Try the tool yourself at J-Grams.com! You can even quiz yourself by trying to answer the questions that your search returns.

The name is a shortened version of “Jeopardy! N-Grams.” Read more about what an n-gram is and what inspired this project here.

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Fifty years ago this week, NBC debuted a daytime quiz show in which contestants were presented answers and challenged to pose the corresponding question. The program, created by game show impresario Merv Griffin and hosted by the actor Art Fleming, was called Jeopardy!.

The show has survived cancellation, undergone failed reboots and now thrives in syndication under the stewardship of Alex Trebek, an avuncular Canadian who began hosting the show in 1984. Thanks to the work of devoted fans, virtually every clue from that 30-year span is recorded at j-archive.com. These 256,000 clues amount to an astounding historical record of our textbooks, our news and even our most trifling entertainment.

In light of the show’s golden anniversary, I started thinking about just how much of ourselves must be captured in those clues. Jeopardy! has been holding a mirror up to the culture for decades. It’s high time someone held a mirror up to Jeopardy!

To do so, I built a tool, called J-Grams, which lets you plot the frequency of words and phrases as they appear in the Jeopardy! questions, answers, and categories from the Trebek era.

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Try the tool yourself at J-Grams.com! You can even quiz yourself by trying to answer the questions that your search returns.

The name is a shortened version of “Jeopardy! N-Grams.” Read more about what an n-gram is and what inspired this project here.

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Harvard is actually the most mentioned American university in basically any corpus you could try: books, rap lyrics, even New York Times wedding announcements. It is in fact the symbol of elite education in America.

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We can actually track this unfortunate word, too, using J-Grams. Thankfully it seems to have gotten very little play on the show:

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What is this?

The Genius annotation is the work of the Genius Editorial project. Our editors and contributors collaborate to create the most interesting and informative explanation of any line of text. It’s also a work in progress, so leave a suggestion if this or any annotation is missing something.

To learn more about participating in the Genius Editorial project, check out the contributor guidelines.

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What are the most exciting matchups in sports? What’s the most exciting sport? What if a computer could tell us which games are hot right now—like an NFL RedZone channel, not just for NFL football, but for basketball, soccer, hockey, and baseball?

Introducing Gambletron2000.com, a tool that uses live in-game gambling data to quantify excitement in sports, write automated game recaps, finally settle the debate about whether the first half of NBA games is even worth watching—and much, much more. It might even make you rich.

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Unless you’ve experienced something like it, it’s hard to wrap your head around the idea that a girl who’s bolemic actually sees something different–different from what her friends and parents see–when she looks in a mirror. But she does; the brain is that powerful.

And the truth is of course you’ve experienced something similar. I remember telling a group of friends that my haircut, which they all had just said was fantastic, that in fact I had done it myself, and they all instantly reperceived it as a terrible haircut ridden with uneven strands. I once thought a girl was impossibly cute and even up close and then I kissed her and it wasn’t any good, she was nervous and afraid and self-conscious and I never looked at her the same, she literally lost her cuteness in my eyes, the same girl instantly looked different and worse.

Developing a warm picture of someone, emotionally, feeling closer to them or better about them, has a literal physical visual impact, it’s no different and perhaps even more powerful than putting that person in candlelight. Just as regarding someone coldly can be like throwing fluorescents on them.

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