The Architecture of Luck — On the Roads We Didn't Build
The Gershwin lullaby that opens Porgy and Bess sets its conditions fast: “Your daddy’s rich and your mama’s good-lookin’.” That’s the benchmark. Clear it, and luck is assumed. Don’t clear it, and the rest is—supposedly—on you. I don’t clear it. My father was not rich. My country—by most international measurements—is not rich. And yet, looking back across decades, I cannot pretend I walked the same terrain as most people around me. What I had was something more subtle than inherited money, and in some ways more durable: I inherited an architecture. …