On the Shelf
The Full Kennections
By Ken JenningsScribner: 480 pages, $21If you purchase books linked on our web site, The Instances could earn a fee from Bookshop.org, whose charges assist unbiased bookstores.
Ken Jennings needs you to know he didn’t identify his trivia sport “Kennections.”
“It’s really an unpleasant name,” the “Jeopardy!” champion turned host says of the quizzes now revealed weekly by Psychological Floss. “We have to lead with that. It was suggested by an editor at Parade Magazine, but it doesn’t look good or sound good.”
However Jennings loves the quizzes themselves, which at the moment are collected (kellected?) in “The Complete Kennections.” The Simon & Schuster launch, on cabinets July 29, follows earlier Jennings books that included extra writing. These embody: “Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs,” “Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks,” “Because I Said So!: The Truth Behind the Myths, Tales, and Warnings Every Generation Passes Down to Its Kids” and “100 Places to See After You Die: A Travel Guide to the Afterlife.”
Jennings just lately spoke about his books, AI and why trivia issues. This interview has been edited for size and readability.
Was writing books all the time a purpose?
I used to be an English main in school. I needed to jot down and to show, however writing didn’t seem to be a sensible alternative. I used to be additionally doing a double main in pc science, and in 2000 it was absurdly simple to get a job at a buddy’s startup, even when you have been a horrible programmer, which I used to be.
Writing about geography and myths and fabled locations of the afterlife all appear to make sense coming from the mind of a “Jeopardy!” champion.
It’s simple to think about the identical child in an elementary faculty library, studying about these items within the World Ebook encyclopedia throughout a wet recess. That’s my origin story. I used to be only a sponge for bizarre data. That’s my origin story proper there.
I considered “Jeopardy!” as a enjoyable, loopy summer season and didn’t assume it will be my life, so I attempted making every ebook much less about “Jeopardy!” and trivia than the one earlier than it.
Is the knowledge in your books trivial, or do you assume it’s vital to get readers to know geography and the way in which our tradition passes down myths and tales?
I’m a believer that trivia is not only a bar pastime, or perhaps a means for little Lisa Simpsons to get instructed they’re good into maturity. I all the time felt trivia was sort of a common social good, a approach to take pleasure in cultural literacy.
I really feel I’m a part of the final era that needed to justify having nerdy pursuits. It was sort of shameful and made you the punchline of jokes in film comedies and stand-up. Right now, it appears self-evident to everybody youthful than us that, properly, after all you’d simply be obsessive about lunchboxes or about “Battlestar Galactica” or fossils. That’s completely normalized, and it’s really good.
However I’ve additionally been mourning the lack of generalists, individuals who knew a bit bit about every thing, which is what “Jeopardy!” celebrates, but it surely’s not modern. We reside in a siloed society of specialists. And I actually assume we’d be higher off if everyone knew a bit bit about every thing.
I do assume it’s good to know trivia is just not one thing that makes you higher than different folks. It doesn’t exist to indicate off and even to make you’re feeling smarter about your self. Ideally, it ought to carry folks collectively and make the world extra attention-grabbing and make you a extra glowing conversationalist.
“Jeopardy!” and your books try to make studying info enjoyable. Is there a lesson there for educators?
I feel that’s the fantastic thing about trivia. I wrote a sequence of books for teenagers with superb info as a result of I favored that sort of ebook after I was a child. And you may see it in a classroom, if you see youngsters’ eyes mild up about data and about severe topics and about data when it’s introduced in a enjoyable means, particularly with narrative.
Narrative is the key sauce. It simply makes youngsters assume the world is an incredible journey and also you simply need to be curious and dig into it. However that will get overwhelmed out of us, after which quite a lot of us sooner or later simply specialise in one factor. You could remind those who studying is just not a chore. If it’s not enjoyable, you’re doing it improper. And trivia is excellent at that.
Each good “Jeopardy!” clue tells a narrative in a roundabout way, saying, right here’s why it’s best to need to know this or right here’s what this might need to do with life and the rationale why this isn’t random minutia, which I feel is lots of people’s stereotype of trivia nerds. A trivia query can assist you join it to different issues. Trivia is simply an artwork of connections.
That’s actually true in your “Kennections” ebook.
I grew up doing crosswords, riddles and rebuses. I’ve all the time favored trivia that rewards not simply the recall of the fitting truth however has a bit extra psychological clockwork concerned so it’s a must to clear up some puzzles. You must analyze the clue and work out why it exists and what it’s asking or what it’s not asking, what was included, what was omitted. There’s quite a lot of evaluation that may sort of lead you to the fitting reply by deduction, even when you don’t know the fitting truth off the highest of your head. One half of your mind is simply making an attempt to recall these 5 info, however you’ve bought this different half that’s making an attempt to determine it out and step again and take the large image. And it is perhaps one thing exterior the field.
The artwork of it’s discovering 5 issues that match within the class however that may have double meanings: Commodore is each a pc and a member of a Lionel Richie combo.
You write that “Kennections” consumes your life — you go right into a bagel retailer and marvel when you can construct 5 questions out of the flavors. Is the issue that in your day-to-day life, you’re continually seeing issues and pondering issues this manner? Or is the issue that you could’t say this out loud since you’ll make your loved ones loopy?
That’s one thing I realized early — that being this trivia-loving child has the potential to be annoying. However my youngsters know what they’re getting from me at this level. They usually each have the gene themselves. One is obsessive about Main League Baseball, and one is obsessive about the historical past of Disney theme parks, and so they have encyclopedic data each bit as awe-inspiring and freakish as I had as a child. And I’m happy with that.
Do you are worried about dwelling in a tradition that’s so polarized that info aren’t even universally acquired and the place AI takes over folks’s must be curious, permitting college students to take shortcuts in studying?
I feel an oligarch class goes to ship us a mixture of each, the place the AI won’t solely create reliance on it however give us dangerous, counterfactual details about vital points. And it’s actually one thing I take significantly. It’s actually one thing we must be pushing again on now.
You don’t need to belief an AI abstract of a topic or AI’s tackle a difficulty with out understanding who controls that algorithm and why they need you to listen to that data.
