Does Luck Exist?
April 08, 2025 at 05:30PM”What are the chances? That a lapsed luck philosopher meets an unluckiness magnet on Tinder and falls for her? That she falls for him?” For New York magazine, Eric Boodman explores the complex nature of luck through the life trajectories of a sociologist prone to misfortune, Holly Davis, and her husband (and luck scholar), Lee John Whittington. Is luck real? It’s a tough question, but Boodman tackles it in this intriguing piece.
We live in an era of boundless data, an empiricist’s fantasy. Apps count our steps and track our breaths. Websites watch our scrolls and clicks. Scientists trace the viruses and chemicals that get flushed with our urine and feces. We recognize the structural forces at play in our lives, the long tail of history and policy swishing around in the everyday. Our world should be at its most analyzable, explicable — but still it can feel like sorcery. That a hurricane’s path was plotted by satellite and dropsonde, radar and big-data modeling doesn’t dull the eeriness of one house destroyed and its neighbor still standing.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/04/08/does-luck-exist/
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