The Archive
What used to be premium-only is going public in weekly stages. Past posts are being updated regularly, so check in.
The Performer’s Guide to Pendulum Divination: History, Science, and the Art of the Swing
April 1, 2024
No card trick does this. A small weight hangs from a chain between your fingers. Cold brass, maybe, or polished crystal. Dead still. Then, without...
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 Hand That Writes Itself: A History of Automatic Writing in Séance and Stage Work
February 1, 2024
A woman's hand starts moving before she tells it to. She isn't trying to write anything, she says so herself, but the pen keeps dragging...
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 Ghost Hunters Effect: How Paranormal Reality TV Reshaped What Audiences Expect From a Séance
December 5, 2023
A sitter walked into a private event in the Louisville area a few years back already holding her phone up, recording for what she called...
Reading the Room in Real Time, Adjusting a Bizarre Magic Set Without Breaking the Frame
November 10, 2023
A room lies to you before the show even starts. The promoter tells you the crowd skews older, reflective, ready for slow reveals. Then forty...
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...