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“We talked about how hard the questions were going to be, and how hard it was going to be on TV under the pressure,” remembered Traci. “I said, ‘Do you want to do this again, or don’t you?’ The next day she had a list of more books she wanted me to buy for her, ready to study. She wanted to do it all over again.”

For two years, Caitlin spent six or seven hours a day doing nothing but studying geography. No days off, no weekends off. She always had a book or a map in her lap—in the backseat of the car, on the bleachers at her younger brother’s baseball games. She filled ten three-ring binders with lists—mountains, islands, cities on rivers—and used colored markers to mark locations on hundreds of maps. She always prepared two copies: one with labels and one without, so she could test herself flash card–style. Traci remembered Caitlin advancing across the map like Napoleon’s army, country by country: “One week she’d focus on, say, India, and we would just check out every book about India in the library, looking for anything new.” The phrase “anything new” strikes me as funny: Caitlin’s geography knowledge had become so comprehensive that she was literally running out of new facts to study !*

She studied smarter as well as harder. Her previous year’s bee experience had allowed her to analyze National Geographic’s question style, and she began to see patterns. So she bought videotapes of every previous bee final and made a database of every question asked. (Having worked out a very similar regimen before going on Jeopardy!, I am probably one of the very few people in the world who could nod appreciatively at this story without inwardly thinking, “What a nut!”) She made checklists of places and topics that hadn’t come up in a while, figuring they had a better chance of appearing next year. She traded tips online with fellow bee veterans: track down an Australian atlas called Geographica, they said, or a children’s atlas published by Dorling Kindersley. When she realized that lots of bee questions came from National Geographic magazine, she began annotating every issue in highlighter. On the plane to D.C. for her big rematch, she came across a mention of the fishing fleet on the Italian island of Lampedusa and neatly marked it in yellow pen. Sure enough, a Lampedusa question popped up in the finals. Right on schedule.

Caitlin breezed through her second bee without missing a single question. In her final showdown against Suneil Iyer of Kansas, the fifth question asked for the capital of imperial Vietnam. She wrote “Hue” and could tell from the time that Suneil was taking that he was writing something much, much longer (“Ho Chi Minh City”). “I’m looking up at Alex, because he’s looking at both our answers. He looks at Suneil’s, and he’s like, hmm.” Caitlin mimicked a Trebekian scowl. “Then he looks at mine, and he looks at me . . . and he winks. I was like, whoa!”

I was a little jealous. Alex Trebek never winked at me.

After themed rounds on current events, wildlife, and medicine, I head upstairs to the Diplomat Room to watch a different cohort of young geographers. Representing Washington State at this year’s bee is none other than Benjamin Salman, the boy with a whole country in his head. He’s up first in each round and stands at the microphone smiling placidly, with his arms folded. He hasn’t missed a question yet—he knows where Dagestan is, where vicuñas live, the largest city in North Africa. (Spoilers: Russia, Peru, Cairo.) Since each player is asked a different question in each round, there’s an element of chance underlying the skill. “You’ll hear everybody else’s questions and think, ‘That’s such an easy question!’” Caitlin told me. “But then it comes to you, and it’ll be the only one you didn’t know.” One player in this round is asked to identify the country where there’s fighting going on in Ramadi and Fallujah (Iraq; you may have heard about it), but the next one needs to locate Hyesan, capital of the Yanggang Province. (Hyesan is a minor industrial city in North