Who Are You Making Magic For?

Everyone is a magician to someone

The Sorceress by Bartolomeo Guidobono, c. 1690. (public domain - Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University)

“Magic is never for yourself. It’s a gift you give other people.” — Brad Meltzer, 2024

When I was young, I remember being fascinated by magic shops — the kinds of places with decks of trick cards, metal linking rings, silk handkerchiefs, and other penumbrae magices.

How wonderful it would be, I imagined, to get an audience’s attention and amaze them with a trick I read about in some folded instruction manual that was jammed in the back of a package containing a fake finger guillotine.

Of course, the conjured image was always better than the conjurer himself, as I clumsily tried to pull off a David Copperfield-like deft move.

I’m not sure if it was more embarrassing for me or the small group of relatives who’d assembled in the living room fo…