The Archive
What used to be premium-only is going public in weekly stages. Past posts are being updated regularly, so check in.
Character Is a Contract: Why Every Mentalism Persona Inherits an Ethical Debt
October 18, 2025
A persona is not a costume. Most performers treat it like one, something you put on before the show and hang back up after, and...
The Callback: Structuring a Bizarre Magic Set So the Opening Pays Off the Close
September 12, 2025
A woman asked me, halfway through a private show in Okolona a few years back, why I'd mentioned her grandmother's ring at the start of...
Part 2 of 2 · The Convention Circuit
Part 2: How Online Communities Replaced the Convention Dealer Room
June 20, 2025
In Part 1: The Convention Circuit: How Magic Gatherings Built, and Gatekept, Bizarre Magic as a Genre, I wrote about the lecture hall and the...
Building the Out: Technical Contingencies Every Mentalism Effect Needs Before It Hits the Stage
May 22, 2025
A mentalist I know once had a spectator hand back the wrong envelope. Not sabotage, just an honest mistake, the kind that happens when a...
The Uncanny Valley of Belief: Why Almost Explainable Effects Unsettle Audiences More Than Impossible Ones
April 13, 2025
A fully impossible effect gets filed away in about four seconds. The audience says "how did he do that," laughs, moves on to their drink...
Pricing the Impossible: What a Private Bizarre Magic Booking Should Actually Cost
March 5, 2025
A client called me once wanting a "quick séance thing" for a dinner party. Twelve people, ninety minutes, candles already on the table. When I...
The Hits You Remember, the Misses You Forget: Confirmation Bias in Mentalism
January 24, 2025
Someone once told me, totally convinced, that I'd gotten "everything right" during a private event reading. I hadn't. I made six statements. Two hit, two...
The Placebo of Certainty: Why a Confident Wrong Guess Beats a Hesitant Right One
January 2, 2025
A performer stands in front of a room, closes his eyes, and says a name out loud. It's the wrong name. Doesn't matter. Nobody in...
Reading a Room That’s Already Turned: Performing Bizarre Magic to a Hostile Audience
September 23, 2024
A hostile room doesn't announce itself with heckling. It announces itself with silence, the wrong kind of silence, arms crossed, phones half up, a table...
Part 1 of 2 · The Convention Circuit
The Convention Circuit: How Magic Gatherings Built, and Gatekept, Bizarre Magic as a Genre
September 10, 2024
Bizarre magic did not grow up on television. It did not grow up in glossy trade magazines or viral clips. It grew up in windowless...
Part 1 of 2 · Reading the Body
Reading the Body Before the Mind: What Interrogation Trained Microexpression Work Actually Offers a Mentalist
August 29, 2024
A polygraph examiner and a bizarre magic performer both watch faces for a living. That's about where the resemblance ends. I've spent years reading books...
Words That Hold: The Craft of Mentalism Scripting and Why It Differs From Stage Patter
July 3, 2024
A magician can flub a line and the crowd laughs with him. A mentalist flubs the same kind of line and the whole room quietly...