On the first weekend of January, my partner, Ann Coleman, and I took my twin stepsons, Dexter and Grayson, now 14 years old, to Los Angeles for a three-day adventure, in the concluding days of their winter break before returning to ninth grade. This was the “J-Pa Knows A Guy” road trip (a sort of running family joke about me), that included magic, music, meals and more.

Nominations are now being accepted for work completed in 2017 for the Allan Slaight Awards. Each year the ASA awards a total of $50,000 recognizing outstanding achievements in the pursuit of the impossible across five different categories:

The seventeenth gathering of the New England Magic Collectors Association is coming up this fall in Westborough, Massachusetts.

One last devilish addition to the Screening Room for 2017...

While Vernon’s focus was on sleight-of-hand magic with playing cards and other small objects, his vision was such that it would eventually impact the entirety of performance magic, from its largest stage illusions down the smallest feat performed with a single coin.

"When it comes to card magic at the dawn of the twenty-first century, it’s the Spaniards’ world, and we just live in it. ... Woody Aragón is an innovative thinker about card magic, deeply influenced by his mentor Tamariz, but like a number of these creative acolytes, he has developed a substantial body of original work, and is an accomplished performer in live venues and on television in his native Spain."

Magicana has added a new archive of films of magicians, shot between 1976 and 1981 by Canadian collector Larry Thornton. In this Take Two, I have selected nine newly discovered vintage films, featuring six previous Take Two subjects, with links to the original essays to guide you along the way.

Nearly twenty years ago, I was able to collaborate with my friend, filmmaker Daniel Zuckerbrot, on a profile of Dai Vernon for Canadian television. At the time, I believed that Vernon was the most influential magician of the twentieth century...