- The Knowledge
- Posts
- The New York whizz-kid who conquered University Challenge
The New York whizz-kid who conquered University Challenge
đ„ Alligator pears | đ„ž âRomeo spiesâ | đ Team America
Life
The New York whizz-kid who conquered University Challenge
Back in 2016, says David Segal in The New York Times, Brandon Blackwell was âstruggling to reach the highest echelonsâ of competitive quizzing. The then 22-year-old New Yorker had already earned about $400,000 from appearing on TV game shows, and trained with 30,000 homemade flash cards containing obscure facts. (âWhich country is home to Lake Assal, the largest salt reserve on earth? Djibouti.â) But he decided he had to move to London. âEight of the top 20 quizzers on the planet lived there,â he explains. âCompeting in the city was the only way I was going to improve quickly.â When he then learned about University Challenge, he became fixated on winning it. He applied to Imperial College â hardly an obvious choice, given it hadnât won the competition since 2001. But as a Star Wars fan, he liked the fact that whenever he buzzed in to answer questions, the showâs narrator would shout âImperial Brandon!â
Blackwell launched into âa self-taught crash course in British historyâ. He watched over 100 hours of University Challenge on YouTube, trained for 80 hours a week, and went through his entire set of flash cards eight times. He soon made the Imperial team, and in 2020 they ârampagedâ to victory. It marked the start of a glorious revival: the university has triumphed twice more since, including in this yearâs final on Monday, making it the most successful team ever. Now 30, and living back in the US, Blackwell works on the quiz show The Chase, where he âregularly swipes more than $100,000 from contestantsâ. He says itâs ânot all that differentâ from University Challenge: âThe idea is the same â make someone else go home unhappy.â
Quirk of history
Avocados took a long time to take off, says Katherine Laidlaw in The Hustle. When the fruit first arrived in the US from Mexico in the early 1900s, it was prohibitively expensive. Luxury hotels in San Francisco and New York had to pay $1 (roughly $25 in todayâs money) to import each one. And they initially werenât very popular. People thought they were complicated â you could neither eat them like an apple nor peel them like an orange â and ugly. There was also a rather significant âbranding problemâ: at the time, they were called âalligator pearsâ. It was only in 1927 that some canny farmers rebranded it the avocado, a name derived from the Aztec word for the fruit: ahuacacacuahatl, or âtesticle treeâ.
Comment
Maybe not such a good idea? Team America: World Police (2004)
Hubris has cost the West dear
Itâs dawning on many of us that, just as Israel is facing âreputational calamityâ over its war on Gaza, so too are the countryâs âWestern cheerleadersâ, says Owen Jones in The Guardian. This is just the latest manifestation of âthe fall of the Westâ â a fall that the right blames on, variously, âimmigration, multiculturalism, Islam, âwokenessâ, âgender ideologyâ, the disintegration of the nuclear family, and so onâ. The truth is simpler: in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse in 1991, America and its European allies became âintoxicated with a premature triumphalismâ. This had two disastrous consequences. One, the 1980s model of âunchained capitalismâ persisted. That paved the way for the 2008 financial crisis, and the economic stagnation which sparked the rise of populists like Donald Trump.
Two, the West hubristically believed itself to be the worldâs police force. In the 1990s, the first Gulf war and armed interventions in former Yugoslavia seemed to vindicate this âliberal interventionismâ. But the wars we launched after 9/11 were catastrophic. Afghanistan âdescended into a bloody quagmireâ; the invasion of Iraq, in the prophetic words of the Arab League secretary-general Amr Moussa, opened âthe gates of hellâ. Natoâs intervention in Libyaâs civil war toppled Gaddafi. âBut at what cost? Libya is now a war-ravaged failed state.â These disasters âignited a justified contempt for Western claims to moral superiorityâ â a contempt which the likes of Vladimir Putin have used âas ammunition for their own aggressionâ. The West is currently learning a painful moral lesson: pride comes before a fall.
đȘ Should Britain stop selling arms to Israel? Read our explainer here.
Zeitgeist
A pro-Palestinian activist in London. Mark Kerrison/In Pictures/Getty
The polling that dare not speak its name
According to a recent representative poll of 1,000 British Muslims, says Rod Liddle in The Spectator, more than a third of those surveyed want to see Sharia law introduced in this country. Only 24% believe Israel has a right to exist. Almost half think Jews âhave too much power over UK government policyâ. Fewer than a quarter believe Hamas committed murder and rape in the October 7 attacks on Israel. âQuite what the huge majority believed Hamas had been up to instead â playing multi-faith Scrabble with their hosts? Sunbathing? â has not been revealed.â Overall, about a third of the group have views which are antithetical â âin some cases violently antitheticalâ â to that of the general population. And because these views âare espoused most stronglyâ by younger Muslims, this segment is probably growing.
When I talked about all this on television, the presenter felt it necessary to assure the viewing public that, actually, âordinaryâ Muslims had âno love for Hamasâ. But the poll findings âwere right there in front of herâ. The liberal establishment stubbornly stick to their âofficial opinionâ, even though âthere is all too much evidence to the directly contraryâ. The BBC, for example, seems not to have covered this report. The number of British Muslims has more than doubled in the past 23 years, to 3.87 million. Of course, the poll findings donât suggest that all of them are âabout to strap on a bombâ. But they do suggest there is a problem. âAll I am asking for is a certain recognition of this problem.â
Inside politics
Jeremy Wolfenden: seduced by a handsome Russian barber
Seductive barbers and âMozhno girlsâ: the sordid history of the honeytrap
âVery clever people do very stupid things for sex,â says Ben Macintyre in The Times. Upon this principle has been built âone of the oldest, nastiest and most effectiveâ of spying techniques: the honeytrap. It was âpioneered and perfectedâ in the Soviet Union. During the Cold War, the KGB seduced foreigners using âMozhno girlsâ â Mozhno meaning âpermittedâ, as they were allowed to have (very close) contact with foreigners. Men were used too: when the gay British journalist Jeremy Wolfenden was appointed the Daily Telegraphâs Moscow bureau chief in 1961, âa handsome young Russian barber at the Ministry of Foreign Trade was ordered to seduce himâ. Compromising photos taken by a cameraman hidden in Wolfendenâs closet were used to blackmail him into spying for the USSR.
Amy Thorpe, codenamed âCynthiaâ, was used by Britain and America during World War Two to seduce high-level diplomats, obtaining âintelligence on the Enigma machines and the cipher books of fascist Italyâ. Markus Wolf, the East German Stasi spy chief, deployed a âsmall armyâ of male âRomeo spiesâ â the war had left many powerful West German women without partners. Mordechai Vanunu, who fled to London after revealing Israelâs atomic bomb programme to the world, was lured by a honeytrap to Rome, where he was âseized, drugged, taken to Israel and tried for treasonâ. The recent scandal involving William Wragg â the Tory MP who handed over phone numbers of colleagues to someone on the gay dating platform Grindr â proves that the digital age has made honeytraps more effective than ever. Dating apps, where compromising material can be exchanged between people who may never meet, âare the spymasterâs dreamâ.
đ€·ââïž Honeytraps donât work on everyone. According to a new documentary about the DGSE, Parisâs equivalent of MI6, Russian spooks gradually realised they couldnât blackmail French spies about affairs. The usual response they got to their threats was: âGo ahead, my wife already knows.â
Quoted
âGenius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.â
American writer EB White