Sublime

In Verna’s opinion, Douglas was a born student. He hadn’t finished college because of some highly exaggerated incident in the locker-room of the gym, but he had continued studying on his own and had already covered ceramics, modern poetry, the French impressionists, the growing of avocados, and the clarinet.

P. Arora and F. Vermeylen, “The End of the Art Connoisseur? Experts and Knowledge Production in the Visual Arts in the Digital Age,” Information Communication and Society (2012), doi:10.1080/1369118X.2012.687392.

He’s referring to Operation Merlin, a botched effort from a few years back that’s just been leaked to the press. In a bid to entrap the Iranians into building a nuclear weapon in contravention of the ban, we apparently arranged for an asset to pass them plans for a contraband firing mechanism, sneakily—or so we thought—adapted to render the system

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/the-experts-vs-the-amateurs-a-tug-of-war-over-the-future-of-media/.

Mr. Forte wasn’t a magician. He was a game protection specialist who worked with the casino industry, helping with theft prevention. And his video series had nothing to do with magic; they were educational tapes from the 1980s, produced to help educate people on the techniques used by gambling cheats.