The Archive
What used to be premium-only is going public in weekly stages. Past posts are being updated regularly, so check in.
Vertex Reconsidered: Why a Single Point of Contact Still Fools Working Mentalists
May 3, 2024
Most performers reach for complexity when they want to feel impressive. That's backwards, and it's the reason so many "advanced" effects fall apart the moment...
Part 1 of 2 · The Center Tear
The Center Tear: A Design History of Mentalism’s Most Important Move
March 22, 2024
There is a moment in every strong billet routine where the paper touches your hands and something happens that no camera in the room can...
The Confederate Question: Working with a Plant in Modern Mentalism
February 22, 2024
Every working mentalist has heard the accusation at least once, usually from another magician who wants to sound clever at a bar. "That's not real...
The Mentalist’s Memory: Mnemonic Systems and the Performance of Impossible Recall
January 8, 2024
A performer stands before a room of strangers. Someone calls out a word. Then another. Then thirty more, tossed out in no order at all,...
Part 4 of 4 · The Mentalism Persona
Part 4: Where the Mask Meets the Method, Connecting Persona to the Ethics of Belief
December 26, 2023
Part 3 covered the moment your persona puts you in an ethical bind you never signed up for. If you haven't read it, start here:...
The Return Engagement Problem: Managing Repeat Audiences, Memory, and the Illusion of Fresh Impossibility
October 18, 2023
There's a moment I've experienced more than once at a private event in Louisville. You walk in, you're setting up, and someone across the room...
The Specificity Problem: How the Claims Your Persona Makes Create Obligations You Did Not Consent To
October 1, 2023
I don't claim to have this figured out. I've built personas that made promises I didn't mean to make, and I've sat with the consequences...
The Dual Act: Two-Person Telepathy, Coded Systems, and the Vanishing Format That Changed Modern Mentalism
September 2, 2023
Two people. No visible signal between them that anyone could verify. An audience of seven million listening on BBC Radio in 1949, and a woman...
The Six Faces of Belief: Common Performer Archetypes and What Each One Actually Signals
August 8, 2023
Every performer is already playing a character. That's the part most discussions about mentalism persona skip past entirely. Before you choose a costume, before you...
The Book Test Reconsidered: Construction, Psychology, and Why No Other Effect Generates the Same Silence
July 23, 2023
Most performers who do book tests can't tell you why the effect works. They know it lands. They know the room goes quiet in a...
Part 3 of 4 · The Mentalism Persona
Part 3: The Promise You Didn’t Mean to Make, When the Persona Puts You in Ethical Situations You Never Planned For
June 30, 2023
The previous installment in this series, Part 2: The Mask That Makes Promises, made the case that your mentalism persona doesn't just shape how you...
The Body in the Dark: Physical Phenomena and the Case for Bringing Manifestations Back to the Modern Seance
March 27, 2023
I've sat in rooms where a table moved and nobody wanted to leave. Not because the show was especially polished. Because something had changed in...