Up to date with new questions at 5:15 p.m. ET on December 2, 2025.
I’ve a lot extolled right here the worth of latest data. Allow us to now hear a counterargument: Some months after Yale gave Mark Twain an honorary diploma in 1888, the author’s schedule cleared up sufficient for him to drag collectively a speech advising that the great individuals of the faculty study much less.
“I discovered the astronomer of the college gadding round after comets and different such odds and ends,” he wrote. “I advised him it was no financial system to go on piling up and piling up uncooked materials in the best way of latest stars and comets and asteroids that we couldn’t ever have any use for until we had labored off the outdated inventory.”
Greek must go “as a result of it’s so arduous to spell with, and so not possible to learn after you get it spelled,” and analysis in math “was not suited to the dignity of a school, which ought to deal in details, not guesses and suppositions.”
Yale didn’t heed the recommendation, and I don’t suppose Twain would actually have wished you to, both. So please—guess and suppose away.
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Tuesday, December 2, 2025
- Minoxidil is the lively ingredient in lots of merchandise that deal with what widespread situation, identified scientifically as alopecia?
— From Yasmin Tayag’s “America Refuses to Go [REDACTED]” - The corporate Lifetouch is the most important U.S. supplier of what product sometimes provided as soon as a tutorial 12 months, in early fall?
— From Annie Midori Atherton’s “What’s the Level of [REDACTED] Anymore?” - What hard-boiled detective sported a well-known two-way wrist radio throughout America’s mid-century comedian strips?
— From Ian Bogost’s “Get Your Child a Watch”
And by the best way, do you know that Garry Trudeau, the creator of Doonesbury, received the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning for his work with the sketch? Gerald Ford, who was then president, stated that 12 months that “there are solely three main autos to maintain us knowledgeable as to what’s going on in Washington: the digital media, the print media, and Doonesbury, not essentially in that order.”
Just one different sketch—known as Bloom County—has received the Pulitzer Prize; Garfield goes to must carry some actual nuance to his ideas about Mondays if he’s ever going to compete.
See you tomorrow!
Solutions:
- Hair loss. Yasmin stories on how the hair-loss-prevention trade, which has lengthy targeted on thinning in males, is able to welcome the various Millennial girls who’re warming as much as the thought of Rogaine. However there’s nonetheless an enormous stigma round searching for remedy. Learn extra.
- Faculty pictures. The Photograph Day custom appears foolish contemplating that each father or mother has a digital camera of their pocket now, however households nonetheless shell out for the (usually ludicrously costly) college pictures, Atherton writes. They’re kitschy and awkward—however that is likely to be the purpose. Learn extra.
- Dick Tracy. Ian, who just lately bought a smartwatch for his youngest daughter, writes that the low finish of the kid-watch market is filled with ineffective “Dick Tracy novelties.” So he went full Apple, and he has discovered that the watch is the right coaching “telephone” for his child. Learn extra.
How did you do? Come again tomorrow for extra questions, or click on right here for final week’s. And for those who suppose up a fantastic query after studying an Atlantic story—or just wish to share a formidable truth—ship it my method at [email protected].
Monday, December 1, 2025
From the version of The Atlantic Every day by David A. Graham:
- William Shakespeare’s solely son, who died at age 11, had what title—only a letter off from one of many bard’s most well-known tragic heroes?
— From James Shapiro’s “The Lengthy Historical past of the [REDACTED] Fable” - In AI-safety discussions, the probability that synthetic intelligence causes international cataclysm is popularly expressed as what statistical time period?
— From Charlie Warzel’s “The World Nonetheless Hasn’t Made Sense of ChatGPT” - Germans typically name their nation “Das Land der Dichter und Denker,” or the land of what two vocations—the previous of which might apply to, say, Rilke, Schiller, and Goethe, and the latter to Hegel, Heidegger, and Arendt (otherwise you proper now)?
— From Isaac Stanley-Becker’s “The New German Conflict Machine”
And by the best way, do you know that Shakespeare’s grave doesn’t bear his title? What it does bear is a curse. The engraving warns would-be tamperers, “Good buddy for Jesus sake forbeare, / To dig the mud enclosed right here. / Blessed be the person that spares these stones, / And cursed be he that strikes my bones.”
Proof means that the curse didn’t beat back everybody; ground-penetrating radar revealed in 2016 that Shakespeare’s cranium is nearly definitely lacking. In fact, researchers may have opened the grave to verify—however would you are taking that danger?
Solutions:
- Hamnet. The parable that Hamnet’s demise begot the tragedy of Hamlet has endured for hundreds of years, Shapiro writes, however the truth that it’s compelling—see Chloé Zhao’s new film, Hamnet—doesn’t imply that it’s true. Learn extra.
- p(doom). Whether or not or not you employ the time period, you’ve most likely thought of the likelihood of AI-occasioned doom, Charlie writes as ChatGPT turns three. In reality, that psychological precarity is already an enormous chunk of AI’s legacy, he argues, and the tech’s ever-evolving nature heightens the nervousness. Learn extra.
- Poets and thinkers. To various levels over the a long time, this self-conception has been about each taking delight in Germany’s mental custom and renouncing the nation’s militarism. As Isaac stories, this makes for a fraught transition as Germany progressively abandons pacifism and rearms in opposition to a destabilized world. Learn extra.
