Today’s Atlantic Trivia Questions and Answers

Updated with new questions at 4:20 p.m. ET on October 23, 2025.

In the 1950s, the TV quiz show Twenty-One stumbled upon a viewership-boosting strategy that for a brief period of time would be all the rage: cheating. The program fixed winners and losers, coached contestants, and generally dabbled in malfeasance. Other shows followed suit, scandal ensued, and Congress—Congress!—got involved.

I’m relieved to say that this quiz operates beyond the revisions to the Communications Act of 1934, so I’ll happily give you all the answers: They’re right there in The Atlantic.

Find last week’s questions here, and to get Atlantic Trivia in your inbox every day, sign up for The Atlantic Daily.

Thursday, October 23, 2025

1. In the first volume of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, the protagonist is able to read an “alethiometer”—a magical device that, per the book’s title, is a type of what more common tool?
   — From Lev Grossman’s “Philip Pullman’s Anti-Escapist Fantasy”
2. What disparaging (and rhyming) nickname for televisions that first appeared in the 1950s combines a dated slang word for “fool” with a word for one of early TVs’ technical elements?
   — From Ian Bogost’s “You’re Getting ‘Screen Time’ Wrong”
3. To prove to his wife, Penelope, after years of travel that he was the man he had once been, what hero of Greek myth had to use his old bow to shoot an arrow through a dozen perforated axe heads?
   — From Nicholas Thompson’s “Why I Run”

And by the way, did you know that there is a volcano whose caldera perennially bubbles with lava and whose vent spews gold into the air? It exists not in Pullman’s fantasy world, but somewhere possibly even wilder: Antarctica.

Mount Erebus has been lava-filled since at least 1972, and each day it blows out about 80 grams of gold flecks, worth thousands of dollars. Nice work if you can get it—just don’t forget your mittens.

See you tomorrow!

Answers:

1. Compass. With the final book of Pullman’s follow-up trilogy out today—three decades after The Golden Compass was first published—Grossman reviews the new book and looks back on the universe Pullman built. It’s a manual not for escaping to another world, he writes, but learning to love this one. Read more.
2. Boob tube. We’ve been fretting about “screen time” for decades, Bogost says, but now it’s no longer a discrete chunk to minimize; it’s the reality we live in. It is always already screen time. Read more.
3. Odysseus. What archery did for the man of many devices, running did for Nicholas, he writes in an excerpt from his memoir. After a bout with cancer, he needed a marathon to prove himself to himself, and it’s still what is keeping his life on track. Read more.

How did you do? Come back tomorrow for more questions, scroll down for more, 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 scintillating fact—send it my way at [email protected].

Wednesday, October 22, 2025

From the edition of The Atlantic Daily by David A. Graham:

1. According to the military adage, there are no atheists in what defensive fighting position?
   — From Missy Ryan’s “Holy Warrior”
2. What federal agency that recently offered a $50,000 bonus to new recruits is, alas, struggling to get those recruits to pass a 1.5-mile-run requirement?
   — From Nick Miroff’s “[REDACTED]’s ‘Athletically Allergic’ Recruits”
3. Florida’s Brightline is only the second high-speed train in the United States—the first being the Amtrak-operated line in the Northeast Corridor known by what name?
   — From Kaitlyn Tiffany’s “A ‘Death Train’ Is Haunting South Florida”

And by the way, did you know that in Edvard Munch’s The Scream, it is not the face-clutching figure who is hollering, but rather the whole rest of the world around him? The man is trying to cover his ears to block out that universal yell—what Munch called in one inscription “the great scream throughout nature.” Next up for reappraisal: 😱

Answers:

1. Foxholes. For all the supplication down in the trenches, Missy writes, rarely have commanders dictated religious terms to their troops; Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth—and the growing Christian-nationalist church from which he appears to have gotten many of his ideas—are changing that. Read more.
2. ICE. Nick reports on how push-ups, sit-ups, and that run (which must be completed sub–14 minutes) are standing between Donald Trump and his deportation goals. More than a third of the new recruits have failed the agency’s physical-fitness test, according to officials. Read more.
3. Acela. The Acela and the Brightline are different for a lot of reasons, including the Florida train’s gloss and surpassing comfort, but the most crucial difference, Kaitlyn reports, is that the Brightline keeps hitting people. Read more.

Tuesday, October 21, 2025

From the edition of The Atlantic Daily by Will Gottsegen:

1. Rudy Giuliani’s son and Osama bin Laden’s niece were among the guest hosts of the podcast War Room while what permanent host served four months in prison for refusing to cooperate with the congressional investigation into January 6?
   — From Jonathan D. Karl’s “[REDACTED] and the Murderers and Hitmen Who Became His ‘Besties’”
2. What barnyard term is used to describe the easily generated and artistically valueless AI content that litters the internet?
   — From Charlie Warzel’s “A Tool That Crushes Creativity”
3. What is the name of the national legislature that contains parties including Likud, Blue and White, and Yesh Atid?
   — From Yair Rosenberg’s “Can Trump Contain [REDACTED]’s Hard Right?”

And by the way, did you know that it’s been well over a century since one pig did, in fact, fly? And for three and a half miles, at that? Granted, this was a ride-along in the airplane of Lord John Moore-Brabazon of Kent, a peer and aviation pioneer, but considering that the flight occurred in November 1909, it’s still no small feat. (The pig was called Icarus II, and he fared rather better than his eponym.)

Answers:

1. Steve Bannon. Karl looks into Bannon’s time in prison last year—what he learned there, whom he befriended, how he managed to wield his influence over MAGA world even from behind bars. Read more.
2. Slop. What with Donald Trump’s fondness for spammy AI videos and the proliferation of social networks dedicated to soullessly generated content, we’re living in “the golden age of slop,” Charlie contends. “There is no realm of life that is unsloppable.” Read more.
3. The Knesset. Last week, Israel’s Parliament hosted Trump for a speech celebrating the cease-fire in the war in Gaza, but, Yair writes, members of the legislature’s far right feel jilted. Trump, he says, will have to restrain them if he is to bring peace to the region. Read more.

Monday, October 20, 2025

From the edition of The Atlantic Daily by David A. Graham:

1. What retailer recently announced that it will carry the weight-loss drug Ozempic at a discounted price of $499 a month—meaning you can get your GLP-1, a hot dog, and a fountain drink for $500.50?
   — From Emily Oster’s “Ozempic for All”
2. The cultural theorist Dominic Pettman defines what modern-relationship term as “abandonment with a contemporary garnish” (adding, “When we came up with texting, we also came up with not texting”)?
   — From Anna Holmes’s “The Great [REDACTED] Paradox”
3. In the way that runners have Strava, birders have eBird, and readers have Goodreads, what hobbyists are most likely to use the app Ravelry?
   — From Tyler Austin Harper’s “The Unexpected Profundity of a Movie About Bird-Watching”

And by the way, did you know—speaking of hobbies—that when he wasn’t writing contributions to the Western canon, the novelist Vladimir Nabokov kept himself busy observing and even discovering new species of butterflies? His lepidoptery fieldwork impelled full-time scientists to reconsider the classification of an entire genus.

That he also composed chess problems is thus hardly surprising. But before you go beating yourself up, consider what he didn’t do much of: sleep.

Answers:

1. Costco. It’s a sign that prices for these “near-miracle drugs” are falling and will keep falling, Oster writes—undercutting the argument that they’re too costly to offer via Medicaid. Increasing the drugs’ accessibility through Medicaid, she says, would save lives. Read more.
2. Ghosting. Holmes writes that Pettman’s new book might offer a less upsetting way to think about the sudden cutoff of communication, though it will require growing a thicker skin. Read more.
3. Knitters. All of these hobby-specific apps have to some extent been gamified, with progress bars, unlockable achievements, or other metrics that Tyler worries are sucking the joy out of the hobbies themselves. Read more.