The Independent features the work of Graham Jones, an Anthropologists from MIT who studied the world of Professional magicians in Paris:
Graham Jones might not have been able to pull a rabbit out of a hat at a kids’ party, but he was going to have to make a pain au chocolat appear from nowhere for the Magic Circle of Paris. For five months, the softly spoken anthropologist from MIT, who hadn’t performed a magic trick since he was a child, worked hard to master the techniques needed to predict, Derren Brown-style, the pastry someone would choose and to build the props to make the chosen pastry appear on command in front of some of France’s greatest magicians.
At stake was an attempt to infiltrate the secret world of magic in Paris, the birthplace of modern magic and the only place in the world where magicians are subsidised by the state
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