Fluke

Brian Klaas, a professor of global politics, argues that chance and tiny, overlooked events shape our lives and history far more than we recognize. Drawing on chaos theory, social science, evolutionary biology, and philosophy, he shows how small accidents of timing ripple into enormous consequences, and how the stories we tell about cause and effect flatten a far messier reality. Fluke opens with a coincidence that altered the course of a war and expands into a wide-ranging case that we control little but influence everything, testing the same suspicion of tidy success stories that animates Outliers.