When Your Father Is a Magician, What Do You Believe?

(mitpress.mit.edu)

37 points | by pseudolus 3 days ago

5 comments

  • petermcneeley 28 minutes ago
    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.
  • vunderba 1 hour ago
    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.

  • tzm 1 hour ago
    > 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

  • hamonrye34 1 hour ago
    Talmudic test of Abrahamic faith.

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

  • toss1 3 hours ago
    >>"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.