The ocean next door
The shocking assassination attempt on former US president and current Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump, will no doubt revive an age-old debate among historians. Does the arc of history depend on such fluke events as a bullet missing its target by a few millimetres, or is it determined by deep structural forces beyond the influence of individuals? The short answer is both, though given our human love of storytelling and our ingrained hindsight bias (everything is obvious after the fact), we probably tend to elevate such historical “hinge moments”.