Atlantic Trivia on Galileo, Horror Flicks, Fast Food, and More

Updated with new questions at 3:50 p.m. ET on October 31, 2025.

1. The Blair Witch Project, which purports to be the cobbled-together clips from a camcorder discovered in the woods, popularized the film subgenre with what alliterative name?
   — From the Atlantic Culture Desk’s “Nine Movies That Break Down How Fear Works”
2. Stephen King criticized Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of what novel for reallocating much of the Overlook Hotel’s evil to its terrorizing caretaker?
   — From Sophie Gilbert’s “The Movies That Capture Women’s Deepest Fears”
3. What young star was the face on the poster for Wes Craven’s Scream despite being killed off in the movie’s opening scene?
   — From the Atlantic Culture Desk’s “Nine Movies That Break Down How Fear Works”

1. Found footage. What was a pioneering filmmaking technique in 1999 is now our everyday online reality, Elise Hannum writes: The internet is “littered with artifacts of the missing and dead,” and the rest of us are their digital voyeurs. Read more.
2. The Shining. Sophie says, with great respect, that King is wrong about Kubrick turning The Shining into a “domestic tragedy”; Kubrick made it, rather, a “domestic horror”—like many movies of the era that vivified such terrors as coercive pregnancy and marital abuse. Read more.
3. Drew Barrymore. The opening kill is a shock, but Scream mostly is a “faithful send-up of the horror genre itself,” David Sims writes. But he barely picked up on that when he first watched. He was too terrified that a killer might one day slash right into his home. Read more.

1. What are the names of the two U.S. lottery drawings that have now crossed the billion-dollar benchmark multiple times?
   — From Judd Kessler’s “The Hidden Cost of ‘Affordable Housing’”
2. Count Vronsky is the love interest of what titular Tolstoy heroine, whose life tragically ends—19th-century spoiler!—under a train?
   — From John McWhorter’s “My Students Use AI. So What?”
3. What prickly first chief of staff to Barack Obama (whose résumé also includes Chicago mayor and ambassador to Japan) styled himself via a White House desk nameplate as “Undersecretary for Go Fuck Yourself”?
   — From Ashley Parker’s “[REDACTED] … for President?”

1. Mega Millions and Powerball. Jackpots grow to that ungodly size when lots of people buy tickets, and lots of people buy tickets when they overweight low-probability events, and people always overweight low-probability events. Kessler writes that the fallacy might provide misguided hope that housing lotteries will solve the affordability crisis when there’s actually just not enough stock to go around. Read more.
2. Anna Karenina. Whereas McWhorter whiled away his youth reading how every happy family is alike, his kids are more likely glued to their phones—as is he these days. And what of it? McWhorter is a bit heterodox in his belief that screens won’t “plunge us all into communal stupidity.” Read more.
3. Rahm Emanuel. But that Rahm is just “the caricature,” he told Ashley, explaining that he fights for principles, not just for the sake of fighting—a nice quality in a president, which seems to be the job he wants next. Read more.

1. To drive home the adverse effects of the government shutdown happening at the time, President Donald Trump in early 2019 served visiting Clemson University football players not the usual White House fare but a smorgasbord ordered from what restaurant?
   — From Toluse Olorunnipa, Jonathan Lemire, and Russell Berman’s “The Missing President”
2. The entry for Adolf Hitler mentions the dictator’s economic achievements before it references the Holocaust on Elon Musk’s newly launched competitor to what website?
   — From Matteo Wong’s “What Elon Musk’s Version of [REDACTED] Thinks About Hitler, Putin, and Apartheid”
3. The mid-20th-century Bracero Program allowed millions of men from what country to temporarily work on farms in the United States?
   — From Idrees Kahloon’s “America’s Impending Population Collapse”

1. McDonald’s. I’ll also accept Wendy’s or Burger King, as a smattering of their delights sat on the table too. During this shutdown, Trump’s focus has appeared to be on basically anything but the funding lapse, our reporters write. Read more.
2. Wikipedia. In case you need another data point, “Grokipedia” also questions Islam’s “inherent compatibility with liberal democracy.” Matteo writes that the venture is the next step in Musk’s misguided crusade against the mainstream institutions he accuses of poisoning global thinking. Read more.
3. Mexico. The program’s demise during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations did not meaningfully increase wages or employment for U.S. workers as intended—nor will the country’s current policies pushing foreign-born people out of the United States, Idrees expects. Read more.

1. In the Punic Wars of the third and second centuries B.C.E., Rome fought what North Africa–based empire (including a few of its elephants)?
   — From Phillips Payson O’Brien’s “The U.S. Is on Track to Lose a War With China”
2. In 1610, Galileo Galilei discovered four of these belonging to Jupiter, but scientists now say it possesses 97 of them. What are they?
   — From Lila Shroff’s “No One Actually Knows What a [REDACTED] Is”
3. What winning word turns a person’s standard-issue garden into one meant to supplement their rations and boost their morale during times of war?
   — From Ellen Cushing’s “The Innovation That’s Killing Restaurant Culture”

1. Carthage. The elephants involved might be a giveaway that the Rome-Carthage model is no longer how warfare works, but Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is still talking like it is, O’Brien writes. Hegseth’s focus on individual valor over things like production capacity and technological mastery is setting the United States up for military failure. Read more.
2. Moons. The 97 number is at least a little fungible in the sense that even in all the centuries since Galileo, scientists still haven’t settled on what a moon really is, Lila writes. In the uncertainty, quasi-moons, mini-moons, and moonlets abound. Read more.
3. Victory. Ellen writes that restaurant delivery became a “sort of 21st-century victory garden” early in the coronavirus pandemic as diners tried to keep their favorite restaurants afloat. Now delivery apps are themselves a threat to restaurant culture. Read more.

1. Speculators in the United States have been trading contracts for the subsequent sale of assets at a specific price since the late 1800s, which feels awfully far in the past for a financial product known by what name?
   — From Marc Novicoff’s “The Company Making a Mockery of State Gambling Bans”
2. In Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time, the narrator experiences a flood of childhood memories after taking a bite of what French shell-shaped cake?
   — From Aleksandra Crapanzano’s “The Mysterious, Enchanting Qualities of Chocolate”
3. A new documentary on the author George Orwell and his work takes as its title what erroneous mathematical equation?
   — From Shirley Li’s “It’s Not Enough to Read Orwell”

1. Futures. This sort of speculation started out with grain prices, but over the decades, people started trading foreign-currency futures, placing bets on future interest rates, and more. Now, Marc reports, the loophole of framing wagers as futures has enabled sports betting to spread even to the states where it’s meant to be illegal. Read more.
2. A madeleine. Crapanzano reflects on her own Proustian treat: chocolate, which found her at every turn as she was growing up in Paris. That’s the way things have gone for a while in France, she writes; one of the only royal courtiers to survive the Revolution was the indispensable chocolatier. Read more.
3. 2+2=5. The 1984 falsehood is unavoidable in discourse about today’s disinformation. Raoul Peck’s documentary, Shirley writes, argues that the comparison “has led to numbness rather than to meaningful change.” Read more.