Martin Gardner was an American popular mathematics and popular science writer, with interests also encompassing scientific skepticism, micromagic, philosophy, religion, and literature—especially the writings of Lewis Carroll, L. Frank Baum, and G. K. Chesterton. He is recognized as a leading authority on Lewis Carroll. The Annotated Alice, which incorporated the text of Carroll's two Alice books, was his most successful work and sold over a million copies. He had a lifelong interest in magic and illusion and was regarded as one of the most important magicians of the twentieth century. He was considered the doyen of American puzzlers. He was a prolific and versatile author, publishing more than 100 books.
Whole language is a discredited philosophy of the nature of reading that is based upon the premise that learning to read comes naturally to humans in the same way that learning to speak develops naturally. In assessing this claim, research psychologist Keith Stanovich asserted “The idea that learning to read is just like learning to speak is accepted by no responsible linguist, psychologist, or cognitive scientist in the research community”, while in a systematic review of the reading research literature, Louisa Moats concluded that “Almost every premise advanced by whole language about how reading is learned has been contradicted by scientific investigations.”
Derren Brown is an English mentalist, illusionist, and author. Since his television debut with Derren Brown: Mind Control in 2000, Brown has produced several other shows for the stage and television in both series and specials. His 2006 stage show Something Wicked This Way Comes and his 2012 show Svengali won him two Laurence Olivier Awards for Best Entertainment. He has also written books for magicians as well as the general public.
Daniel Keyes was an American writer who wrote the novel Flowers for Algernon. Keyes was given the Author Emeritus honor by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2000.
Mentalism is a performing art in which its practitioners, known as mentalists, appear to demonstrate highly developed mental or intuitive abilities. Performances may appear to include hypnosis, telepathy, clairvoyance, divination, precognition, psychokinesis, mediumship, mind control, memory feats, deduction, and rapid mathematics. Mentalists are sometimes categorized as psychic entertainers, although that category also contains non-mentalist performers such as psychic readers and bizzarists.
Paul Goodman was an American novelist, playwright, poet, literary critic, and psychotherapist, although now best known as a social critic and anarchist philosopher. Though often thought of as a sociologist, he vehemently denied being one in a presentation in the Experimental College at San Francisco State in 1964, and in fact said he could not read sociology because it was too often lifeless. The author of dozens of books including Growing Up Absurd and The Community of Scholars, Goodman was an activist on the pacifist Left in the 1960s and a frequently cited inspiration to the student movement of that decade. A lay therapist for a number of years, he was a co-founder of Gestalt therapy in the 1940s and 1950s.
Michael Moschen is an American juggler. He received a Fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation in 1990, has appeared on TV on PBS, and did ads for Motorola. Cirque du Soleil commissioned Moschen to create a new work for their permanent theatrical circus in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Muscle reading, also known as "Hellstromism", "Cumberlandism" or "contact mind reading", is a technique used by mentalists to determine the thoughts or knowledge of a subject, the effect of which tends to be perceived as a form of mind reading. The performer can determine many things about the mental state of a subject by observing subtle, involuntary responses to speech or any other stimuli. It is closely related to the ideomotor effect, whereby subtle movements made without conscious awareness reflect a physical movement, action or direction which the subject is thinking about. The term "muscle reading" was coined in the 1870s by American neurologist George M. Beard to describe the actions of mentalist J. Randall Brown, an early proponent of the art.
The Wheeler Dealers is a 1963 romantic comedy film directed by Arthur Hiller and starring James Garner, Lee Remick, Phil Harris, Chill Wills, Jim Backus, and Patricia Crowley. It was produced by Martin Ransohoff and distributed by Metro Goldwyn Mayer. The film's screenplay was written by George Goodman and Ira Wallach, based on Goodman's 1959 novel of the same name.
Jamie King is an American creative director, choreographer, and producer whose work directing concert tours for pop stars has grossed over two billion dollars.
Villard, also known as Villard Books, is a publishing imprint of Random House, one of the largest publishing companies in the world. It was founded in 1983. Villard began as an independent imprint of Random House and is currently a sub-imprint of Ballantine Books, itself an imprint of Random House. It was named after a Stanford White brownstone mansion on Madison Avenue that was the home of Random House for twenty years.
Magic, along with its subgenres of, and sometimes referred to as illusion, stage magic or close up magic is a performing art in which audiences are entertained by staged tricks or illusions of seemingly impossible feats using natural means. It is to be distinguished from paranormal magic which are effects claimed to be created through supernatural means. It is one of the oldest performing arts in the world.
H.M. Naqvi is a novelist who is the author of Home Boy, winner of the inaugural DSC Prize for South Asian Literature.
Hadji Ali was a vaudeville performance artist, thought to be of Egyptian descent, who was famous for acts of controlled regurgitation. His best-known feats included water spouting, smoke swallowing, and nut and handkerchief swallowing followed by disgorgement in an order chosen by the audience. Ali's most famous stunt, and the highlight of his act, was drinking copious amounts of water followed by kerosene, and then acting by turns as a human flamethrower and fire extinguisher as he expelled the two liquids onto a theatrical prop. While these stunts were performed, a panel of audience members was invited to watch the show up close to verify that no trickery was employed.
John Randall Brown was an American mentalist of the Victorian era, and was one of the first nationally popular mentalists of his age. By some accounts, Brown was the first to publicly perform a mind-reading act in the United States, in 1873. He was born in Saint Louis, Missouri.
Samuel Gilbert "Sam" Scott was an American daredevil who was killed performing a stunt at Waterloo Bridge in London, England.
David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants is a non-fiction book written by Malcolm Gladwell and published by Little, Brown and Company on October 1, 2013. The book focuses on the probability of improbable events occurring in situations where one outcome is greatly favored over the other. The book contains many different stories of these underdogs who wind up beating the odds, the most famous being the story of David and Goliath. Despite generally negative reviews, the book was a bestseller, rising to #4 on The New York Times Hardcover Non-fiction chart, and #5 on USA Today's Best-Selling Books.
The book test is a classic magic trick used by mentalists to demonstrate telepathy-like effects. The name refers to its early use as a test of mental powers.
Mark Jay Singer is an American journalist and a staff writer at The New Yorker.
