Good afternoon everyone,

How is it going? I hope all is well.

Here’s something that I think I should be good at but that I am consistently very bad at; it’s pub quizzes. I think I should be good at them because I have a good memory and read a lot, but what this analysis ignores is that I read a lot on a relatively small number of topics. This is bad for the very obvious reason that pub quizzes require shallow knowledge of a large number of topics (to be clear; the opposite of my thing) and for the more subtle reason that when something on one of my specialist topics does come up it appears to me so easy that I can’t properly enjoy answering it. So, for example, when the question is “who wrote The Great Gatsby?” I find it really hard to suppress my irritation that the question was not “Who was Harold Ober’s most famous client?” It would also be permissible in this question to note the space in which Harold Ober agented. I am not a complete maniac.

Anyway, all of this is to say that today’s Fem Fri is about women who are much, much better sports around triv than I am, and also better at it. Let’s start with the ladies of Agnes Scott College and their exciting victory over Princeton* in American University Challenge. It’s a gripping story and I highly recommend that you read the link in full:

For her part, Malinda Snow, the captain of the 1966 team, dismisses the idea that the tiny women’s college was at any sort of disadvantage against the Ivy League boys of Princeton. “I never felt that we were a David and Goliath,” said Snow. “I was assuming that Agnes Scott was an excellent college, which it was, and I was assuming that we were representing one of the best women’s colleges and that we would do well and nobody was better than we were.”

https://slate.com/culture/2018/08/agnes-scott-vs-princeton-college-bowl-the-biggest-upset-in-quiz-show-history.html

Something else that I like to read about quiz show rigging scandals. Here’s Dr Joyce Brothers – allegedly, the producers of The $64K Question tried to get her off the show as they thought she was not engaging enough for the viewers, but she had done the research, answered the questions correctly, won $64K and launched a successful television career. Good:

Dr. Brothers arrived in the American consciousness (or, more precisely, the American unconscious) at a serendipitous time: the exact historical moment when cold war anxiety, a greater acceptance of talk therapy and the widespread ownership of television sets converged. Looking crisply capable yet eminently approachable in her pastel suits and pale blond pageboy, she offered gentle, nonthreatening advice on sex, relationships, family and all manner of decent behavior. It is noteworthy, then, that her public life began with fisticuffs. The demure-looking, scholarly Dr. Brothers had first come to wide attention as a contestant on “The $64,000 Question,” where she triumphed as an improbable authority on boxing.

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/14/arts/television/dr-joyce-brothers-psychologist-dies-at-85.html

Finally, here’s a lovely bit of writing about trivia and its social limits, from Margo’s Three Weeks newsletter. I think you would really enjoy Three Weeks! As the name implies, it’s less frequent than Fem Fri, but it has more dresses and more links and some of them are about men sometimes:

If I knew everything about music, movies, comic books, and any other really important subjects, I figured that other people would be drawn to me. I'd dazzle them with my knowledge of Counting Crows songs and X-Men cartoons, and they'd want to be my friend/make out with me/invite me to parties/lift me from this weary suburban vale of tears and into whatever real life was.

https://tinyletter.com/threeweeks/letters/mailman-bring-me-no-more-blues-three-weeks-vol-56

Have a great weekend!

Alex xx.

*who is Princeton’s most famous drop out, I’m sorry, I’ve started so I can’t stop