HN Reader

My father took magic very seriously and went way beyond simple slight of hand that this article suggests. He could make coins disappear without a trace. Our mother was often astonished when she found all the money in the house and bank had vanished. One day he wanted to show us a disappearance trick with a cigarettes carton. He didn't have one so he went to the corner to pick one up. He hasn't been seen since. A true magician never reveals his trick.

>>"The real wonder is in the human mind that constructs reality from fragments, that can be fooled by a flourish, but that can also be illuminated by experiment. "

Beautiful.

My dad is a tax attorney/cpa, but is also a magician. My birthday parties were dope. It certainly wasn't a full time job, but he made enough money from corporate parties doing walk around magic to fund his habit, and magic is expensive (most videos teaching the trick are ~$100 or more). He has a magic library that if I had to guess is worth 6 figures.

I've tried getting into the craft many times, and if I had to boil down the essence of nearly every trick (especially for slight of hand, not necessarily stage magic)... Imagine the stupidest, dumbest, simplest explanation of the trick that you write off as "well certainly they're not doing _that_", and that is what is happening. The real art is that doing that simple thing is hard AF, they have to practice it a thousand times to make it look convincing. I never really got into it because it required too much dedication. And if anything, that makes it more special than something more cerebral.

> I became my father’s assistant, carrying props, rehearsing patter, acting as the straight man. But I was also his skeptic. If a trick fooled me, I made it my job to discover how. When he succeeded, I applauded; when I found the secret, I felt the satisfaction of uncovering a law of nature.

I find this beautiful

> My father taught me to vanish before I learned to appear. Science taught me to appear without vanishing — to stand by evidence, to let truth emerge even when it contradicted the spectacle.

Poetic

I grew up loving magic. I watched David Copperfield on a grainy old tv, and vividly remember rewatching taped performances of "The World's Greatest Magic" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World%27s_Greatest_Magic) trying to figure out how the big illusions were done. I was part of a magic club and loved peeking behind the curtain. It fascinated me how as you learned those building blocks of simple sleight of hand, you could compound and build on those components to pull off more and more impressive tricks. A double lift, palming, french drop, etc...all pulled together to a cohesive "trick".

I feel like a lot of what entertained me about magic also pulled me towards web development. Sites and interactions online seem like magic until you realize they also break down into simple problems, simple components that build upon one another to deliver the trick. That interest in figuring out how things work just never went away I guess!

This is an topic where internet and camera phones have ruined it.

Well, obviously, you don't believe what you see. :-)

Talmudic test of Abrahamic faith.

Bit of Jungian parapsychology: tell the physician to forget everything he knows prior to undergoing psychoanalysis.

From the article:

> If a trick fooled me, I made it my job to discover how.

Tangential but that's one of the reasons I actually migrated away from sleight of hand towards juggling. IMHO it's far less stressful when your performance doesn't require fooling the audience.