Scott Duke Kominers, Columnist

Kominers’s Conundrums: A Puzzling Hunt for Missing Monoliths

Can you figure out who made off with these mysterious objects, and where they’ve been taken?

December 6, 2020 at 1:00 PM UTC

Scott Duke Kominers is the MBA Class of 1960 Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and a faculty affiliate of the Harvard University department of economics.

A puzzle inspired by on one of the most interesting mysteries of 2020.
Photographer: David Butow/Corbis via Getty Images; Patrick A. Mackie (via Creative Commons Wikipedia); Illustration by Lara Williams

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First they found one in Utah. Then reports of others like it arrived from Romania and California. Monoliths have been popping up all over and then — just as quickly — disappearing.

Here at Conundrums, our intelligence unit has been working day and night to find them all. Using our global satellite network, Conundrumaire First Class Lara Williams was able to snap pictures of seven new ones — but unfortunately our geolocation array was down at the time, so we’re not completely sure where they were.