The essayist Alain de Botton has been writing a great deal lately about crushes, those sudden infatuations aroused by the merest of stimuli — the way she subtly rolls her eyes at a blowhard’s pronouncements, her intentional dropping of a glass to attract a waiter’s attention, the way he casually uses his iPhone as a bookmark. In beautiful prose laden with examples, Mr. de Botton describes how attraction can cascade into exultation but, alas, gradually dissolve into disillusionment and a slow vanishing of the mirage.
A crush is undeniable, he writes, but barely explicable. That assertion appealed to my own sometimes reductionist mind-set, and I realized that the bare bones of the thesis could be expressed in statistical terms.
[H/T @Sanjay__Bakshi....who also recommended Paulos' book Innumeracy.]