Ho Chi Minh City officially has its own Magic Club. The venue in Vietnam’s largest metropolis is part of the HCM City Centre of Cultural Labour. “HCM City has nearly 100 magicians but they find it hard to attract crowds,” said Tran Dinh, the magician who heads the club. “Our club will help them stage …

New York City has long been home to many kinds of odd regulations. For instance, in the 1930s, the city was subject to a Statute of Prediction that prohibited accepting money for telling fortunes. That law led to a fascinating wave of police crackdowns on innocuous-seeming tea rooms were fortune tellers often worked. Atlas Obscura …

Perfecting your stage presence is a never-ending practice for magicians. The smallest things can totally change the impact of a performance, from a word to a body position. Or, to hear Mario Lopez tell it, even the slightest facial expression is important.  The Spanish magician is the latest guest on the Discourse in Magic podcast, …

If you were trapped on a desert island, what message would you put in a bottle?  That’s the setup for this simple but effective trick courtesy of comedian and sleight-of-hand magician, Jay Sankey. With just a couple of sleights, you can make your mark’s signed letter appear inside a water bottle. I’m cack-handed as they …

Whether they realize it or not, most magicians are also cunning psychologists. A study published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology delved into just how powerful an audience’s expectations are in making your misdirection work. The research led by Goldsmiths, University of London, ran tests based on the Theory of False Solution, where a …

Every iOS rollout from Apple introduces new features we eventually can’t live without, but they almost always break something, too. In the case of iOS 11, it’s making it difficult to perform TOXIC, a trick that uses the calculator on a borrowed phone. The new operating system changes how the calculator is displayed, which ruins …

Franco Pascali has the kind of resume that makes you feel like you’ve wasted your life. At just 20 years old, he’s the director of magic at Theory11 and has ridiculous skills as a magician, mentalist, and cardist. And now you could see him perform live. Pascali is doing a limited tour called Mind Control. …

Did you know that Cy Endfield, director of films like Zulu, was also a magician who even crafted his own card tricks? Many of his tricks were compiled into a series of books called Cy Endfield’s Entertaining Card Tricks by Lewis Ganson, a writer with over 60 magic books to his credit and editor of …

For all the time spent perfecting tricks and developing a persona, many magicians don’t invest the same energy in treating their craft as a business. If you want to make magic your career, then it’s time to readjust your thinking. Marketing isn’t a bad thing to do, and it doesn’t have to be smarmy or …

There is a man suspended upside down in a glass box filled with water. His hands and feet are bound. The man holds his breath. The audience does the same. That’s the popular image of the escape artist right there. Over a hundred years after it was first performed, the “Water Torture Cell” is still …