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On fortunes, the people who told them, and why they work on us.
The oracle is for fun. These are not — or at least, they are the part of the site where we take the subject seriously. Fortune-telling is one of the oldest continuous human practices, and the reasons a two-line reading can land squarely are genuinely interesting, and better understood than most people realise.
Why a fortune feels like it was written for you
A psychologist handed his students identical personality profiles and asked them to rate the accuracy. They averaged 4.26 out of 5. What that experiment showed, why vague statements feel specific, and how to tell a real insight from one you supplied yourself.
A short history of telling the future
From sheep livers in Babylon to cracks in heated ox bone in Shang China to the Victorian parlour. Four thousand years of a practice that has never once gone away, and what has stayed constant through all of it.
The fortune cookie is not Chinese
It is Japanese, it is American, and the question of who first made one led to a mock trial in San Francisco in 1983. Also: the night in 2005 that 110 people won the Powerball at once, all of them following the same slip of paper.