You’ve been waiting to build that dream place of yours, there in the spot you picked out a few years back, between the pons and the frontal lobe. Maybe you want to crib some designs from your friend Steve’s place; it’s got space for the first 115 digits of pi and the names of all 266 popes. But is now really the time for a new memory palace? Look at all the palaces sitting empty now, built by the folks who turned over their thinking to AI in the end.
All the more reason to start thinking and memorizing and building—your opulent mnemonic can be the pride of the neighborhood. Herewith: your first raw materials.
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Monday, December 8, 2025
- In the late 1990s, the opening of a Guggenheim Museum outpost designed by the architect Frank Gehry reinvigorated what city in northern Spain? — From Carolina A. Miranda’s “Frank Gehry’s Best Work Was Not His Flashiest”
- The American biochemist Jennifer Doudna shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work on the gene-editing tool known by what acronym? — From Nancy Walecki’s “The Rarest of All Diseases Are Becoming Treatable”
- Football analysts coined what portmanteau combining a word for the outcome of a game with the word for an intricate Japanese art form to describe when a game ends in a tally never before recorded? — From Josh Levin’s “No NFL Game Has Ever Ended … 36–23”
And by the way, did you know that the highest score ever recorded in an NFL game is the Chicago Bears’ December 1940 performance over the Redskins, in which they earned 73 points? Don’t feel too bad for Washington—they also set a scoring record! However, it’s one matched many times before and since: zero points.
Remarkably, this was a championship game, the Super Bowl equivalent of the era. And the score could have been even higher; by the end of the game, officials were asking the Bears not to kick for extra points, because too many footballs had been lost to the bleachers.
See you tomorrow!
Answers:
- Bilbao. Miranda writes that if you really want to understand Gehry, who died last week at 96, you ought to look past his “titanium showpieces” to his more intimate experiments, including the very quirky house he made for himself. Read more.
- CRISPR. Nancy reports on the ways that CRISPR has advanced since, including its first use this year to fix mutations specific to a single patient’s genes. Plans to streamline the process could attract enough investors to get similar therapies to patients en masse. Read more.
- Scorigami. Scoring strategy makes some outcomes far likelier than others—say, 36–22, which has happened 11 times, versus the never-before-seen 36–23. Elusive Scorigamis, Levin says, are a reminder that there are yet things left undone in sports, even when it feels like we might have seen everything. Read more.
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