There is something about coincidences that delights us. There are thousands upon thousands of examples to choose from—yet not so many that they lose their strange power over us. And that’s the point—the combination of improbability, timing, and felicity has a kind of magic power. To the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, coincidences were the “wonderful pre-established harmony” of the universe. To Carl Jung, they were “acts of creation in time.” To author and journalist Arthur Koestler, they were “puns of destiny.”
