Card Catalog: ” In 1754, Horace Walpole coined the word “serendipity” in a letter to a friend, borrowing it from a Persian fairy tale about three princes who made discoveries “by accidents and sagacity.” He meant the wandering that puts us somewhere unplanned, and the readiness to recognize what we’d stumbled into when we got there. Some things arrive sideways and turn out to matter more than what we came for, and he thought that deserved a word. We still have the word. What we’ve lost is the wandering. The systems we use to find things now are built almost entirely around intent. We arrive with a question, leave with an answer, and the whole apparatus is engineered to make that transaction as fast and frictionless as possible. Lost in that transaction is the detour that becomes the discovery, the neighboring idea that reframes the question we arrived with, and the thing that couldn’t have been searched for because we didn’t yet know it existed…” [h/t Barclay Walsh]