How to fool Houdini and avoid fooling yourself

Scientific American:

Last week, Alex Stone taught Wall Street Journal readers the world round how to steal a watch. It’s probably a safe bet that fellow magicians were none too pleased. 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. 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.”

But does it really? Stone certainly doesn’t think so. 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.

Read the whole story: Scientific American