ROBERT SMITH, host:
This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Robert Smith in Washington, D.C., sitting in for Neal Conan.
Any magician will tell you that magic requires hard work. To master a card trick takes practice and skill and if you're going to throw knives at a beautiful woman, make sure you got good aim. And of course, and your trusting audience, someone's got to let you saw him or her in half. That said, any magician worth your salt won't tell you everything, secrecy is important. Magicians form a small community with a storied history that dates back to the 16th century at least. They specialize in illusions, sleight of hands and supernatural feats. And although it's not as popular as it once was, before the modern technological magic of the Internet and television and movies, magicians still command audiences, on street corners and clubs and at Las Vegas casinos.
We want to hear from magicians today, professionals and amateurs both. And here's what we want to know - what trick got you interested in magic? Who showed it to you? How long did it take you to master it? And what does it taught you about life? Our number here in Washington is 800-989-8255, our e-mail address is talk@npr.org and you can comment on our blog at npr.org/blogofthenation.
Joining us via magic from our bureau in New York is Adam Gopnik, a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. His article, "The Real Work: Modern Magic and The Meaning of Life" is in this week's issue on newsstands now.
Adam Gopnik, it's good to have you with us.
Mr. ADAM GOPNIK (Staff Writer, The New Yorker): It's wonderful to be here.
SMITH: So what got you interested in magic? Everyone has a story from their youth or otherwise about when they first were captivated by this.
Mr. GOPNIK: Well, like everyone, when I was a little boy, I had a magic set and I could do three tricks and was proud of them. But I had sort of put all that behind me, I must be the most heavy-handed manipulator of objects in the world. And a couple of summers ago, we were sort of stuck in New York for the summer, my whole family, we started going to a wonderful magic show off 9th Avenue in a church theater called Monday Night Magic and we all got drawn in again to the wonderful thing that magic is - stage magic is - because it's simultaneously a holdover, a vestige of the great days of live entertainment and you feel yourself at a good magic show in touch with much older traditions of entertainment, of showmanship.
And at the same time, it was startling to me because I realized that in sort of the abstract qualities of magic, there was something that was actually quite profoundly philosophical. Why are we amazed? What surprises us? What does our degree of surprise tell us about our own minds? And I began having a series of conversations with one of the producers of Monday Night Magic, Jamy Ian Swiss, who turned out to be, like me, an essayist, a writer as well as a magician. And from those conversations and from the world that opened up to me, at that moment, I began to put together a piece, an essay, about the subject.
SMITH: You know, I was going to make a joke about that, how a New Yorker writer enjoys a magic show is by thinking about the meaning of life, but I realize that as you talk to these magicians, that's exactly what they're thinking about too.
Mr. GOPNIK: Well, that was one of the things that startled and delighted me, which is that I would not have known the degree of intellectual acumen, mindfulness that's already present in the magic tradition and in the magic world. It sort of has to be, it's built into it. What you're doing every day when you're a magician is doing psychological experiments on willing subjects. You know more, a magician knows more about what astonishes people, about what people's expectations are. Every magician will tell you that people will collaborate in their own illusions that there are misdirections that seem achingly obvious at the moment that you do them that are opaque to other people.
You know, there's a famous psychological experiment that involves getting people to watch a video - I don't know if you've ever seen it, you can find it on the Internet - where people are bouncing balls and you're supposed to follow the track of the bouncing ball and in the middle of this very dull video of people bouncing balls to each other, a gorilla walks across the center and pounced his chest and walks out, and no one, I mean no one, notices the gorilla because you're busy watching where the basketball goes. This thing, which has delighted psychologists in the last 10 years, magicians have known for centuries.
SMITH: You know, we were talking a little bit about the skill and that's the first thing you notice is the skill of magicians. But you take it a step further; you say that the magician is one of the few true artists left on earth. What did you mean by that?
Mr. GOPNIK: Well, in two senses. First, because magicians have a huge repository of craft, accumulated craft. I love the expression that's common to magicians, the real work because that they mean something more than the method, something more than the way that you go about during the trick, the thing you can read off the side of the box if you're beginning or in someone's notes and lectures if you are more advanced. It means that in order to make the illusion work, whether it's a small, close-up illusion or a big-staged illusion, there's a kind of inherited understanding of narrative, of approach of ways of doing it that you could only learn in a sense by doing and through the example of other magicians. I don't think anybody who's serious about their crafts knows what the real work is. And they know when you've got it and they know how hard it is to learn it.
And then, in a second sense, one of the things that fascinated me is that in lots of ways, sort of the natural ecological space in the environment of entertainment for magic has, if not vanished, at least diminished in the past century. You know, once you can make a special effect happen in the movies. Once a woman can disappear through a dissolve or through a jump cut, some of what a magician can do on stage is necessarily diminished. A lot of the early movie special effects in fact were invented by magicians. And yet, magic hasn't disappeared, magic hasn't diminished and it puts me very much in mind for years, I was an art critic writing about art for The New Yorker. And that's pretty much the story of modern art as well.
Photography in the movies dried up a lot of the natural ecology of the painter. Nobody needs a portrait anymore. Nobody needs you to paint their house. Nobody needs you to paint their children. And yet, instead of responding to that challenge simply by disappearing, modern artists have found ways through the growth of their own community, through other kinds of intimate coterie art to go on. And magicians, I discovered, to my delight and to my fascination, had very much the same kind of history and in a kind of more and more internal history of great performers and great techniques. But instead of being big and blowsy and outward necessary, a lot of it had the quality of chamber music or of the art of Marcel Duchamp, something inward and intimate.
SMITH: We're talking about magic and the philosophy of magic and what magic means to you and, of course, we want to hear about your first trick. The phone number is 800-989-8255, talk@npr.org.
Well, Adam Gopnik and I, two observers of the craft could talk about it for hours, but we need a magician in here. We're joined by Jamy Ian Swiss, a magician who lives in New York City. He is also in our New York bureau. We'll make him magically appear next to Adam Gopnik.
Jamy Ian Swiss, welcome to TALK OF THE NATION.
Mr. JAMY IAN SWISS (Magician): Poof, here I am.
(Soundbite of laughter)
SMITH: You see, it works so well on the radio.
Mr. SWISS: Exactly. Why do they say radio has to be believed to be seen?
SMITH: It's something like that.
Mr. SWISS: Nothing like magic.
SMITH: And I have to say, you really opened my eyes about something because a lot of times when I've watched a magic show, I feel a little stupid afterwards, like I've been tricked and you in this piece by Adam Gopnik, you talk about how that's not the way to look at it. That in fact you need intelligence to appreciate magic.
Mr. SWISS: That's right. Being fooled is not the same as being a fool. And magicians are very actively using the audience's intellect against you. You know, you can't really do magic for a preschool child who doesn't understand the difference between what reality is and what magic is. You have to understand what reality is before you can recognize the contrast between that and magic. And so, without intellect, magic doesn't really exist. The simplest magic trick doesn't exist. And although it is very counter-intuitive and difficult for people to grasp, any magician will tell you that the more intelligent an audience in many ways, the easier they are to fool. And this is why, among other things besides magic, scientist and academics often are duped by psychic fraud and things like that because they don't believe that they could be fooled by so-called simple trick. But magicians don't make our living just fooling stupid people.
SMITH: Yeah, if somebody who are to materialize in front of me, I would have to assume that either magic existed or I was having a brain aneurysm or something like that. You make the point that it's the figuring out. I have to know that it's a trick. I have to work out in my own mind and sort of go to a lot of dead ends in the maze in order to truly have that sense of enjoyment, where I can almost see how it's done, but not quite, or at least have a suspicion, right?
Mr. SWISS: Right. I think that's correct. And you know, people are equipped to talk about the willing suspension of disbelief, Coleridge's famous term about poetry but that's often applied to the theater. And magic, however, is quite different. My friend Teller of Penn & Teller likes to say that there is no willing suspension of disbelief in magic. Magic is more like a theatrical rape in the sense that you force the spectator into having to believe the illusion in front of him. We're all accustomed to the experience in Peter Pan, we all see the wires when she's flying across the stage. It doesn't trouble us at all because we are willingly suspending our disbelief. But if you see the wires in a magician's program of levitating a woman in the air, passing a hoop over her, if you were to see some kind of wire or something like that, then the whole thing is down the shoot.
SMITH: I wanted to get a quick phone call before we take a quick break. David(ph) is calling us from Chicago, Illinois.
Go ahead, David, you want to talk about your first magic trick?
DAVID (Caller): For me, it was the Sneaky Pete magic set that was give to my brother who was a year and a half older than I. He didn't do anything with it. And 45 years later, it is still the passion of my life. Like, Dai Vernon, I wasted the first five years. I didn't get into magic until I was five and a half.
SMITH: What is the Sneaky Pete magic set do?
DAVID: The Sneaky Pete magic set is revered by collectors as one of the finer magic sets and it had the standard assortment of beginners' magic tricks that awoken in me the love of magic that I continue with today.
SMITH: Well, thanks for your call, David.
Adam Gopnik, do magicians look down on these little plastic sets that people get when they're 8 years old or is that really the key to their profession.
Mr. GOPNIK: I think every magician started out that way. Every magician that I have known, every magician I've had the chance to speak to begins, maybe not at five, but certainly at seven or at 10 or 11 when they walked into a magic store and bought a magic trick and learned to do it when they got that first magic set.
It's one of the things, I think one of things that the piece in the magazine is about the connection between a certain moment in a boy's life, being 10, 11, 12, being drawn to magic and how that carries on. It's something Jamy and I debate and argue back and forth about. When I say that, you know, all magicians in the sense of forever 11, I don't mean that in a negative way at all. I think in a very positive way, the same way that all scientists, in their heart, is still 4 years old, amazed by the world and desperately trying to make theories for it, the way that all writers like myself are really, at heart, 8 or 9 years old, where you're sort of aware and indignant, at the same time you want everybody to know what you know. I think there's an element in a very productive way in which magicians are all 11 or 12 at heart and remain that way forever.
SMITH: Coming up, we'll ask Jamy Ian Swiss to do a magic trick on the radio, seriously. Magicians, give us a call. We're taking your calls at 800-989-8255. No, I won't ask how the trick is done. You can also send us e-mail. It's talk@npr.org.
I'm Robert Smith. It's TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.
(Soundbite of music)
SMITH: This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Robert Smith in Washington, in for Neal Conan.
We're talking about magicians this hour with Adam Gopnik. His article about contemporary magic appears in this week's edition of The New Yorker. And we're also joined by Jamy Ian Swiss, a magician who lives in New York City. And of course, we want to hear from you. What was the magic trick or performance or sleight of hand that blew your mind? Give us a call at 800-989-8255. Our e-mail address is talk@npr.org. And I will note, it is not a scientific sample, but so far all of our callers wait and talk about their first magic trick are men.
Mr. GOPNIK: Well, this is a deep thing. Jamy actually, I think, has a theory about why boys and men are so drawn to magic and women often are but much less so.
SMITH: What do you think Jamy?
Mr. SWISS: I will point out there have always been women in magic. It's important to understand that there are professional women working in magic today and there is a long history of that. Famously, one of the most famous American magicians of the 19th century, Alexander Hermann - who defined the look of the magician with the goatee and mustache - when he died, his wife Adelaide took the show out, continued touring with the full illusion show. So, there have always been women in magic. But that said, they are a distinct minority. And of course, as in other areas of life, there are first and foremost, cultural barriers. Sexism has kept women out of the magic kit, in a way, because people buy magic kits for their boys and dolls for their girls. But those things are changing as we know. And nevertheless, I do think that when all those barriers are eliminated, women will still be a minority. And my own theory is that it has something to do with the way, the different ways that men and women use power.
I saw a talk once by a corporate psychologist about different styles of leadership and management and sex differences they're in and that men lead from the front by example, come and follow me. Whereas women lead from the back. Like the mother goose, go ahead, you can do it. You can do it. And both these strategies are perfectly effective, but the difference is the approach to power. And the problem with magic is that magic uses power very explicitly. You cannot avoid the fact that you, as the magician, are exerting this power over the forces of the universe. And I think that's not a natural form for women to display power.
SMITH: Adam Gopnik, in your article, you talk about how Jamy Ian Swiss can be controversial sometimes and I think we see why. I want to go to some of our callers and ask and you shall receive. We have a female magician on the line. Geri(ph) is calling us from Chico, California.
Hey, Geri. Hey, Geri, are you on the line?
GERI (Caller): Yes, I am.
Mr. GOPNIK: Hey, Geri.
SMITH: So what do you think?
GERI: I'm not a magician. I'm a magician's - I was a magician's assistant.
Mr. SWISS: Poor babies.
(Soundbite of laughter)
GERI: No, I loved it. It was absolutely wonderful.
SMITH: So how many parts of you are there?
GERI: Well…
Mr. GOPNIK: Left.
SMITH: Left.
GERI: …I'm very short because I was sawed in half so many times.
(Soundbite of laughter)
SMITH: But approaching zero but never quite getting there.
GERI: Exactly. And I wanted you to know that my first love for magic started when I was a child when my father talked me to see Blackstone. And the electric light cabinet was what I really loved.
SMITH: What is the electric…
Mr. SWISS: A beautiful illusion.
SMITH: What is this illusion?
GERI: The electric light cabinet. And what happened was a woman was put in this cabinet and electric lights - electric - they looked like…
Mr. SWISS: Fluorescent bulbs.
GERI: Exactly, like fluorescent bulbs, and they went through the body. And I just thought that was absolutely amazing. And that's what I wanted to do. As a matter of fact, my magician bought some of Blackstone's things when Blackstone stopped doing magic shows, and I wanted that cabinet but he wouldn't buy and says that no it's too dangerous for me because I was too curious and he said I can imagine you electrifying yourself…
(Soundbite of laughter)
SMITH: Too curious.
GERI: …electrifying yourself.
SMITH: Jamy Ian Swiss, have magicians always adopted the latest technology?
Mr. SWISS: Yes, magicians have often been at the forefront of technology. As Adam pointed out, magicians were really the first to use film commercially and discover special effects. And, well, a man considered the father of modern stage conjuring, Robert-Houdin, a French magician in the mid-19th century whom - from whom Houdini eventually took his name.
Robert-Houdin was an early user of electricity to light candles on the stage. And during a wonderful suspension sort of a levitation piece that he used to perform, he used ether to anesthetize his son on stage before levitating him, and this was a very new cutting-edge medical idea at the time. And actually the scent of the ether would waft through the theater and the audience would be able to detect that. So magicians in some ways have always been on the cutting edge and yet at the same time, we've always been asked will technology damage magic. And in the end, that's not really true because there's something visceral and direct and real and immediate about the experience that transcends whatever the limits of the effects we do or versus the spectacle we see in television or film, but we can't really touch television and film the way we can touch magic.
SMITH: Thanks for your phone call, Geri. Let's talk to Frank(ph). Frank calls us from Eugene, Oregon.
FRANK (Caller): Hello.
SMITH: Hey, Frank, you're on the air?
FRANK: Yeah. Hi. I started with magic also when I was 10. We had a summer landlord who rented bungalows Upstate New York, and he was a professional magician. And he would do a few shows for us, part of the bungalow colony. And I ended up kind of glomming on to him as a groupie. And the first thing he taught me was how to back-palm a single card. And after that, it was the French-drop coin illusions, basically, sleight of handwork. And I was hooked from then on.
SMITH: Adam Gopnik, this sounds familiar, the glomming on seems to be the formal way in which magicians are made, right?
Mr. GOPNIK: Yes, you mean, through apprenticeship. Yeah.
SMITH: Yeah. That's a formal way up putting it, I picture more, you know, falling around…
Mr. GOPNIK: Hang around.
SMITH: …hang around until they're given scraps of the trick.
Mr. GOPNIK: One of the nice things about spending time in the company of magicians is they tend to be very open to the ancient, almost medieval practice of apprenticeship. Kids hang out with magicians if they have the right spirit and the right kind of desire and they learn because they're very much sort of thing with the real work is something that you have to learn.
Some magicians, inevitably, are kind of snobbish about, you know, kid magic. You know, they have a kind-of-go-away-kid-you-bother-me attitude. But the best ones in my experience welcome the, you know, that bright 12-year-old who's obsessed with doing the basics of sleight of hand because they see themselves as they once were. They also understand that the continuity of the art form depends on bringing those kids in. So there's a lovely, as I say, almost kind of medieval guild sense of connections between masters and apprentices in the world of magic.
FRANK: I have one comment also on the male propensity for magic. I really suspect that it's part of the pre-adolescent or adolescent, you know, hey, look-at-me syndrome, something to get you visible to be able to strut your stuff. And in some respects, it reminds of the bowerbird. You know, wow, look at this great functionless bower that I made for you. And it's - you can be a geek, you can be a non-athlete and even the jocks will be amazed at some sleight of hand with a standard deck of cards.
Mr. SWISS: But why would that aspect or explanation not apply equally to women?
FRANK: Good question, but they are definitely a minority. And I would rarely see any women had (unintelligible) magic shop in Manhattan or -, you know, when I - the first shop I ever went to was Al Philoso's Magic(ph) down in the '30s on the West Side.
Mr. SWISS: A legendary center of magic.
FRANK: Oh, it's like walking into a apothecary from…
Mr. SWISS: Yes, it was.
FRANK: …18th century.
Mr. SWISS: Yes.
SMITH: Well, thank you very much for your phone call, Frank.
FRANK: Okay.
SMITH: We wanted t see if we could maybe try a little bit of audio magic, which fascinates me, Jamy Ian Swiss, because when I think about it, you would almost think that eyes, vision is a necessary part of any magic trick.
Mr. SWISS: Well, that's not entirely true because one of the branches of magic that I engage in professionally is what magicians referred to as mentalism, which is basically the branch of magic that specializes in the illusions of mind reading and other sort of psychic phenomena. And that is a sort of more explicit case that's true of all magic, which is that ultimately magic happens only in the spectator's mind anyway.
Sitting here with Adam in the studio, I thought that one thing that might be useful on the radio is a bit of mystery in which the listening audiences will see exactly what Adam will see in front of me here because the props I'm going to use are completely invisible and imaginary. How does that sound?
SMITH: That sounds great.
Mr. SWISS: Great. So Adam, what I'm going to present you with here from my pocket now in my hand, as you can clearly see, are three imaginary coins in my hand. Can you see them?
Mr. GOPNIK: I see three imaginary coins.
Mr. SWISS: Imaginary coins.
Mr. GOPNIK: I see…
Mr. SWISS: And, of course, you already know but for the purpose of the listeners at home and for Robert, I will identify them as a quarter and a nickel and a dime. No doubt you knew that already.
Mr. GOPNIK: Mm-hmm.
Mr. SWISS: And if you can reach out with your left hand and take one of them. And what did you take?
Mr. GOPNIK: I took the quarter.
Mr. SWISS: That's fine. And I'll keep these. And if you would just flip that coin and catch it, and sort of, you know…
Mr. GOPNIK: All right. I am…
Mr. SWISS: …snap it on to your hand there.
Mr. GOPNIK: …flipping the imaginary coin and catching it…
Mr. SWISS: Great.
Mr. GOPNIK: …right there.
Mr. SWISS: And tell me what did you get?
Mr. GOPNIK: Heads.
Mr. SWISS: Heads. Excellent. You took the quarter, you flipped it, it came out heads. I didn't handle it, you handled the imaginary coin. We didn't arrange anything in advance.
Mr. GOPNIK: No, we did not.
Mr. SWISS: What's sitting here on the counter between us is this envelope I've had here for quite some time…
Mr. GOPNIK: It is indeed.
Mr. SWISS: …which is a prediction I wrote before the show. And if you would just remove the card and read aloud to everyone what I wrote.
Mr. GOPNIK: It says, I swear to God, the quarter is heads.
Mr. SWISS: The quarter is heads.
Mr. GOPNIK: The quarter is heads.
SMITH: You did not arrange this ahead of time.
Mr. GOPNIK: Absolutely not. We didn't see it. This is at this time, the most astonished person. It says the quarter is heads.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. GOPNIK: That's beautiful.
SMITH: You know I want to ask how it's done but I will ask it in this way. Adam Gopnik, you're doing this article, you have this requirement as a journalist to look these people in the eye and say, how did you do it? Did you ask that question and did they kick you out?
Mr. GOPNIK: I did ask the question from time to time though I quickly learned that exposures, magicians refer to it, giving away a method is verboten. There's complicated kinds of decorum and diplomacy about it. Some methods are so familiar and so old that they sort of get - been exposed long ago, but magicians will defend the method in that way.
But the more important thing that I did learn was that the method is not the trick, to quote Jamy Ian Swiss, that is, that even if you knew the method of every trick you saw, you wouldn't be able to reproduce it that - and in fact, the tricks that I have learned through, be it hanging around magicians for that time and being with kid magicians and so on, one of the things I've learned is that once you know the method, you're sort of almost on the verge of being enraged by the simplicity - something that absolutely astounded you like this thing that Jamy just did (unintelligible) for me the quarter is heads.
When you find out, very often how it's done - sometimes when you find out how it's done, it's an absolutely amazing act of mental discipline and memorization, they're just hair-raising acts of mental acuity. And one of the things that magicians show is that the things we think are impossible - mental things we think are impossible often are possible. They're just difficult.
But on other occasions, the trick, the method is unbelievably dumb and obvious once you get it. And that's something else I think that magicians can teach us, which is that we are tend to be very unobservant. We tend to be unaware of just how simply we can be fooled. I know that's something that everybody, who engages in the exposure of fake psychics, points out, which is that very smart people (unintelligible) will say he never touched the envelope. In fact, he touched the envelope three times but you participated in the notion that he didn't.
SMITH: We are listening to Adam Gopnik from The New Yorker and Jamy Ian Swiss, a magician living in New York City. This is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.
Let's go to our callers. Again, we finally have a female magician on the line, Nicole(ph) from Portland, Oregon.
I feel like you have to give the response now.
NICOLE (Caller): Well, yeah, so I'm sort of your lone female magician, I guess, for the show. And I actually got my start watching the street performers in Boulder, Colorado because my parents were college students and we had no money to do anything else, and was totally, totally fascinated by watching these guys because there was all, you know, they got close sleight-of-hand kind of a stuff. And the person in my family who really kind of nurtured me was my aunt -another female, and she's a lot better than I am, actually.
SMITH: So when you hear all these theories about what men need to prove and their manhood and the transition to this, so what do you think about those theories?
NICOLE: I don't know.
(Soundbite of laughter)
SMITH: You just like the fact that they're fun tricks. Is that right?
NICOLE: Well, (Unintelligible) trick and I wonder if more women aren't part of it because women I think have a hard time - this is just a guess - fooling people or being dishonest. Yeah, there's some kind of bad about it.
Mr. GOPNIK: You know, my own feeling about watching it, and is obviously, it's in large part, a cultural stereotype and (unintelligible) cultural. They are not stereotypes, since they are cultural trend, tradition, prejudice, like all of such things, is changing and will change.
I do think that in our society, at least, in our particular civilization, it's true that there's a lot of burden put on 11, in 12-year-old boys to perform, to woo people, to begin to be socially adept. Women are naturally socially adept, in my experience, in a way that boys are not. And so magic like playing the guitar, for instance, is one of those things that gives you, at least, the illusion of being socially adept.
Jamy and I have had an argument about this for the last couple of years because I always have the sense that the truth is, is you can't woo anybody with a trick because they'll be, you know, if someone is paying attention to you, woman or man, who is about interested in you as they are going to get and that's what you work on. I was saying this to Jamy one night at a restaurant on the far Upper East Side and he immediately proceeded to attract a crowd of extremely attractive women of all kinds by doing magic at our table just between the two of us. So I maybe wrong about that.
Mr. SWISS: No further questions, you honor.
SMITH: Jamy Ian Swiss, always willing to prove the opposite. Thanks for your phone call, Nicole.
Let's go for one last short phone call from Brent(ph). Brent joins us from Lawrence, Kansas.
Hey, Brent, what was your first trick?
BRENT (Caller): I was 12 years old - can you guys hear me?
SMITH: Yes. Absolutely, go ahead.
BRENT: I was 12 years old when I saw the sponge ball routine, the Albert Goshman sponge balls in a shop in Colorado Springs. And I'd seen magic in shows and on television before but I think the experience of seeing it close up was much different having, you know, sponge balls split apart and multiply in my hands. It really got me hooked and I became an amateur and I still do magic to this day even though, currently I'm an attorney and I think some people find that a little bit disconcerting that I'm involved in that kind of dishonesty outside of my practice.
SMITH: Well, at least, the bar accepts that, so…
Mr. SWISS: Well, at least as a magician, you're an honest liar. First we promise to fool people and then we do it.
BRENT: That's true. I wondered if it's been your experience what I've seen, I mean, especially for magicians like Penn & Teller and James Randi that it seems like people that understand magic are generally a little bit more skeptical about things like, you know, claims of psychics or claims about religion or even claims in politics, and I wonder if it's your experience that magicians because of the way they learn about trickery and psychology and whatnot, do you believe that that sort of engenders a little bit more natural skepticism and…
Mr. SWISS: I want to say is I…
SMITH: Jamy, we have about a minute.
Mr. SWISS: I would say it's often true but not always. Importantly, there is a longstanding history of connection between magicians and critical thinking going back centuries; and of course very visible with Harry Houdini debunking the seance mediums of the 19th century and James Randi debunking psychics today. So there is a longstanding connection between the two although I wouldn't say that all magicians are innately skeptical either.
SMITH: Thank you very much for your call, Brent.
Adam Gopnik is a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. You can find his newest piece in the March 17th issue. Jamy Ian Smith(ph) is a magician who lives in New York City. You can read more about him in Adam Gopnik's article. He joined us also from the New York bureau.
Thank you both very much for being here and for the trick.
Mr. SWISS: Thanks for having us.
Mr. GOPNIK: It was a pleasure.
SMITH: Coming up, a new study estimates that one in four American adolescent girls are infected with a sexually transmitted infection. We'll take your questions next.
I'm Robert Smith. It's TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.
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