by Peggy Robin
Today, I take a break from my usual Saturday ramblings about quirky little local things -- what you might dismiss as trivia -- to give over this space to the most celebrated master of trivia, Jeopardy host and G.O.A.T. Ken Jennings. What follows ia a link + partial reprint of his op-ed column in the New York Times, posted online Thursday, June 5, 2025, in which Ken talks about the Meaning of Trivia, the Nature of Truth, and This Political Moment in America.
And all this time we thought he was just a nerdy-smart quiz kid!
It starts like this:
NY Times Opinion: Guest Essay
Ken Jennings: Trivia and ‘Jeopardy!’ Could Save Our Republic
June 5, 2025
By Ken Jennings
When I first stepped behind the host lectern on the quiz show “Jeopardy!,” I was intimidated for two reasons. Most obviously, I had the hopeless task of filling the very large shoes of Alex Trebek, the legendary broadcaster and pitch-perfect host who’d been synonymous with the show since 1984.
But I was also keenly aware that the show was one of TV’s great institutions, almost a public trust. Since I was 10 years old, I’d watched Alex Trebek carve out a safe space for people to know things, where viewers get a steady diet of 61 accurate (and hopefully even interesting) facts every game. And I wondered: Even if “Jeopardy!” could survive the loss in 2020 of its peerless host, could it survive the conspiracy theories and fake news of our post-fact era?
Facts may seem faintly old-timey in the 21st century, remnants of the rote learning style that went out of fashion in classrooms (and that the internet search made obsolete) decades ago. But societies are built on facts, as we can see more clearly when institutions built on knowledge teeter. Inaccurate facts make for less informed decisions. Less informed decisions make for bad policy. Garbage in, garbage out.
I’ve always hated the fact that “trivia,” really our only word in English for general-knowledge facts and games, is the same word we use to mean “things of no importance.” So unfair! Etymologically, the word is linked to the trivium of medieval universities, the three fundamental courses of grammar, rhetoric and logic. And much of today’s so-called trivia still deals with subjects that are fundamentally academic. [Continue reading the full opinion piece at this link]
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Still Life with Robin is posted on the Cleveland Park Listserv and on All Life Is Local on Saturdays.
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