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How Trivia Makes Problem-Solving Fun

Everything I learned from writing my own trivia:

5 min readJun 30, 2022
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Photo by Prateek Katyal on Unsplash

Trying to keep your distance from every human being in the world, it turns out, means spending a lot of time by yourself. Like many, I developed curious new interests during the pandemic, ones I probably wouldn’t have discovered if my day-to-day life didn’t transform overnight. It was during this time that I became obsessed with professional sports, got my driver’s license, and fell in love with driving. I also found my true calling, an underappreciated art form that (in my opinion) I have an innate gift for: making trivia.

A few months into the pandemic, my fiancé’s college friends started hosting a weekly Zoom trivia hour. Whoever won that week’s game got to make their own trivia the next week. My fiancé Hudson and I happen to be very good at trivia and, as a team, we work well because we fill in each other’s knowledge gaps. Hudson thinks the guy who did the iconic “Whatcha Say” song is named Justin Derulo, but I know it’s actually Jason, thanks to the useless encyclopedia of celebrity minutiae that exists in my brain. Meanwhile, I was shocked to learn that the capital of Vermont isn’t Burlington. (WTF is Montpelier?)

Winning trivia is fun and all — the weekly pandemic games brought out a competitive side of me I never knew existed — but the best…

Eve Peyser
Eve Peyser

Written by Eve Peyser

nyc native living in the pnw. read my writing in the new york times, nymag, vice, and more.