Only in New York do people use a terror plot twist as proof of their city’s specialness.

The news that separate thieves thwarted not one, but two bomb plots in the metropolitan area over the weekend was met with celebration by New Yorkers who are convinced that everything that happens in their city never happens anywhere else in the world, ever.

This is indeed a Chaplinesque plot twist. But let us not delude ourselves into believing that New York has a monopoly on weird and fortuitous turns of events. An extremely quick Google search, for instance, returns a 1994 Independent story about a “petty thief [who] apparently foiled a bomb attack on Reading railway station yesterday when he stole the suitcase containing the device.”

I have never been to Reading, but I can only assume it’s the second-greatest city in the world.