Magazine Editing

How a Legendary Magician Builds the World’s Greatest Illusions

There is a century-old magic trick that Jim Steinmeyer finds particularly fascinating. It involves a burglar, a safe, and mind-reading, and it unfolds like this: A group of random audience members file on stage and each place a personal possession inside a sturdy, commercial-model safe, out of view of the magician, Charles Morritt. The safe is locked before anyone looks inside, and after a beat, a burglar appears. The lock-picking bandit looks at the closed safe with a pair of field glasses and disappears. Moments later, a telegram arrives for Morritt. It’s from the master thief. It says, in essence, “I’ve decided not to crack that safe and steal the contents—it’s not worth my time. But here’s a list of everything inside.”

When the safe is opened, the list matches up, item for item.

How You’ve Been Conditioned to Love Conspiracy Theories

A smart conspiracy theorist never wears a tinfoil hat. According to research done by MIT students in 2005, tinfoil can actually amplify mobile communication and satellite frequencies, including those used by the Federal Communication Commission. Based on these findings, the researchers (jokingly) speculated that tinfoil hats were a ploy propagated by the government to track the thoughts of U.S. citizens.

So remove the headgear, but stay frosty: There are conspiracies happening around you all the time, and thanks to evolution, you probably have suspicions about dozens of them—even in the face of logic and reason. Conspiracies are fun to dissect and debate, but there's a deeper appeal: Humans have a natural skepticism toward authority and power.

When This Runner Faced Unspeakable Tragedy, Faith Kept Her Going

Distance running with an upper-body amputation is a war against instability. Muscles can strain so much to compensate for the missing limb that they contort your spine, misalign your shoulders, and worsen your imbalance. In 2017, Ashley Jones—then 15 years old—faced a punishing return to high school sports following the amputation of her right arm. On the soccer field, she had collisions so violent that the pain would bring her to the brink of blackout. Later, during cross-country runs, the jostling of the amputation site intensified her phantom pain—which she’d already rated 7 out of 10 on normal days—to as high as 10.

But Ashley couldn’t slow down.