Kuala Lampur, March 8 -- I have a friend (a Malaysian) who met his Korean wife while waiting for a bus in Singapore.

He was going home after work and was at the same bus stop as this Korean woman; they chatted, agreed to meet up again and, voila, 20 years later they're married with two kids and living in London.

Chances are, if they both didn't happen to be at that bus stop at the same time (or if there were too many people there for the two of them to get acquainted), their lives could have taken very different turns.

This is the theme of the book published this January by Brian Klaas called Fluke: Chance, Chaos and Why Everything We Do Matters (Scribner, 2024) which argues that reality consists mainly of unpredictable events, random ...