Magic will remain magic no matter how many of its principles you open up to the public. ![]() It’s as if the community were afraid that magic would vanish if exposed. Secrecy, Stone argues, makes magic look finite, old, and stagnant-a washed-up pastime that is afraid of change, of criticism, of anything that might threaten its ascendance. In its exploration of Stone’s quest to become a better magician, Fooling Houdini becomes an ode of sorts to the principles of openness-a testament to the notion that when we strive to maintain secrecy, we are only fooling ourselves. Though initially cowed by the magic community’s overwhelming insistence on a code of silence (one that even got him kicked out of his local magic chapter, after he published an exposé in Harper’s), he has since come to believe that the emphasis on secrecy is not only misplaced, but detrimental to the very practice of magic. Shamelessly, that is, if you’re playing by the traditional rules of magic conduct, where, as Stone puts it, “exposure is seen as a form of vandalism,” something that “deadens the mystery and tarnishes the brand, shrinking all the grandeur in magic to the scale of an intellectual puzzle.”īut does it really? Stone certainly doesn’t think so. Nor are they likely to have gotten a kick out of Stone’s new book, Fooling Houdini (out today), where the watch theft maneuver is but one of the effects that the amateur magician so shamelessly reveals. It’s probably a safe bet that fellow magicians were none too pleased. ![]() Last week, Alex Stone taught Wall Street Journal readers the world round how to steal a watch.
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