Genii readers of a certain age might have heard the name Micah Lasher. Back in the 1990s, he was a well-known 12-year-old magician with a book deal. Today, Lasher, who holds a position in the New York State Assembly, is running in the Democratic primary for New York City’s 12th congressional seat.
It’s a crowded field that includes Jack Schlossberg (John F. Kennedy’s grandson), George Conway (the ex-husband of Republican Kellyanne Conway), and Alex Bores, another State Assembly member whose platform focuses on regulating AI.
Lasher’s magic background, however, got him an article in The Atlantic. It’s written by Joel Stein, the researcher on 1996’s The Magic of Micah Lasher: More Than Fifty Tricks That Will Amaze and Delight Everyone—Including You. Lasher (well, Lasher’s dad) ultimately had to fire Stein since he wasn’t great at finding “magical tidbits.” Stein hadn’t seen Lasher since, and Lasher moved away from magic soon after because the art “became very much a part of my identification and it could crowd out other things.”
Joel Stein
Lasher did bring out some playing cards during his interview, however, and suitably impressed Stein. “I clenched coins in my fist that seeped into the ether. Cards sitting on the table in front of me changed faces. If he had done this for me at any other time in human history, I would have burned him at the stake,” he writes.
The article also shares Lasher’s answer to how magic and politics share similarities, specifically on how magicians and politicians start with an end goal and then work backward. “There is a way that I could walk into this diner, talk to you for 30 minutes, and make myself disappear,” Lasher explained. “It’s simply a function of figuring out the mechanics. In policy making, I found that one of the greatest impediments to changemaking is that there’s a ton of self-limitation, risk aversion, and lack of imagination. Spending years as a kid looking at things that were impossible with the presumption that there was a way to do it was a pretty good discipline for policymaking.”