DL Open Thread Sunday Magazine: January 11, 2026
Any ‘Mincefluencers’ Here? An obsessive fan tries to understand her obsession. My fave piece of the week:
Maybe if I start from the beginning, I can make sense of it.
Last March, I went to a press preview for the new Broadway musical “Operation Mincemeat.” Two weeks later, a friend came to town from Los Angeles and asked what she should see, so I told her about the show and offered to go see it again with her.
Just a week after that, on a Wednesday morning when one of my sons was feeling a little blue, I went to the office but then stood up in the middle of the workday — I never leave my desk in the middle of a workday — bought two tickets and called his school to say he had an appointment, allowing them through a lie of omission to believe that it might be medical (and I am sorry for that). I picked him up in a cab and took him to the matinee.
Then, after my family was talking about how odd it was for me, who is famously (famously, in my family) always griping about my relative lack of time and money, to see a show three times, I decided that what my other son was actually saying was that he felt that I had been negligent in not taking him. So later that week I woke him up on Wednesday and told him to meet me at the theater for the matinee.
Here my memory becomes a blur. There were planned trips; there were spontaneous ones. There was at least once when I found myself at the theater with no real recollection of having made the decision to go. There were the more than a couple of times I went with a friend’s 8-year-old child I’ll call B here (anonymized because B is not old enough to consent to being in this ridiculous story and I don’t want to have to apologize to them later), because I’d seen B there once and learned that it was neither of our first times, nor even our second.
There was a big trip on Father’s Day so that my husband, who did not feel left out, wouldn’t feel left out. There was what I would not call lying to my family but obfuscating about where I was and what I was doing, as if I were having an affair. (An affair would have been easier to explain.) One night, The Times’s theater reporter offered me his plus-one to a different show, but I told him that I already had tickets to see “Operation Mincemeat” again. It would be my ninth time.
“Oh, dear,” he said.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” I said.
“You’re a fan,” he said. “This is what it is to be a fan.” He said it so kindly, the way a doctor talks to a mental patient in the movies.
That’s just the beginning. Following the writer down the rabbit hole will make your day.
Oh, if you want to hear how it took the cast six years to create the opening number, here you go:
Serendipity: Its origin, and why it’s not about luck:
Since the word was coined in the 18th century, “serendipity” has been used to describe all kinds of scientific and technological breakthroughs, including penicillin, the microwave oven and Velcro. (More on these below.)
The whimsical term has also been the title of countless poems, songs and books about remarkable coincidences or eureka moments. And let’s not forget that it was the name of the charming 2001 romantic comedy about two strangers — played by John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale — meeting and reuniting during chance encounters.
“Serendipity” — as the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it — is “the ability to find valuable or agreeable things not sought for” or “luck that takes the form of such finding.”
The term was introduced by English politician and writer Horace Walpole in a letter dated Jan. 28, 1754. Walpole is widely credited with writing the first gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, but he was also the inventor of dozens of words in the English language, including “souvenir” and “nuance,” along with less common terms like “balloonomania,” referring to an 18th-century craze for hot air balloons, and “robberaceously,” meaning a robber-like manner.
“I think often now people will use it in a bit more of a generic sense to mean a positive thing that happened by chance,” Gorrie said. “ It’s the same basic meaning, but it’s less to do with finding and more just to do with happening.”
However, to Sanda Erdelez, a professor at the School of Library and Information Science at Simmons University, serendipity involves more than just being at the right place at the right time.
“ What matters is not just chance, but how people recognize this opportunity and then how they act on that opportunity,” she said. “There is actually an element of human agency in it.”
In her research, Erdelez focused on how people come across information important to them either unexpectedly or when they are not actively looking for it. She called them “super-encounterers.”
“These are people who have a high level of curiosity,” Erdelez said. “[They] have either a number of hobbies or interest areas so they can see connections between various things.”
Erdelez added that super-encounterers were skilled in the art of noticing. That was a key step in many famous instances of serendipity.
You (I) just learned something new today.
Genius Dogs–Of Which Our Dog Is Not One:
If you’ve ever had to spell out words like W-A-L-K or T-R-E-A-T around a dog, you know that some dogs listen in to humans’ chitchat and can pick out certain key words.
Well, it turns out that some genius dogs can learn a brand new word, like the name of an unfamiliar toy, by just overhearing brief interactions between two people.
What’s more, these “gifted” dogs can learn the name of a new toy even if they first hear this word when the toy is out of sight — as long as their favorite human is looking at the spot where the toy is hidden. That’s according to a new study in the journal Science.
“What we found in this study is that the dogs are using social communication. They’re using these social cues to understand what the owners are talking about,” says cognitive scientist Shany Dror of Eötvös Loránd University and the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna.
And while dogs may learn that a command like “fetch” means you want them to bring you something, says Dror, they generally are flummoxed by the difference between “fetch the ball” and “fetch the frisbee.”
“There’s only a very small group of dogs that are able to learn this differentiation and then can learn that certain labels refer to specific objects,” she says. “It’s quite hard to train this and some dogs seem to just be able to do it.”
“They’re going to see how we get the job done. They’re going to see us state a theme and take it for a walk in the woods,” Weir told The San Francisco Chronicle in 2010. “If I were playing a note-for-note set every night for all these years, I think I would have put a gun to my head. If we’re not having fun, we’re not doing our job.”
Let’s let Bobby Weir and The Grateful Dead sing us out one last time:
