Magic Is Dead: My Journey into the World's Most Secretive Society of Magicians

don’t telegraph your moves. This is a pervasive problem with newbie magicians and I was falling into the trap. Sometimes my nerves got the best of me. I knew when the sleight was a few seconds away and, as I mentally prepared to execute the move, my body language shifted, reflecting this internal planning.

Magicians are also able to file a patent for a piece of equipment used during a routine, but that largely defeats the purpose of protecting a secret. In order to file a patent (which is a public document), the magician has to reveal how the apparatus, and therefore the trick, works. The secret therefore must be revealed for it to be protected.

“There’s a moment in your life when you realize the difference between illusion and reality and that you’re being lied to,” Teller of Penn & Teller once said, referring to childhood figures such as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. “[But] if you’re sufficiently preoccupied with the power of a lie, a falsehood, an illusion, you remain interested

Card-handling legends like Jason England and Derek DelGaudio lambasted Madison on Facebook, with DelGaudio calling him “the Milo Yiannopoulos of magic.” Memes were created, jokes were made, and Madison loved every second of it. He used it as fuel for his fire.

As we sat down at a nearby table, I thought back to what Ramsay and Madison and all the guys had been trying to explain to me for the past year. This was the gravity of a magic moment—one of astonishment, an experience layered in psychological and emotional revelations. The purpose of a trick isn’t merely to fool the spectator, but to make them fee

Virginia Heffernan puts forward in her book Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art. “Instagram images have become units of speech, building blocks in a visual vocabulary that functions like a colonial patois, where old-school darkroom photography is the native tongue and digitalization is the imperial language.”

For much of the 1970s, Doug Henning was North America’s best-known magician. He was a charismatic and comedic entertainer, and he connected with large audiences because of his personal brand. He was a straight-up hippie: fuzzy mustache, long Allman Brothers–style hair, bell bottoms, and tie-dyed shirts. His image fit snugly into the trendy, New Age

It transforms into a rock that must be carried in the pocket of his son, a ghastly thing that never seems to go away. And, despite being in my pocket for many years, I have never touched that rock. I do not know its grooves and crevices, its bumps and ridges. I know only its weight and its inability to be removed. To this day, despite this phantom

“One hundred percent. When I am playing, no one else is there, it’s just me and my own decisions. It’s my choices. I don’t want to have to think about making the right choices for everybody else.” “Do you think life is a constant battle between those two things? Trying to be the most complete version of yourself while also trying to understand that