"No matter how sophisticated our choices, how good we are at dominating the odds, randomness will have the last word," wrote Nassim Nicholas Taleb Is the business world inherently chaotic, or is ...

On a snowy night in 1961, Bennett Cerf, one of the founders of the publisher Random House, excused himself from a dinner party to watch his favorite television show. His hosts, the writer Robert Penn ...

In “Nothing Random,” her rousing biography of Bennett Cerf, Gayle Feldman conjures an era when a glamorous publishing figure could be a household name. By Alexandra Jacobs When you purchase an ...

As co-founder of Random House, Bennett Cerf published works by many of the biggest names in 20th-century fiction and nonfiction. But he was more than just a shrewd and immensely successful businessman ...

And yet fear is among his recurring themes. Each of Alameddine’s books, dissimilar as they otherwise may be, is an attempt to wrestle with the terrifying arbitrariness of fate. This preoccupation ...

Eeny, meeny, miny, mo, catch a tiger by the toe – so the rhyme goes. But even children know that counting-out rhymes like this are no help at making a truly random choice. Perhaps you remember when ...

The world may seem orderly, but randomness and chaos shape everything in the universe, from enormous galaxies all the way down to subatomic particles. Take a chilly window sheeting over with ice: even ...

A new mathematical equation describes the distribution of different fragment sizes when an object breaks. Remarkably, the distribution is the same for everything from bubbles to spaghetti. When you ...

AI chatbot responses can be random and varied, and most of us think of that variability as problematic. Are we wrong? Randomness is something that people are not used to coping with, but we should ...

The surprising patterns behind random events and learn how hidden forces shape outcomes you thought were unpredictable. This Ontario ruling may be the most compelling judicial decision you'll ever ...

"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." Do you know what'll always save you from awkward silences at a work function? Or make you the shining ...

Researchers have developed a chip-based quantum random number generator that provides high-speed, high-quality operation on a miniaturized platform. This advance could help move quantum random number ...