Enter the last leg of the Fairway Rollin' Dough Leaderboard Series today before it is too late. Play DFS golf against House and others for a chance to win thousands in prizes. If you finish at the top of the leaderboard, you’ll win the inaugural Fairway Rollin’ Dough Championship Jacket. Not to mention a lifetime of bragging rights!

Over the weekend, Alex Trebek passed away at age 80 after a battle with pancreatic cancer. What is his legacy with Jeopardy!?
This is such a bittersweet moment for the book to come out. There is so much grief in the Jeopardy! community, which I think speaks to how good Trebek was at his job—he felt like a member of the family for a lot of people. I’m so grateful that I was able to talk to him for the book and get to know him a little bit, and I hope that it can be a celebration of his 36 incredible years behind the lectern. He meant so much to so many, and I think he knew that. That there is a Jeopardy! community at all is really a testament to him and to his legacy.

What inspired you to write a Jeopardy! book?
During James Holzhauer’s historic winning streak last year, I wrote a feature about the buzzer (er, signaling device) and how Holzhauer was using it to dominate his opponents. I remember thinking it was laughably niche at the time (shouts to my very patient editors, who reliably let me gallivant down rabbit holes). Like, who cares enough about the specifics of the Jeopardy! buzzer to read 3,000 words about it?

But then the story published and it blew up. It turns out that a whole lot of people cared about the Jeopardy! buzzer—it’s a show with just about universal name recognition, and in this great nation of nerds, a lot of people were interested in the nitty-gritty inner workings. So I kept reporting out more Jeopardy! stories, and got to know more and more of the people who make up the greater Jeopardy! community: the contestants, the writers and producers, the die-hard fans, and the people who’ve spent literal decades trying to get on the show. There have been Jeopardy! books in the past, but few with much in the way of reporting, and none that captured all the different sides of the show that I was interested in.

As a game show, what makes Jeopardy! stand out as unique and special?
The most obvious thing is the gimmick of it: You must answer in the form of a question. It really is a gimmick (albeit one prompted by the 1950s quiz show scandals—the joke being that the show is just handing over the answer, which since the scandals has been a federal crime). But it’s one that’s given the show some staying power—it’s just so iconic.

Jeopardy! is at this really interesting moment. Over the last five or so years, contestants have semi-professionalized: They spend months or years drilling themselves on homemade buzzers and game simulators, they study and memorize really complicated math to tell them what to do with Daily Doubles and Final Jeopardy!, they create yearlong study and workout regimens to be in tip-top mental and physical shape. It used to be that your average player had maybe picked up an almanac or an old clue anthology and flipped through it in the weeks before they taped their game. The odds are good that a contestant on today’s Jeopardy! has been training in one form or another for years. It’s been said that right now is the Moneyball era of Jeopardy!—the advanced stats are out there, and it’s just now becoming the norm for players to use them to unlock whole new levels of potential.

What was your favorite discovery in researching the history of Jeopardy! for this book?
I’d heard rumors that Weird Al Yankovic was responsible for the Jeopardy! we know and love today. In 1984, he released a spoof of the Greg Kihn Band in 1984 called “I Lost on Jeopardy.” And wouldn’t you know it, Jeopardy!—whose original version with Art Fleming had been cancelled in 1975, brought back for a season in 1978, and then quickly shelved again—came back on the air just a few months after the song was released, this time with a dapper Canadian named Alex Trebek behind the lectern.

So I got in touch with Weird Al to ask him. (He called me from his dentist’s office, which seemed somehow fitting.) It turns out that the timeline doesn’t really track—Merv Griffin, who created Jeopardy!, was already hard at work on a reboot months before “I Lost on Jeopardy” was recorded. But there was a connection. Griffin had Weird Al come perform the song on his talk show just before the new Jeopardy! debuted—and said on air that he wished he’d known about Weird Al’s song sooner, because he would have asked him to be the host of the new edition. Griffin passed away in 2007, so we can’t know for sure if he was joking. But I’d like to think we have Weird Al to thank for Jeopardy!—at least the version with Trebek.

What is the one thing you want people to take away from reading your book?
I got to spend some time plumbing the depths of the trivia world, and what became clear is that while there is harder trivia than Jeopardy!, and more competitive trivia, and trivia where you can win more money or even have a better shot at fame, Jeopardy! really is the peak for most North American quiz junkies. Jeopardy! is this white whale for the 100,000 or so people who take the contestant test every year. 

I think part of the obsession with Jeopardy! is the show’s universality: When somebody tells you they were a Jeopardy! contestant—even if they didn’t win big, or even win at all—you know immediately what that means: Oh, wow, this person is really smart. And part of it is the nostalgia: Maybe you grew up watching it with Grandma, maybe your fifth-grade teacher realized you were getting all the answers right and told your parents, maybe you didn’t quite fit in growing up and Jeopardy! was the thing that first helped you find a nerdy, like-minded niche in the world, maybe you just love your nightly 7:00 ritual. It’s a really precious thing for a lot of people.

Answers in the Form of Questions: A Definitive History and Insider's Guide to Jeopardy!