Christopher Straus, University of Chicago class of ’88, created the school’s first scavenger hunt in 1987, envisioning a modest diversion, limited to his dorm, whose purpose was to instill a sense of camaraderie. These days, many of the items on that first list seem like easy pickings—a hula hoop (10 points), a training bra (25 points), a painting on velvet (20 points). Then again, Item No. 93 was a nude dean, bound and gagged (500 points). ⁠ ⁠ Since then, scavvies have been asked to unboil an egg; induce a potato to break the sound barrier; eat their umbilical cord (one student, having persuaded his mother to express-mail the membranous keepsake she’d saved from his birth, stuck it into a Twinkie and swallowed it); get circumcised (someone did); and bring a lion, a tiger, or a bear to campus. ⁠ ⁠ _____⁠ ⁠ In 1999, for five hundred points, a pair of physics students built a working nuclear breeder reactor in a Burton-Judson dorm room in one day, converting thorium powder collected from...