One Thing: What would you ask for if you could ask for anything?

Picture the scene: a dusty lamp, a curl of smoke, and a genie announcing, “You have three wishes.” Most of us met that moment in Disney’s 1992 film ‘Aladdin’, and most of us have wondered since what we would ask for. The history is a little messier than our memory of it. The tale belongs to the One Thousand and One Nights, a collection linked to a 9th-century Arabic papyrus (Razzaque, 2017; Waxman, 2019). Aladdin himself may be a later addition, borrowed from an eighteenth-century Syrian storyteller (Waxman, 2019), and the three-wish limit seems to come from a different story, “The Fisherman and the Jinni,” in which a jinni promises three wishes to anyone who frees him from prison (Dennis, 2019).