| On Friday, Susan Orlean’s latest Afterword column recounted the life and career of Gloria Dea, a former chorus girl and actor who secured her place in history as “the first magician on the Vegas Strip.” Las Vegas is now “the epicenter of magic,” Orlean wrote, and Dea, who lived to a hundred, had—as a young, female pioneer—represented a “trifecta of exceptionalism.” In 1993, The New Yorker profiled another spellbinding performer: Ricky Jay, whom the writer Mark Singer described as “perhaps the most gifted sleight-of-hand artist alive.” At one point, Steve Freeman, a friend of the magician, recalled an encounter: “I walked into Ricky’s apartment one day, and I was wearing a shirt that Charlie Miller had given to Ricky and that Ricky had left at my house,” Freeman says. “I was returning it, but, just for fun, I had put it on. I took the shirt off, and Ricky said, ‘Oh, just leave it on the back of that chair.’ Then we started talking for a while and he said he wanted to show me a new trick. He spread the deck face up and told me to point to a card. I did, and then I gathered and shuffled and dealt them face up. There were only fifty-one. I didn’t see my card. And he said, ‘Oh, well, go over and look in the pocket of that shirt over there.’ And the card was in the shirt pocket.” In the course of Jay’s career, his conjurings would land him appearances on the “Tonight Show” and in the movies, and partnerships with performers including Steve Martin and Tina Turner. But Jay’s true magic derived only partly from what he could do onstage. He was also, Singer writes, an ardent scholar of the history and craft of magic, a collector of rare books and artifacts that in turn informed two beloved volumes he had authored. “His mission,” Singer writes, "is to reignite our collective sense of wonder.” The Profile achieves the same. | 
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