Matthew Lindquist

“All of this plot hole talk has got me thinking about a storytelling concept called Chekov's gun. It posits the idea that if you mention a gun in the first act, it has to go off later on. Like life itself, there's a momentum within every story, a preordained conclusion that everything will eventually guide you back to: a series of mysterious

Rare events aren’t as rare as you’d think.

via How People Think

• We are blind to how fragile the world is due to a poor understanding of rare events.

• John Littlewood was a mathematician who sought to debunk the idea of miracles being anything more than simple statistics. Physicist Freeman Dyson explains: Littlewood’s law of miracles states that in the

Everyone in this room has managed to grow old despite how easy it is to die. They all escaped their childhoods alive despite tuberculosis, polio, and whatever other horrible illnesses afflicted humanity when they were kids. They drove without seat belts, in cars full of cigarette smoke. They survived literal wars. Terrible things have probably

“There are billions and billions of paths for us on any given day, and we certainly remember the ones that lead to something like a brutal car crash. We think to ourselves, Why me? How did I get so unlucky?` The problem is, we have absolutely no idea how many times we've missed one of the infinite tragic routes, ducking and dodging butterflies left

“Now that the collection was gone, the bookshelves lay empty. You would think with all the books removed they would look neat and tidy, but when a huge bookshelf lacked a single book and the room was dirty, the impression was that a thief had just come and gone.”

Dinner at the Night Library by Hika Harada