Today’s Atlantic Trivia: The Answer’s in Your DNA

Updated with new questions at 3:40 p.m. ET on November 11, 2025.

The famed 18th-century lexicographer Samuel Johnson was a lover of learning. As the dictionary maker once wrote, he dedicated his life “wholly to curiosity,” with the intent “to wander over the boundless regions of general knowledge.” (He was additionally a lover of getting bored and moving on, writing of how he “quitted every science at the first perception of disgust.” Respect.)

Perhaps Johnson’s greatest legacy, though, was his ardent belief that one didn’t have to know all the answers so long as one knew where to find them. For Johnson, that place was usually in his reference books. For you and this trivia, it’s right here 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.

Tuesday, November 11, 2025

1. What book written by then–Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg is frequently used as shorthand for the “girlboss” flavor of feminism that peaked in the 2010s?
   — From Sophie Gilbert’s “All’s Fair Is an Atrocity”
2. The memoir of the scientist James Watson took its name from what shape that Watson and his partner, Francis Crick, identified as the physical form of DNA?
   — From Kathryn Paige Harden and Eric Turkheimer’s “The Paradox of James Watson”
3. What software company co-founded by Peter Thiel has the same name as the magical crystal ball of the Lord of the Rings series?
   — From Adam Serwer’s “Why Elon Musk Needs Dungeons & Dragons to Be Racist”

And by the way, did you know that Veterans Day—observed on the 11th day of the 11th month to honor the World War I armistice that occurred in the 11th hour—was for a few years in the 1970s commemorated on, oh, the 24th day or the 27th day (or really any day from the 22nd to the 28th) of the 10th month?

Federal law in 1971 bumped Veterans Day, Memorial Day, and Washington’s Birthday to always-on-a-Monday status. The travel industry was thrilled by the jump in three-day weekends; veterans were not thrilled by the loss of the 11/11 significance. The vets won out, and the observance returned to November 11 in 1978.

See you tomorrow!

Answers:

1. Lean In. The dream is alive at the divorce-law firm depicted in Ryan Murphy’s new All’s Fair, which Sophie says is less a television show than it is an episode-length Instagram Reels session, where scenes of dazzling moving images pass fleetingly and almost incoherently. Read more.
2. Double helix. The discovery was the greatest achievement of Watson, who died this week. Harden and Turkheimer ask: How does one hold that brilliance next to the bigotry directed at women, gay people, and Black people? Read more.
3. Palantir. Adam explores how J. R. R. Tolkien (consciously or not) set the fantasy genre down a path of reinforcing racial and gender stereotypes—which appears to be no problem at all for many right-wing figures in government and tech. 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 wild fact—send it my way at trivia@theatlantic.com.

Monday, November 10, 2025

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

The film Bugonia takes its name from the ancient belief that a cow’s carcass could spawn what pollinators, whose numbers have declined dangerously in recent years?

1. — From Shirley Li’s “An Intimate Portrait of Humanity at Its Worst”
2. Hours before the government shutdown caused millions of Americans to lose their food stamps, Donald Trump hosted a decadent Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago with what F. Scott Fitzgerald novel as its theme?
   — From Jonathan Chait’s “Senate Democrats Just Made a Huge Mistake”
3. Mark Twain once said that when a speaker of what language dives into a sentence, you won’t see him again until he reaches the other side of the ocean, carrying in his mouth the verb—which this language frequently places much later in a sentence than where it would occur in English?
   — From Ross Benjamin’s “The Costs of Instant Translation”

And by the way, did you know that interpreting by whispering real-time translations into someone’s ear is known as chuchotage? The word is French, so soften those ch’s into sh’s, make that g into a velvety zzzhh, and recognize just how whispery the word itself sounds; that’s why the French formed it that way in the first place.

Answers:

1. Bees. The word bugonia is never uttered in the Yorgos Lanthimos project, Shirley notes, but the idea of life from death—on a planetary scale—is central to his study of a moribund civilization. Read more.
2. The Great Gatsby. I can’t say for sure that this was a reason public polling on the shutdown looked so bad for Trump, but I have a hunch, old sport. Jonathan writes that Democrats were likely surprised that the shutdown they’d forced was drawing political blood, and that they made a huge mistake in withdrawing the knife. Read more.
3. German. Benjamin writes that German’s delayed-verb structure invites uniquely collaborative conversations for learners; his partner would often supply at the very end of the sentence the verb that Benjamin was grasping for. That sort of beauty gets lost when learners rely on machine translation. Read more.