It’s said that the 17th- and 18th-century polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was the last person to know everything. He was a whiz at philosophy, law, logic, science, engineering, politics—the works. But there was also simply less to know back then; the post–Industrial Revolution knowledge explosion killed the universal genius.
Which is to say that I bet Leibniz wouldn’t know the full oeuvre of K-pop if he were alive today. Or at least not philosophy, law, logic, science, engineering, politics, and K-pop. But I bet he would know everything in The Atlantic—which is all you need to answer these questions.
Find last week’s questions here, and to get Atlantic Trivia in your inbox every day, sign up for The Atlantic Daily.
Monday, October 27, 2025
- 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” - 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” - 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”
And by the way, did you know that the word chocolate comes from the Nahuatl language of the Aztecs, in which it is xocolatl? In the kitchen, Nahuatl also gives us “mesquite” from mizquitl and “avocado” from ahuacatl, and then, of course, where you say “tomato,” they say “tomatl.”
See you tomorrow!
Answers:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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 beguiling fact—send it my way at [email protected].
