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Holly Davis didn’t believe in luck until she realized just how unlucky she was. Then she couldn’t quite shake it, this sense of having an anti-Midas touch, bad outcomes following her unprovoked. Often, it was the little things. Reservations she made disappeared. Rides she booked never came. Someone else would fill out an annoying but vital online form without a hitch; the site would crash as soon as she tried. Her neighbors’ plants glowed a lustrous green while hers — same soil, same rain — shriveled with disease.

She knew it sounded crazy, but it all started when she accepted her grandmother’s rings. She was 21, graduating college and getting engaged to her freshman-year sweetheart. They’d both double-majored in sociology and women’s studies. Now they were moving to Portland, Oregon, looking for jobs and housing. Second-hand engagement rings were considered bad luck, but she didn’t give it much thought. To her, that was nonsense — and it wasn’t like she had much money to buy rings of her own.

Almost immediately, there was acrimony when other relatives grew jealous that Davis had gotten these heirlooms. One lousy event would precipitate another. The job she found in Portland was at a halfway house for sex offenders. It sounds hyperbolic, but somehow, at the time, she always felt like she was the person on duty when a resident came home high on meth or wielding a knife, or when the bosses ordered a room search, which meant she was the one looking under mattresses and pulling back soiled sheets, rummaging for contraband cigarettes and porn. “I was always the member of staff that ended up with jizz on them,” she said. “And it was always on days when I would wear my nicest sweater, or a nice handmade scarf, and then it was like, ‘Great, I’ve got to go handwash this.’”

Her romantic relationships followed the same rule. A grad-school acceptance in sociology at the University of Edinburgh pulled her out of the halfway house, and her fiancé followed her only for him to declare Scotland “the land that God forgot” and move back to his parents’ basement. Years later, she married a Scot — again, using her grandma’s rings — only for the British government to impose an income requirement for spousal visas that neither she nor her new warehouse-worker husband could meet. Their relationship fell apart. She’d get into the car, ask if he might turn down the screamo, “and his response would be to turn it all the way up to the point of, like, almost blowing the speakers out.”

She knew there were other explanations — more rational explanations. The halfway house was chronically underfunded and understaffed; the work was rough and dirty for everyone. The suite of failed relationships might’ve been a product of her own psychology, the trend of failed bookings a product of inattention. And yet. It felt like there was something else.

She started wondering whether the rings were hexed. She talked about it the way you might tell a ghost story — as an outlandish dinner-party anecdote you can’t help laughing about but also, in some secret, inadmissible part of your soul, can’t fully discount. Her grandmother had been volatile: a Hungarian Canadian bombshell with black hair, red lipstick, and a personality disorder that went undiagnosed until her 80s. She had a tempestuous second marriage to a soft-spoken man who painted portrait after portrait of the same female figure — decidedly not his wife — whom he described only as “the woman of my dreams.” Ask him about his life in Hungary, and his answers had a quicksilver quality, hard to pin down. Then, once he died, stories started coming out. There was a cupboard, which he’d usually kept locked, full of Nazi memorabilia: swastikas, military maps, gold teeth. There were secret bank accounts for sending money back to relatives in the Old Country, which he’d stashed in secret compartments he had made by cutting holes into the pages of books. There were divorce filings that he’d never finished filling out. True or mythologized, it was hard to say for sure. Still. Marital lies, possible collaboration with the Third Reich — the rings could be carrying an “intergenerational family karma curse.” It made a certain kind of sense.

It also made no sense at all. Davis was a sociologist, level-headed in her views. Her work was filled with references to redlining and deindustrialization, mandatory sentencing and welfare reform. She’d left behind her parents’ Catholicism. She was a millennial, born in 1984, conversant in the structural and the systemic, the sweeping explanations undergirding the patterns she could see in the world. She knew she’d benefited from stability, a middle-class childhood, a good education that gave her options for what she could do with her life. She didn’t believe in the supernatural.

Was this just adulthood, she wondered, to be waging an endless war against the everyday, your clothes stained and your efforts foiled? Was this normal? The man who would eventually become her second husband didn’t think so, and he knew a thing or two about luck. He’d written a master’s thesis about it, and a 122-page doctoral dissertation, and had co-edited a volume called The Philosophy of Luck. His name was Lee John Whittington, she’d met him on Tinder, and he didn’t believe in the salt-throwing, new-engagement-ring-buying sort of luck, either. At least in most cases he didn’t. Though he too laughed about it, hedged about it, he came to see his wife as the exception, a living counterargument to his philosophizing. He sometimes joked she was the unluckiest person he’d ever met.

In 2020, a professor at the University of Iowa named Michael Sauder noticed that one subject was tacitly off-limits in sociology. No matter how hard you looked, the literature was curiously silent about luck. There was an exception, he found, that seemed to prove the rule. Some 50 years earlier, a team of Harvard sociologists had published a lightning rod of an academic tome called Inequality. Access to good schools was important, its authors argued, but education alone couldn’t close the country’s divides; to do that, your best bet was to redistribute income.

Inequality was, to put it mildly, controversial. But one of the most contentious bits — rivaling even the socialist policy proposal — was the suggestion that some differences were attributable to sheer luck: “chance acquaintances who steer you to one line of work rather than another, the range of jobs that happen to be available in a particular community when you are job hunting” — the myriad little twists that have a big effect on a life. Other sociologists were not so sure. Luck was invoked in only a handful of the book’s 400 or so pages but was mentioned 15 times in the American Journal of Sociology’s review. Such assertions were “merely speculations about the unexplained variance, not findings.” It generated such blowback that the lead author later said he regretted using the word at all.

The idea was still pissing people off decades later. When the Cornell economist and columnist Robert H. Frank appeared on a Fox Business talk show in 2009 to talk about the importance of luck in economic success, the British-born host wasted no time before telling him off: “Do you know how insulting that was when I read that? I came to America with nothing 35 years ago. I’ve made something of myself, I think through hard work, talent, and risk-taking, and you’re going to write that this is luck.”

There’s something about luck that inspires skepticism or rejoinder. Partially, it’s a question of terms. It’s hard to agree what exactly we’re talking about. The word is slippery, a kind of linguistic Jell-O. The critiques come from left and right, from those who see luck as a mask for privilege and those who see it as an offense to self-made men. Voltaire, with the confidence of the encyclopedist, once declared that one can locate a cause for everything and thus the word made no sense. Others dismiss it as mere statistics, still others as simply a term the godless use for God. It can call to mind an austere medieval manuscript, two-faced Fortuna, one side beaming, the other weeping, ordinary humans clinging to her fickle wheel.

But we can’t quite quit it, either. It’s something you might say you don’t believe in but continuously invoke. We’re up all night to get it, are warned not to push it, are sometimes down on it. It haunts our pop songs and expressions, but it isn’t just some rhetorical holdover, like the bony stub of an ancestral tail. This organ is still in active use. Months before he narrowly survived an assassination attempt, a Washington Post op-ed called Donald Trump “the luckiest politician who ever lived”; just two days before he arrived in Butler, Pennsylvania, a columnist at the National Review wondered whether he had a “desk drawer full of four-leaf clovers in his office at Mar-a-Lago.”

In the tech world, managers ask about it in job interviews. “Are you a lucky person?” was reportedly one of Jeff Bezos’s favorite questions in the early days of Amazon. Now it’s common enough that some college career centers warn students to have an answer prepared. One year at Goldman Sachs, a superior in charge of hiring entry-level analysts divided the résumés he’d gotten into two piles at random, the way you might cut a deck of cards. Then he threw one pile out, saying, “You have to be lucky in this business. We might as well pick from the lucky ones.” According to a Goldman Sachs spokesperson, this story is almost certainly apocryphal — but it keeps getting told, a parable for how luck figures in supposedly meritocratic outcomes.

For Frank, the Cornell economist, it was the difference between life and death. After an episode of sudden cardiac arrest on the tennis........

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