Rules of the Club

June 21, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Alex Stone was expelled from the Society of American Magicians.  In 2008, Stone wrote an article for Harper’s

The Magic Olympics:  With tricks explained!

Explaining tricks to the public is a no-no.  The first rule of magic is: you don’t talk about magic, at least not to laymen.* 

In this article, you blatantly exposed the secret, not only of your act but the acts of several other magicians as well.  By doing so, you have acted in opposition to the SAM’s Code of Ethics and Oath . . .We hereby ask for your resignation . . . .

But it’s not quite so simple.

Magicians make a strange deal with their audiences.  They do everything they can to convince the audience of something that is not true – that they have the power to makes things appear, disappear, levitate, or change form, that they have to power to predict the future and read minds.  Yet while they claim to have these powers, they must also convey the idea that they do not have these powers and that what they are doing is “just a trick.”

The key clause in the tacit contract between performer and audience is voluntary deception – “fooling.”  We in the audience know that we are being fooled.  We know that the coin did not really appear out of thin air, that the girl was not actually sawed in half and then restored.  The magician has fooled us into seeing it that way.**

Performers who claim actual supernatural powers, who refuse to acknowledge that they are fooling us, are no longer protected by the professional rule against exposing secrets.   Magicians like The Amazing Randi or Penn and Teller take great pleasure in exposing psychics and healers who are using standard magic-act techniques (often not very skillfully).

But what about this?



The video is from “America’s Got Talent,” but Kevin James performed it at the Magic Olympics that Stone wrote about for Harper’s.

A website devoted to optical illusions had this to say:

Kevin James . . . sawing a man in half has to be one of the best magic optical illusions I have seen in a long time. . . . At first I thought this could be done with animatronics. . . . The part that astonished me was once the patient was stapled back together he jumped up in the air and walked off stage; this is currently not possible by todays robotics. . . . . It is beyond me as of how this trick was pulled off.

Stone too was baffled when he saw this illusion at the Magic Olympics in Stockholm.  Things soon became clearer.

I board a small plane back to the States. Several of the artists and competitors are on the flight, all looking as haggard as I do, and feel. . .  . ln the first row sits the illusionist of last night's sawed-in-half routine, a meaty, florid man with triangular eyebrows and thin red lips. His trick has been gnawing at me since I saw it. No boxes. No mirrors. How? Now, suddenly, I understand. Sitting next to him, in the aisle seat, is a slender, dark-skinned man who looks normal in all respects save one: his body terminates just below the waist. No legs. No hips. Nothing.

The “America’s Got Talent” clip is edited.  The tables are wheeled offstage and back on in order to switch the half-man for a full one (the one who springs up from the table at the end).*** But the baffling stage of the routine (baffling if you hadn’t seen the guy on the airplane seat) is the sawed-in-half part. 

Maybe that is what allowed Stone to expose the secret of the trick.  The magician was not fooling us.  The man really was, in effect, sawed in half.  It isn’t magic (“Can I, too, buy a half-man at my local magic store?” Stone asks).  So exposing the secret is perhaps not such a clear violation of the norms. 

 (Stone’s new book Fooling Houdini is reviewed in the Times today, here.)
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* This is the term magicians often use to refer to non-magicians.

** Stage actors and audiences make the same deal.  For example, the Times critic complained about Philip Seymour Hoffman in Death of a Salesman: “as a complete flesh-and-blood being, this Willy seems to emerge only fitfully.”  But suppose that Willy did emerge fully as “a complete flesh-and-blood being” and that we wept at his death.  After the final curtain, Hoffman would come out, we would applaud, and he would bow  – a ritual that says in effect that he was just fooling us.  He was not really a salesman, and he did not really die eight times a week.

***  (A video of the full 5-minute routine is here.)

Me and Him Say It That Way

June 19, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Planet Money had an excellent podcast  about the natural experiment that Oregon created when it could allow only 10,000 additional people onto Medicaid.  Many thousands more qualified but had to be turned away, thus providing a control group for researcher Katherine Baicker.  The study showed that Medicaid does work.  People on Medicaid were healthier and happier than those who were turned away from the program.

That result did not surprise me.  But one sentence from reporter Alex Blumberg did. 

It is the perfect control group that Katherine Baicker had been waiting for her entire career.  Her and her team got in touch with Oregon and went about designing a study . . .  [it comes at about 3:25 in the podcast]

Not to go all prescriptivist or anything, but “her and her team got in touch”??

I’m not sure what other stories I might have heard by Blumberg.  But him and his team are getting pretty casual with English grammar.  Are them and other reporters also the kind to say “she told Alex and I about her research”? 

I’m from the generation that was taught to use the same pronoun in a compound form that you would use if it stood alone.  If you wouldn’t say, “Her got in touch with Oregon,” then don’t say, “Her and her team got in touch with Oregon.” Ditto, mutatis mutandis, for “she told Alex and I.”  But us and our kind are out of step.

Hat tip to The Language Log for the New Yorker cartoon, which is from 2010.  But the “between you and I” world is hardly new.  It has had a resurgence in the last 20 years, but as the Log’s Arnold Zwicky pointed out (here)

it’s safe to say that the rise of “between you and I” in Late Modern English goes back at least 150 or 160 years, not 20.

He wrote that in 2005, well before the birth of Google Ngrams, which now provide further support for his history of  “between you and I.”

(Click on the graph for a larger view.)

Overqualified

June 18, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

What can I do with a Ph. D. in industrial chemistry?  Not that I have a lot of students asking me that question, but here’s one answer.  Get a job as a street sweeper in Rome.

Reuters assigned photographers to do portraits of people who are, shall we say, overqualified for the jobs they could find.  The Atlantic has posted seventeen of these. 

I was reminded of the duelling Tumblr pages.  We Are the 99 Percent, started during the early days of the Occupy movement and showed the brief biographies of people like Francesco Foglia (the streetsweeper above) except that they were all Americans.  They often mentioned their student debt, their medical costs, and other difficulties that came with unemployment or with work in low-paying jobs which provided no healthcare.

We Are the 53% was created in response.*  The typical narrative there was one of hard work leading to success, often with explicit commands to the 99% that they should stop complaining and get a job.

A regular theme underlying the 99% is a sense of having been conned.  They’d been told that if they got an education and were willing to work, they would be better off.  But now they can find only menial jobs or none. From their viewpoint, something is wrong with the system.

The 53% have jobs and presumably incomes high enough to be in the tax-paying range.  They attribute their success to their own virtue, so by implication those less successful must be less virtuous. 

If this were a round of musical chairs with ten players, the nine people who fought their way to a seat might well be attributing their seated status to their own abilities.  The tenth, looking at the whole scene from his standing position, might see lack of success as having something to do with the ratio of chairs to people.  “Nonsense,” say the seated ones. “I got my chair thanks to my own efforts, so stop complaining.” 

Of course, in musical chairs, those who are now seated will soon be chairless and get a different view of the game.  In the real world, unemployment rates do not keep rising.  Still, something like one-third of small businesses fail in the first year.  Fewer than half last four years.  I wonder if those entrepreneurs have different ideas about what makes for success or failure than do the 40-45%. 

(The chart based on SBA data, is from Small Business Trends.)

Maybe the successful ones knew more about how to run a business, unlike, say, Jessica Mazza, another in the Reuters photo exhibit, who has a degree in painting and business management from Ball State. She probably did not invest in that education thinking that she would wind up working in a diner.

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*The name comes from the statistic that 47% of the population have incomes so low that they owe no federal income tax.

The Economy Is Lousy – But Where?

June 15, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross-posted at Sociological Images


What’s familiar isn’t so bad, even if it’s bad. 

One of the things I remember from my days in the crim biz is that people’s perceptions of crime don’t have a lot to do with actual crime rates. This was back in the high-crime decades, and people were more afraid of crime than they are now.  But people felt safer in their own neighborhoods than in other neighborhoods, even when their own neighborhoods had a higher crime rate. 

These were the days when I would give someone directions to my building – “Get off the IRT* at 72nd St. . . . .” – and they would often ask, “Is it safe?” 

“Of course it’s safe.  It’s my neighborhood,” I would say, “I live here. I ought to know.” Yet when I would go to a party in the East 20s or, God forbid, Brooklyn, I would emerge from the subway and follow the directions with a certain sense of apprehension and caution. 

Apparently, the same link between far and fear holds true for people’s perceptions of economic well-being.  A recent Gallup poll asked people how the economy was in places ranging from their own city or area to the world generally.  The closer to home, the better the economy.  The farther from home, the lower the percent of people rating economic conditions as excellent or good.

(Click on a graph for a larger view.)

And the farther from home, the higher the percent of people rating economic conditions as “only fair” or poor.

Republicans were the most pessimistic about the economy, regardless of location.  Democrats were the most sanguine, with Independents in between. The graph shows the percent who rated the economy positively minus the percent who rated it Poor.

This obviously has nothing to do with familiarity but with contempt.  Apparently, for Republicans, a Democrat – especially a Kenyan socialist Democrat – in the White House means that the economy must be bad everywhere.

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* These old subway line designations – IRT, BMT, IND – are no longer in official use.  But when did the MTA jettison them?  If you know the answer, please tell me.

UPDATE, June 22:  Andrew Gelman has formatted the data as line graphs, making the comparisons and trends clearer.  He has also added his own observations – things I wish I had known or thought of.