How to fool Houdini–and avoid fooling yourself | Literally Psyched. Alex Stone's "Fooling Houdini," out today from HarperCollins. Photo credit: www.foolinghoudini.com. Last week, Alex Stone taught Wall Street Journal readers the world round how to steal a watch. It’s probably a safe bet that fellow magicians were none too pleased. Nor are they likely to have gotten a kick out of Stone’s new book, Fooling Houdini (out today), where the watch theft maneuver is but one of the effects that the amateur magician so shamelessly reveals. Shamelessly, that is, if you’re playing by the traditional rules of magic conduct, where, as Stone puts it, “exposure is seen as a form of vandalism,” something that “deadens the mystery and tarnishes the brand, shrinking all the grandeur in magic to the scale of an intellectual puzzle.”
But does it really? Secrecy, Stone argues, makes magic look finite, old, and stagnant—a washed-up pastime that is afraid of change, of criticism, of anything that might threaten its ascendance. That principle holds true far outside of magic. La Double Vie de Vermeer: Amazon.fr: Luigi Guarnieri, Marguerite Pozzoli. RMN.