Five Years of Tuesdays

Every Tuesday since April 2021, Sleight School has hosted a live study session. An hour on Zoom. A topic, a guest, or an open table. Sometimes deep dives into a single sleight or plot. Sometimes wide-ranging conversations about craft, theory, books, and the life of a working magician. Always recorded. Always archived.

As of this writing, that archive holds 260 sessions.

That's over 260 hours of material. A library that started with Session #1 , Back to Basics , and has kept going without a break, week after week, year after year.

What the Sessions Cover

The range is the thing. Scroll through the archive and you'll find sessions dedicated to single subjects: Triumph. The Zarrow Shuffle. Oil and Water. Cards Across. Color Changes. Slydini. Larry Jennings. Cards to Pocket. Gambling sleight of hand. Coin assemblies. The center tear. Paddle tricks. Invisible thread. Forcing. All about aces.

You'll also find sessions that open up into broader territory. Favorite books. Drills and rehearsals. Tricks with nothing. Show and Tell sessions where members bring their current work to the table and talk it through together. Guest sessions where someone from outside the regular group comes in to share their expertise.

Recent sessions have covered puppet magic, the work of Aurelio Paviato, adaptations, and a long discussion about revelations as a plot. One session was built around haunted house special effects, which opened into a conversation about Pepper's Ghost and the physics of illusion. Another started with a question about mnemonic stacks and turned into a discussion about convention culture, teaching philosophy, and what it means to find your own material.

That's how these sessions work. They start somewhere specific and go where the conversation takes them.

The AI Summaries

Starting with more recent sessions, each post includes an AI-generated summary of the conversation. These aren't transcripts. They're structured overviews that capture what was discussed, who said what, and where the conversation went.

Here's a sample from Session #258 on Adaptations:

The group discussed Pepper's Ghost, a Blue Room project involving real performers, and the principles behind making illusions work in non-traditional spaces. Mark Brown talked about his time as a bungee-corded scareactor at a haunted house in Nashville. David told a story about Jerry Andrus's floating head illusion that had to be retired because it frightened Halloween visitors too much. The conversation moved from practical stagecraft to the theory of why certain illusions register differently depending on context.

That's one session. One hour. One Tuesday.

Session #259 on Forcing covered Axel Heklau's approach to the 3Fly, a conversation about the Mnemonica and Aronson stacks, and a demonstration of spirit glass card reveal glasses. Session #257 on the Center Tear included a long discussion about the Blackpool convention, what makes a good magic convention versus a competitive one, and the difference between educational content and spectacle.

Every one of these sessions is searchable inside the community. If you want to find every session that touched on Triumph, or forcing, or coin work, or the center tear, you can search for it. The archive is indexed. The summaries make it navigable in a way that hours of raw video never could be.

What the Archive Represents

Two hundred and sixty sessions. Five years of consecutive weekly gatherings. That's not a course or a curriculum. It's something harder to find: an ongoing conversation among people who are serious about this art, showing up week after week to think about it together.

Some of the sessions are historical. Session #2 was dedicated to Larry Jennings. Session #4 to Slydini. Session #17 to gambling sleight of hand. These were not survey courses. They were conversations among practitioners who had studied these people and wanted to talk about what they found.

Some of the sessions are practical. Specific sleights worked through in real time, questions answered, approaches compared.

Some of the sessions are harder to categorize. Conversations about the life of a working magician, the ethics of originality, the challenge of finding your own voice, the question of what separates a good trick from a great one.

All of it is in the archive. All of it is searchable. All of it is waiting.

This Is What a Tuesday Looks Like

The Tuesday Study Sessions don't stop. Session #260 happened last week. Session #261 is scheduled for next Tuesday. Whatever the topic is, someone will show up to think about it out loud with a room full of people who care about the same things.

That's been true every week since April 2021. It will be true next Tuesday.

If you want to be in the room, the door is open.

Sleight School is an online community for magicians at every level. Browse free tutorials, connect with instructors, and start learning at sleightschool.com.