Conjuring for a Cure Virtual Fundraiser

Last night, I got to host Conjuring for a Cure, a virtual fundraiser put on by the Hat & Rabbit Club of Toronto raising money for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation.

In the end, twenty magicians from age two-and-a-half to age ninety-six teamed up to share magic virtually safely from home. While we were in the middle of planning earlier in the fall, they instituted stricter safety measures (ending indoor dining, limiting gathering size) and everything online is so different, so we didn’t know how things would go and we set a very modest goal of $500.

We ended the evening at over $5,500 and people to continue to see the archived broadcast and donate.

I want to thank all of the magicians who donated their time: Jonah Babins, David Ben, Ian Crawford, Matt DiSero, Shawn Farquhar, Gerry Frenette, Robert Herd, Lulu Lin, Patrick Nemeth, Marty Papernick, David Peck, Jeff Pinsky, Gordon Precious, Khanya Rubushe, Ari Soroka, Ben Train, Glenn West, “Brookalini” Westfall, Mark Wicken, Andrew Woo.

You can still watch the show for the next ten days here:

And of course donations are still being accepted.

Virtual Experiences with AirBnB

We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve teamed up to deliver a magical virtual experience with AirBnB. Now instead of staying at someone else’s home, you get to bring the magic home to your own

The program is designed to give smaller group a chance to reconnect online and participate in a new and fun activity. (After all, virtual magic didn’t even exist before the spring!) Multiple households can join in from anywhere in the world, but it’s still a private event, limited to just the people you invite. Spots are available now, on a first-come, first-served basis.

It started out weird, but over the past few months, we’ve been having a tremendous amount of fun performing for audiences virtually. The shows are fully live and interactive. Instead of tuning into a livestream, you get to keep your microphone on and participate the whole way through. This is especially true when we do virtual get-togethers for smaller groups of family and friends.

Feel free to take advantage of this opportunity to Bring Magic Home, or contact us if you have any questions.

Conjuring for a Cure

This Thursday, I’ll be hosting a an online show raising money for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation. Fifteen other magicians will be sharing magic virtually from home hoping to make cancer disappear.

We currently accepting donations and have already raised over $800. If you have a moment to make a donation — any amount you think is acceptable — it would be greatly appreciated.

You can bookmark the video below and watch live along with us, Thursday, December 3 at 8PM Eastern.

The show is being put on by the Sid Lorraine Hat & Rabbit Club, a secret club for magicians that’s been around since 1942. We have been meeting online on Zoom since the start of the pandemic and wanted to have a bit of fun this holiday season even though we can’t get together in person.

Is That Your Card: The Math Behind It

If you’ve seen at least one card trick in your life, you’ve probably seen this one. You pick out a card, put it back magicians rummages through the deck, pulls out a card, exclaims, “Is this your card?” That one.

When I was younger, I studied math at the University of Toronto and so I loved this explanation by UK math teacher, author and comedian, Matt Parker about the math behind about guessing what card someone chose. Because as it turns out that with just about everything to do with probability and statistics, that our intuitions are almost always wrong. And not just a little bit wrong, but wrong by a lot.

Now of course no sensible magician would do this trick by guessing. There has to be something else going on. But they might pretend they were guessing for dramatic effect. You never can trust those magicians.

James Randi (1928-2020)

Over the weekend, we lost a celebrated magic icon: James “The Amazing” Randi. Randall James Hamilton Zwinge was born in Toronto. On multiple interviews, I heard him discuss getting on the bus and going to see Harry Blackstone Sr. in theatre.

Throughout his life, he was an inspiration to many. He earned his living as a magician and escape artist and even provided behind the scenes consultation for Alice Cooper’s tour.

He went on to become one of the world’s foremost paranormal investigators, and helped thousands, if not millions of people help think more critically about the world around them. He preferred “investigator” instead of the more inflammatory “debunker” used by the media, because “debunking” implies that you have already made up your mind and aren’t open to new evidence. He was one of the luminaries that abused phrase “I want to keep an open mind, just not so open my brains fall out.”

In that role as investigator, he founded the James Randi Educational Foundation. The foundation offered a famed “Million Dollar Prize” for anyone who could demonstrate psychic, paranormal or extrasensory phenomena under mutually agreed upon controlled conditions. Many applied, none ever succeeded.

He worked on something called “Project Alpha” where he got two young magicians insinuated into a parapsychology lab so they could be tested for ESP. The magicians were on their honour: if anyone ever asked if they were just doing tricks, they had to answer honestly. The researchers never asked — again, they were working towards their desired predetermined conclusion — and found out with the rest of the world at a press conference.

You can see his take on science, skepticism and investigating the paranormal in this clip that was just released by Michael Shermer from a lecture in 1992 at CalTech:

Magicians like Randi are extremely important to me. While technically I was a math major, I always feel as though I was brought as a scientists — reading the popular books by Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins — and when you care about truth, there’s always a little voice in the back of your head that’s not quite on board with magic — which is essentially carefully crafted deception. But you could put it pejoratively and say it’s lying for a living.

And it’s lying in a way that’s different from acting. Magic tends to have a much more academic feel to it, like a science demonstration. After all, if you want people to be impressed when you escape from the box, it helps if you give them time to examine it carefully to understand how sturdy it is. That amount of exposition can make it feel like you are doing magic “for real” — who will take what we do as proof of the supernatural or that we are in league with the devil. It was people like Randi that showed that you can do magic in an intellectually responsible and grownup way where you still get all the fun of the illusion without giving shelter to the wing-nuts.

Of course, he didn’t stop there. He went on to come out as gay when he was into his eighties. Old magicians can learn new tricks.

In 2014, he was the feature of a full-length documentary The Honest Liar, which you can track down and stream in various places.

The magic community mourns the lost of one of our great role models.

David Copperfield on some of his most well-known Illusions

Almost everyone grew up getting to watch one famous magician on television. In the 70s and 80s, that was Canadian Doug Henning. In the 80s and 90s, that was David Copperfield. For over a decade, David defined for the world what it meant to be a magician!

Here with GQ, he revisits some of his most famous illusions, in a fairly long interview:

David is still performing in Las Vegas at the MGM Grand Hotel.