Today’s Atlantic Trivia Questions and Answers, Week 5

Updated with new questions at 4:35 p.m. ET on October 28, 2025.

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.

Tuesday, October 28, 2025

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”

And by the way, did you know that elephants are either left- or right-tusked, the same way that humans are left- or right-handed? The dominant tusk is usually shorter and rounder, worn down by more frequent use. But elephants are far likelier than people to be lefties, so it’s really a good thing that they don’t often have to use scissors.

Until tomorrow!

Answers:

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.

How did you do? Come back tomorrow for more questions, scroll down for previous days’, 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].

Monday, October 27, 2025

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

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”

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.”

Answers:

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.