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Ricky Jay and the Met Conjure Big Magic in Miniature..

Ricky Jay and the Met Conjure Big Magic in Miniature..

The magician Ricky Jay, considered by many the greatest sleight-of-hand artist alive, is also a scholar, a historian, a collector of curiosities. Master of a prose style that qualifies him as perhaps the last of the great 19th-century authors, he has written about oddities like cannonball catchers, poker-playing pigs, performing fleas and people who tame bees. But probably his most enduring interest is a fellow polymath, an 18th-century German named Matthias Buchinger…

Buchinger (1674-1739) was a magician and musician, a dancer, champion bowler and trick-shot artist and, most famously, a calligrapher specializing in micrography — handwriting so small it’s barely legible to the naked eye. His signature effect was to render locks of hair that, when examined closely, spelled out entire Psalms or books from the Bible. What made his feats even more remarkable is that Buchinger was born without hands or feet and was only 29 inches tall. Portraits show him standing on a cushion and wearing a sort of lampshade-like robe. Yet he married four times and had 14 children. Some people have suggested that he also had up to 70 mistresses, but Mr. Jay says that’s nonsense.

Continue reading the main story at:  http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/17/arts/design/ricky-jay-and-the-met-conjure-big-magic-in-miniature.html?_r=0

The Power of Magical Thinking.. David Copperfield on the Enemies of Art

The Power of Magical Thinking.. David Copperfield on the Enemies of Art

By David Copperfield for the New York Times.

In 2012, a man in Saudi Arabia was executed for practicing witchcraft; last year, guest workers were put on trial in Saudi Arabia for “witchcraft and sorcery”; already this year, reports surfaced of the Islamic State’s having beheaded a street magician in Syria; and, of course there was the attack in Paris on Charlie Hebdo.

The most recent events overshadowed North Korea’s Christmastime hacking of Sony over “The Interview.” Yet the people who hacked Sony, the men who reportedly murdered the magician, and the terrorists in Paris all share a hatred of free speech and democracy. They also share the wrongheaded belief that brutality and force can suppress the human spirit and its inevitable expression through art. They’re fighting a losing battle.

As a magician and a student of magic history, I can attest that magic has often run afoul of zealots. I have numerous copies of “The Discoverie of Witchcraft.” It was written in 1584 to show that what people thought was the devil’s work was sleight of hand. King James I wasn’t persuaded. He ordered every copy burned… Read more..

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/03/opinion/david-copperfield-on-the-enemies-of-art.html?_r=0

For Young Offenders, a New Confidence Game…

For Young Offenders, a New Confidence Game…

By John Leland for the New York Times…

At the Crossroads Juvenile Center in Brownsville, Brooklyn, shrill buzzers announce the movement of sliding doors, and visitors leave all metal objects in lockers by the entrance. The residents are as young as 10 years old, awaiting trial on charges ranging from trespassing to murder.

Once a week, David Roth and Ricky Smith teach them how to be better deceivers.

Mr. Roth, 62, is a professional magician who has performed coin tricks on David Letterman’s show. At Crossroads, where coins are considered a potential weapon, he works strictly with cards.

“Watch and learn,” Mr. Roth told a small group of boys the other day, as he placed a deck of cards on a wooden game table.

Louis Watts, the facility’s executive director, interrupted to address one of the students. “Pull your pants up,” he said…

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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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