Ricky Jay & Susan Boyle

Ricky Jay has an op-ed in today’s NYT on the Susan Boyle phenomenon. It’s interesting – there may not be many people alive who know more about the history of freak shows and public oddities than Jay – but it’s really just an excuse to point you towards Mark Singer’s terrific New Yorker profile of Jay. It begins:

The playwright David Mamet and the theatre director Gregory Mosher Taffirm that some years ago, late one night in the bar ofthe Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Chicago, this happened:

Ricky Jay, who is perhaps the most gifted sleight-of-hand artist alive, was per- forming magic with a deck of cards. Also present was a friend of Mamet and Mosher’s named Christ Nogulich, the director of food and beverage at the hotel. After twenty minutes of disbelief-suspending manipulations, Jay spread the deck face up on the bar counter and asked Nogulich to concentrate on a specific card but not to reveal it.