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Hercule Poirot and the Greenshore Folly

His novel presentation focused on the thousand people in the audience who did not step up onstage, calculating that by quietly exposing the trick to a few, he was creating a miracle for everyone else.

Teller Jim Steinmeyer • Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear

In June 1983, Alexander Grothendieck sits down to write the preface to a mathematical manuscript called Pursuing Stacks . He is concerned by what he sees as a tacit disdain for the more “feminine side” of mathematics (which is related to what I’m calling the solitary creative state) in favor of the “hammer and chisel” of the finished theorem. By el... See more

Henrik Karlsson • Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born

The Best of Phil Stutz

Moi Jamri • 9 cards

I said that a mathematician was a maker of patterns of ideas, and that beauty and seriousness were the criteria by which his patterns should be judged.

G. H. Hardy • A Mathematician's Apology (Canto Classics)

The Expert at the Card Table, written under the pseudonym S. W. Erdnase, has stood for more than a century as magic’s most thorough and well-regarded text on playing card sleight of hand. If you are serious about magic, reading the book should be first on your to-do list.

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

Scientific models that seek to predict the consequences of human actions with some reasonable accuracy—such as game theoretical models of economic behavior—for the most part ignore human individuality in favor of aggregated outcomes.

Jessica C. Flack • Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute, 1984–2019 (Compass)

Erdnase color change

Adam Gopnik • The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery

The physicist Murray Gell-Mann has spoken often of the need, when faced with multidimensional problems, to take a “crude look at the whole”—a process he has even given an acronym, CLAW.