Ken Jennings: "That’s what people don’t understand about Jeopardy! dominance: It’s so fragile"

The Atlantic

"You get only one loss, and it’s Russian roulette: Any given night could be the game with your name on it," Jennings writes in an Atlantic essay expressing appreciation for James Holzhauer's Jeopardy! winning streak. "You could play a dominant game, but still catch a bad break or two—a missed Final Jeopardy, a Daily Double found by someone else. I think there were about a dozen games in my streak where my win hinged on a single question. Incredibly, they all went my way. Until the 13th game, when one didn’t." Jennings adds: "There was something beautiful, I think, in the James Holzhauer news cycle. For two months, one of the most irresistible news stories in America was about Jeopardy!, a 55-year-old media property. It seemed so wholesome and old-timey, a story that Snapchatting teens and their grandparents were all following at once. It brought back good memories of 2004 for me, but it also reminded me of a time before the cultural landscape balkanized into a thousand niches, before middlebrow America went away, before politics and everything else dumbed down. For a little while, we just wanted to watch someone blow our minds by knowing stuff."

ALSO:

• Emma Boettcher made Jeopardy! history on Tuesday: She is the first contestant to topple a champion with 10 or more victories and then win the next game, according to The Jeopardy! Fan website
• Boettcher shrugged off Alex Trebek saying, “Oh, okay, influenced by James, are we?" (Boettcher first watched James Holzhauer play Jeopardy! when she beat him.)
• Holzhauer is almost as good at Twitter as he is at Jeopardy!
• Why Holzhauer gave his first post-losing TV interview to ESPN's SportsCenter
• Jimmy Kimmel weighs in on Holzhauer's loss: "Just like that, everyone under the age of 75 can now go back to not caring about Jeopardy again"
• Conan O'Brien jokes about Holzhauer (whose mom is of Japanese descent): "Last night's Jeopardy was the most watched episode in 14 years. I have to say, it was very cathartic to finally watch a white man lose to an overqualified woman."