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Derren Brown interview: ‘Maybe I was an eccentric. Part of it was me not dealing with my sexuality’..

Derren Brown interview: ‘Maybe I was an eccentric. Part of it was me not dealing with my sexuality’..

Chris Blackhurst Interviews for the Independent..

At the beginning of Derren Brown’s latest stage show, Infamous, the illusionist declares he’s gay, or as he puts it, “I’m a puff”.

When I saw him in Bristol last week, he quickly moved on to what the audience had come to see. But there were other slightly jarring moments – like when he made a stinging attack on homeopathy, saying baldly that it did not work, and when he alluded to being taunted at school because he was nerdy and not interested in girls.

I’d like to describe his performance, trick by trick, but he’s pleaded with me, as he does with his audience, not to do so for fear of spoiling the surprise for others. Suffice to say, the climax  is spectacular…

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Steven Galloway interlaces history, imagination around Houdini’s death..

Steven Galloway interlaces history, imagination around Houdini’s death..

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A Cube With a Twist: At 40, It Puzzles Anew..

A Cube With a Twist: At 40, It Puzzles Anew..

 By James Barron for the New York Times..

A Rubik’s cube can be twisted and twiddled in 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 different ways, and 43,252,003,274,489,855,999 of them are wrong.

Those truths — especially the second, maddeningly frustrating one — have been known since soon after the modish, Mondrianish plastic object was invented in 1974. The cube went on to become the must-have toy of 1980 and 1981.

Its popularity faded fast.

By 1982, the cube was so last year, doomed to Hula-Hoop faddishness. In 1986, The New York Times said the cube had been “retired to the attic, the garbage heap and, with a bow to its elegance and ingeniousness, to the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.”

Lately it has undergone a resurrection in a world in which engineers and computers can generate helpful algorithms that would-be cube solvers can share with each other. But some things have not changed.

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WHAT MAGICIANS CAN TEACH US ABOUT HOW OUR BRAINS WORK..

WHAT MAGICIANS CAN TEACH US ABOUT HOW OUR BRAINS WORK..

  Jane Porter for Fast Company…

How do you make something disappear into thin air?

David Copperfield famously made the Statue of Liberty vanish, but even the most elementary of magicians can make a scarf disappear in their hands. It’s the stuff magicians make a career out of.

But studying magic isn’t just for the Houdini-wannabes of the world. “You could learn so much about the human mind through magic,” says Alex Stone, author of the bookFooling Houdini. “Creativity is about questioning assumptions. … Every kind of creative endeavor is a sort of magic trick.”

Stone, who has been obsessed with magic since he got his first magic kit at the age of five, believes studying magic is like a crash course in applied neuropsychology, teaching us how and why our brains work the way they do.

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