however, is the public, she writes. Read more. Everything Everywhere All at Once. The writer of that review—one of Letterboxd’s most popular users—told Spencer that he favors a sensibility of “the first thing that comes to mind.” Cultural commentary is less polished and more democratic than ever, Spencer writes, which isn’t necessarily for the best. Read more. How did you do? Come back tomorrow for more questions, read below for previous ones, 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]. Thursday, October 16, 2025 From the edition of The Atlantic Daily by David A. Graham: The U.S. military command known as STRATCOM is most notably responsible for what duty—which one would certainly hope involves the careful thinking suggested by the command’s name? — From Tom Nichols’s “Kathryn Bigelow’s Warning to America” Humbert Humbert is the protagonist of what novel, named after the much younger girl to whom he is attracted? — From Vauhini Vara’s “Why So Many People Are Seduced by ChatGPT” What director, whose 2019 movie was the first of its kind to win Best Picture at the Oscars, said, “Once you overcome the one-inch tall barrier … you will be introduced to so many more amazing films”? — From Stephanie Bai’s “A [REDACTED]-Film Starter Pack” And by the way, did you know that the song “Happy Birthday” was copyrighted until 2016? The attempt to maintain licensing over the most popular song in the English language led to some nigh-on absurd situations over the years, including in 1996 when a performance-rights organization demanded royalties from Girl Scout troops that wanted to sing the song at campfires. So many brazen lawbreakers over the years—with Marilyn Monroe doing it right in front of the president, no less! Answers: Nuclear deterrence. Tom recently watched Kathryn Bigelow’s new movie, A House of Dynamite, a nuclear-disaster flick he says pretty accurately depicts STRATCOM and its people—and will hopefully knock a little terror into a populace inured to the possibility of Armageddon. Read more. Lolita. Vara remarks on how Humbert Humbert beguiles readers in Vladimir Nabokov’s novel, despite his predilections, and on how Ishmael keeps Moby-Dick readers interested through all the spermaceti talk. This is what good fictional characters do, she writes—and why it’s so dangerous that ChatGPT is one without an author. Read more. Bong Joon Ho. The South Korean director’s Parasite was the first foreign-language film to win Best Picture, and his quote refers to subtitles. Stephanie asked several Atlantic staffers where someone interested in exploring foreign films should get started. Read more. Wednesday, October 15, 2025 From the edition of The Atlantic Daily by Nancy A. Youssef: A phrase from ancient Rome that describes superficial appeasements meant to keep the public from becoming too dissatisfied with its government refers to what two offerings? — From Sally Jenkins’s “The MAGA-fication of Sports Continues” Around the turn of the 20th century, a U.S. senator from Wisconsin—the Dairy State—described what food product invented a few decades prior as “matured under the chill of death, blended with vegetable oils and flavored by chemical tricks”? — From Olga Khazan’s “Avoiding Ultra-Processed Foods Is Completely Unrealistic” The comedian Marc Maron’s industry-revolutionizing podcast, which ended this week after 16 years, was known by what common (well, depending on the coarseness of your social circle) three-letter initialism? — From David Sims’s “The Radical Empathy of a Low-Key Chat Show” And by the way, did you know that the first commonly accepted instance of a flag being lowered to half-mast in mourning was in 1612, when a Greenlandic Inuit killed a British explorer (apparently in revenge for the kidnapping of other Inuit by Brits), and the chap’s ship sailed back to London with its flag hanging low? That seems late to me! But boy, have we made up for it: In just the past 15 years, New York State alone has set the flag to half-staff more than 250 times. At least one Atlantic contributor thinks we need to dial it back. Answers: Bread and circuses. The mixed-martial-arts cage match to be held on the White House grounds in June might seem like this, but Sally says it goes deeper, right to the heart of sports-audience psychology: Donald Trump wants people to picture him as an absolute winner. Read more. Margarine. Clearly, we’ve been maligning ultra-processed foods for a very long time now—and to be clear, Olga is not saying that they are good! Just that they are pretty bad but entirely unavoidable—so where do eaters (and parents of eaters) go from here? Read more. WTF. Fittingly, the show could be grouchy, David writes, but more than anything else, it was weekly proof of the power of human connection. The finale wasn’t the best WTF, but it was arguably the most WTF. Read more. 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. Answers:
Author: Drew Goins.
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