Posts Tagged ‘contingency’

Ever feel as though you have no control over things that happen in your life?

Bet that’s how many felt on a December morning in 1892 when fog, ferryboats, and a fainting woman “formed a conspiracy that led to disaster”—as the New York Times put it. The disaster was a New Jersey train collision. Railway workers later spoke of it as “special dispensation from aloft”—what we’d call “an act of God.” But a closer look reveals a lot of human fingerprints.

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