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On the cover of Genii this month is Tom Gagnon, a man of many talents. Now in his seventies, he has spent the last 40 years doing a deep dive into card techniques using a ribbon spread. Stated coldly like that, it sounds about as exciting as warm ice cream, but in fact there’s brilliance at work here. Tom does things that are radically different which deeply fool magicians. You don’t see any monkey business, and I’ll prove it to you. In addition to the story, written by Jon Racherbaumer, we’re printing three items of Tom’s. Watch the videos before you read the methods.

Columns this month? We got ’em. Al Schneider does some thinking about styles of magic and then explains an exciting handling of “Expansion of Texture”; Hannibal goes west, part 2, in which he enters B-movie hell in real life; John Bannon smacks the one-ahead principle upside the head with his routine “Infinitum”; Mike Caveney introduces us to Charles Carter’s son, and the phrase “assititus”; Andi Gladwin goes pro on the subject of “bootstrapping”; Traipsing across four pages of newsiness is Chloe Olewitz as our watcher in “The Eye.” We end with reviews of books, videos, and tricks by David Britland, Shiv Duggal, and David Regal. And I guarantee that reading this issue will make your August more enjoyable.