Category Archives: Uncategorized

I’m delighted to be quoted in the company of many thoughtful and daring colleagues in this article about the history of circus in higher education. Thank you, Madeline Hoak for the work your doing and for sharing it with the world:

I would like to thank Richard Young, The Magic Circle and others who made The Magicians’ Podcast possible. I love listening to podcasts and audiobooks when I’m traveling long distances or running errands. However, there are very few audiobooks devoted to the conjuring arts out there and only a handful of magic podcasts. Clicking on the […]

Chicago’s Newberry library is crowd-sourcing the transcription of a number of its texts. The collection that I’m immediately drawn to, of course, was recently mentioned on the Open Culture website. Click on the image above to read about the projects details and to try your hand at a little magical transcription.  

This New Yorker contribution by Ricky Jay on magic lanterns and phantasmagoria is a fun read. Last night I toured the Parisian catacombs, which has me thinking about Étienne-Gaspard Robert. If you like Jay’s article, then learning about Robert’s phantasmagoria shows at the end of the 1700s in Paris is a must:

I’ve completed 1,000 words of a magic translation and I’m thinking of Walter Benjamin. He says that a translation “issues from the afterlife” of the original. For him the translated work causes a “flowering” of the origin text. How wonderful it is to be part of a text’s reincarnation. Now when I sit down to […]