ChiMe Activity Bulletin Deadline. Last day for these submissions to the April ChiMe. Interested in organizing and hosting a virtual or in-person event? Find out how by checking out our guide to hosting events.

ChiMe Editorial and Ad­ver­tising Deadlines. Last day for editorial submissions to the April ChiMe. Please submit original ar­ticles, insights, puzzles, brain teasers, or short poems. Your fellow Chicago Area Mensa members would love to hear from you.

Chicago Area Mensa Odd Outing @ Reg­istration. The outing will be held at 2 PM on Sunday, March 22nd in Batavia. Find out the details and/or register online by 10 PM Saturday, March 21st. You may also register in-person during the AGOG weekend at the Westin. There will be no on-site registration at Funway. Join us for a fun time indoors with a wide variety of activities for any Chicago Mensan and the entire family (bumper cars, black light mini golf, laser tag, bowling, roller skating, and arcade games).

Mind Games® 2026 Judge Registration. Join American Mensa members for Mind Games Thursday, April 16th through Sunday, April 19th, at the Hilton Washington Dulles Airport located at 13869 Park Center Rd. in Herndon, Virginia. Visit the website for all the details. The registration cap has been met and if you register now, you’ll be waitlisted.

CultureQuest® XXXVII Registration. On Sunday, April 26th, at 3 PM CDT, all across the country as well as Canada, all at the same time, teams of Mensa members will participate in a 90-minutes-long contest to test cultural literacy administered by American Mensa. Prizes will be award­ed to twenty “Classic” (no age restrictions) teams and one “Next Generation” (youth) team with the highest scores! Submit your team registration information to American Mensa by Tuesday, March 31st. Get all the details including, if you want your team to meet virtually, how to request your own Discord channel.

Annual Gathering (AG): Online Registration Deadline! Register for the AG, held Wednesday, July 1st through Sunday, July 5th in Fort Worth, Texas, in the Omni Fort Worth Hotel, before midnight EST, Tuesday, March 31st, which is your last chance to qualify for a discount.

AML Leadership Workshop: Level Up! Lead With Relationship 7 PM. We all experience work like a relationship. That means we crave the same things from work that we do any important relationship in our lives: acceptance, appreciation, and commitment. Through this eye-opening talk, Jason Lauritsen delivers an experience that helps leaders put an end to any outdated ways of managing people, so they can instead liberate employees to deliver their best.

A dynamic keynote speaker, Jason Lauritsen is a true thought leader in the world of work and employee engagement who is dedicated to revolutionizing the way we Lead With RelationshipTM. He fearlessly challenges traditional norms to reshape the employee experience by consistently placing authentic human connection at the heart of leadership. Jason is the author of two books, Unlocking High Performance and Social Gravity. His thought leadership has been featured in Forbes, Fast Company, Talent Management magazine, HR Executive magazine, and SHRM publications.

For more details, visit the AML Event which includes the Zoom link for this event.
Virtual Event!!

Cincinnati Mensa RG held today through Sunday, March 8th at the Doubletree Suites Cincinnati - Blue Ash lo­cated at 6300 E. Kemper Rd. in Cincinnati, OH. Join the Cincinnati Mensans for their 3 day RG. For more information, see their Zinzinnati Porkolopolis RG website, which will have their most up-to-date information.

SFRM: Flying for the CIA's Air America, Pablo Escobar, and Jimmy Hoffa 4:30 PM. In 1964, Captain Neil Graham Hansen embarked on a journey that would become the adventure of a lifetime. He hired on as a pilot for Air America—the CIA's airline that operated during the Vietnam era and the “Secret War” in Laos and Cambodia—officially neutral countries, but the scene of countless U.S. covert operations. Even though he had already been a pilot for more than half his life, had worked as now-disappeared Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa's private pilot, and later ran drugs for the Colombian cartels, flying for the CIA's secret air service was the pinnacle of Hansen's career—a dream come true that eventually turned his life into a nightmare. Air America's operations were unknown. Its schedules were irregular. Its pilots were shadow people, whose personnel, Hansen says, “cannot be filed neatly under anything resembling normal sanity.” It was the world of spooks, covert air ops, and adventure!

Captain Neil Hansen received a commercial pilot&aposs license in high school before he even had a driver's license. He spent more than a decade in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War era as a captain for Air America, accumulating more than 29,000 hours of flight time, 9,000 hours in a combat zone. He served as an advisor to the director of the 1990 movie Air America starring Mel Gibson and Robert Downey, Jr. Gibson's character in the movie was patterned after Hansen's “antics” reported in the Christopher Robbins book of the same name. Hansen&aos;s book FLIGHT: An Air America Pilot's Story of Adventure, Descent and Redemption was published by History Publishing Company. His writing has also appeared in various other publications, and he has been a frequent guest on the interview and speaker circuit. He makes his home in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

For more details, visit the SFRM Zoom RSVPs FB Group or the SFRM List of Presentations. To register, visit San Francisco Regional Mensa (SFRM)’s registration signup for this event.
Virtual Event!!

Armchair Conversation: Free Speech, Fighting Words, and Violence 6 PM. Northern New Jersey Mensa's Armchair Conversations are a friendly environment for serious conversations. This conversation will be about immigration. Visit their website, to view their House Rules, other Armchair Conversations, and for the Zoom link.
Virtual Event!!

MWW: Nonfiction Book Discussion 4:30 PM CST. Please join us in discussing March (Omnibus edition) by John Lewis. We generally discuss what we liked about the book or found challenging. We also discuss what we would like more or less of, what format we read the book in, and whether it was a recent read.

Can't make it this month? The next books will be The Technological Republic by Alexander Karp (April 15), Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity by Peter Attia (May 20), and Fixing Fairness: 4 Tenets to Transform Diversity Backlash into Progress for All by Lily Zheng (June 17). See the full write-up and find contact info on the American Mensa Events website.
Virtual Event!!

SFRM: Unraveling Distant Worlds: From Cotton Candy Planets to Ocean Worlds and the Search for Life Among the Exoplanets 4:30 PM. The discovery of exoplanets has revealed a cosmos teeming with strange and diverse worlds—some scorched by their stars, others light as cotton candy, shrouded in thick atmospheres, and a few that might resemble Earth. From molten lava planets to giant super-puffs and water-rich mini-Neptunes, exoplanets defy expectations at every turn. Join us for a deep dive into the cutting-edge science of exoplanet exploration. How do we detect their atmospheres? Could they support life? And do they offer clues about Earth's own formation? With new data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and upcoming telescopes, we are beginning to piece together the story of planetary evolution—unlocking the chemistry of these distant worlds and rethinking the very definition of habitability.

Caroline Piaulet-Ghorayeb is an astrophysicist specializing in exoplanet characterization and atmospheric studies. Her research explores the diversity of distant worlds, from super-puffs—enigmatic low-density planets to water-rich sub-Neptunes and temperate exo-Earths that challenge our understanding of planetary habitability. She has worked with cutting-edge space telescopes like JWST, TESS, and HST. Passionate about science communication, she founded a NPO, InitiaSciences, to open the doors of scientific research labs to high-school students. Caroline is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago, contributing to the next generation of exoplanet discoveries. She received her PhD in Physics (Astrophysics subject) from the University of Montreal, Canada and is an E. Margaret Burbridge Prize Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago.

For more details, visit the SFRM M-Wisely's Cafe. .
Virtual Event!!

Chicago Area Mensa Odd Outing @ Reg­istration Deadline. The outing will be held at 2 PM on Sunday, March 22nd in Batavia. Find out the details and/or register online by 10 PM today, which is the last day you can register. You may also register in-person during the AGOG weekend at the Westin. There will be no on-site registration at Funway. Join us for a fun time indoors with a wide variety of activities for any Chicago Mensan and the entire family (bumper cars, black light mini golf, laser tag, bowling, roller skating, and arcade games).

Theodore Talk: Dudley Clarke: The Genius of Deception 2:30 PM. Can one man change the course of a world war? From 1941, working from rooms over a Cairo brothel, British officer Dudley Clarke conceived a new way of fighting the Nazis: using the tools of the mind. Deception in war isn't a new idea, but this eccentric colonel realized that global conflict offered the chance to carry out deception on a global scale. Instead of getting the enemy to put a battalion at the wrong end of the line, he would persuade them to put whole armies in the wrong country. His tools were a limitless imagination and a talent for stagecraft. But his eccentricity would end up nearly destroying everything he'd built.

Robert Hutton, author of The Illusionist: The True Story of the Man Who Fooled Hitler, spent years in Britain's archives digging out Clarke's amazing story; now you will learn it as well.

The list of all the Theodore talks will be on the American Mensa Events website. Provided you register for the live talk, you will receive a link to a recording of the event. Closed captioning enabled.
Virtual Event!!

GOBS Request Deadline Noon. Today is the last day to submit a request for GOBS funds to be approved at this Sunday’s virtual Business Meeting for any planned, eligible event, activity, or class taking place after Sunday, March 29th through the end of April and, optionally, later; to be eligible, events involving CAM members must be published in the issue of ChiMe corresponding to the month in which they occur. For CAM events, it’s recommended you submit the GOBS request and get it approved before submitting your event information for publication in ChiMe—so no later than today for events planned for May. May events need to be submitted by the 1st of April to the activities editor to be included in the May ChiMe. An article must be featured in the May ChiMe for GOBS-subsidized June events with an RSVP deadline in May (same 1st of April deadline but article emailed to the editor; see editorial deadline).

If you’ve reg­istered or are planning to register for CultureQuest® XXXVII (get all the details), but have not submitted your request for GOBS funds, you still have time to submit it today before this Sunday's virtual Business Meeting. The entire registration fee (and only the registration fee) will be covered and, after the event, reimbursed for approved GOBS requests when you submit your expense form.

Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo (C2E2) through Sunday, March 29th. This event promotes the latest and greatest from the worlds of comics, movies, television, toys, anime, manga and video games, and is being held in the South Building of McCormick Place in Chicago. For more information, see the C2E2 website.
Public Event!!

CultureQuest® XXXVII Registration Deadline. On Sunday, April 26th, at 3 PM CDT, all across the country as well as Canada, all at the same time, teams of Mensa members will participate in a 90-minutes-long contest to test cultural literacy administered by American Mensa. Prizes will be award­ed to twenty “Classic” (no age restrictions) teams and one “Next Generation” (youth) team with the highest scores! Today is the last day to submit your team registration information & payment to American Mensa. Get all the details including, if you want your team to meet virtually, how to request your own Discord channel.

Annual Gathering (AG): Online Registration Deadline! Register for the AG, held Wednesday, July 1st through Sunday, July 5th in Fort Worth, Texas, in the Omni Fort Worth Hotel, before midnight EST, Tuesday, March 31st, which is your last chance to qualify for a discount.

ChiMe Activ­ity Bulletin Dead­line. Last day for these submissions to the May ChiMe. Interested in organizing and hosting a virtual or in-person event? There’s bound to be an activity or a restaurant you want to try, but you just want some other people to experience it with you. So invite your fellow Mensans. Find out how by visiting our guide to hosting events.

ChiMe Editorial and Ad­vertising Dead­lines. Last day for editorial submissions to the May ChiMe. Please submit original ar­ticles, insights, puzzles, brain teasers, photographs, or short poems. Your fellow Chicago Area Mensa members would love to hear from you.

Mind Games® 2026 Judge Registration. Join American Mensa members for Mind Games Thursday, April 16th through Sunday, April 19th, at the Hilton Washington Dulles Airport located at 13869 Park Center Rd. in Herndon, Virginia. Visit the website for all the details. The registration cap has been met and if you register now, you’ll be waitlisted.