The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery

If magic is just magicians doing card tricks to impress other magicians—I’m not interested in that anymore. I don’t want magic that looks real. What I want are real things that feel like magic.”

At the heart of the Too Perfect theory is the insight that magic works best when the illusions it creates are open-ended enough to invite the viewer into a credibly imperfect world. Magic is the dramatization of explanation more than it is the engineering of effects. In every art, the Too Perfect theory helps explain why people are more convinced b

Poe’s deductive account of the Turk, with its focus on the minutiae of performance and deception, became the model for his later detective stories, the first ever of their kind.

Keyser Söze

Dan Rocker’s hard-to-learn lesson—that no one really notices even eccentric behavior, that you can mostly follow your star, or your zipper, without raising the eyebrows or attention of the Others, who are following their own—was true here, as it is everywhere.

Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, and author of the best basic explanatory tome on Darwinism, Why Evolution Is True

We live trapped within a self that makes its own dimensions, its own axes, of pleasure and pain. To honor our discomforts at our body’s insistence is to honor our selves. A soul is simply the part that lies within the intersecting axes of pleasure and pain and self-knowledge. It sprays out into the world, if we let it.

To my bliss, it was an old favorite: Sinatra singing “Fly Me to the Moon,” with the Basie Orchestra, decorated with period jazz flute played by Frank Wess, the underknown reed player who more or less invented the sound of the jazz flute, a thing I had learned from the years when I edited Whitney Balliett’s great jazz writing. (Trained as a flautist

it is, I’ve come to believe, the most sustaining feeling. I know how to do this, and this is the thing I know how to do.