Micah Lasher, Child Magician

I’m meeting with Micah Lasher at a diner on the Upper West Side. The last time I saw him was also at an Upper West Side diner. That was 32 years ago. He was 12. I was 22. He was interviewing me for a job. Lasher is running for Congress in the June 23 Democratic primary for the smallest, richest, most educated district in the country, the one that Jerrold Nadler is leaving after 34 years. New York’s Twelfth District jaggedly stretches all the way across Manhattan from the top of Central Park down to 12th Street. It is so liberal that whoever wins the primary will likely get to keep the seat as long as they want. It’s so rich that whoever wins will have considerable power in Congress, thanks to Manhattanites’ ability to donate to other campaigns. In his Yankees jacket over a white button-down, Lasher doesn’t look that different than the last time I saw him, which is strange because he has since undergone puberty. He still has a boyish, earnest, Michael Cera energy. He has three kids and is married to a finance executive now, but he still lives in a building with his mom. When the waitress comes over, Lasher politely orders cottage cheese, strawberries, blueberries, two eggs sunny-side up, and an orange juice. The orange juice, so high in sugar, seems suspiciously wild. Lasher has spent his entire life in Manhattan, except for a semester at NYU spent in London, where he roomed with the comedian Aziz Ansari. He’s also spent his entire career in politics. At 15, while he was at Stuyvesant High School, he worked on a state assembly member’s campaign for Manhattan borough president. At 20, he helped start the successful political-consulting firm SKDK. This led to policy jobs with Nadler, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and Governor Kathy Hochul, and to his current gig in the assembly. But I worked for Lasher long before he turned 15. [Jonathan Chait: Please, not another Kennedy] I now live 3,000 miles away and don’t have any stake in this race, but it’s one of the most interesting primary fields in the country. Though Lasher is the party-insider pick, having landed endorsements from Nadler and Bloomberg, who has offered to donate up to $5 million to support him, he’s not the most exciting candidate. He’s running against George Conway, the former Republican, former husband of Kellyanne Conway, and former resident of a home without a green screen in every room. The candidate leading in early polls is Jack Schlossberg, the 33-year-old grandson of John F. Kennedy, who spoke at the 2020 Democratic National Convention and has 1.7 million social-media followers eager to watch him simultaneously walk and talk smack about his cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr., surf shirtless, or laugh after someone calls him “you incel Frankenstein-looking motherfucker.” Lasher is somehow less exciting, even, than Alex Bores, another state assembly member vying for the seat, who once worked as a Palantir data scientist and now takes on AI companies. People mostly see Lasher as an earnest, wonky, slow-talking, detail-oriented, policy guy. But they don’t know the Micah Lasher I knew. In 1994, I was a year out of college and working as a fact-checker at Reader’s Digest Books. Not Reader’s Digest, the magazine, where all the action was, but Reader’s Digest Books. One of the older fact-checkers told me about a freelance job that paid $20 an hour—$2 more than I was making. Her friend’s son was a magician. He had gotten a book deal and needed a research assistant. It was soul-crushing to learn that a 12-year-old had already accomplished my dream of writing a book. Even worse, he had accomplished my far-bigger dream of being a guest on David Letterman’s show. I met Lasher and his father, who had been an amateur magician, at a diner on the Upper West Side. His dad did most of the talking, explaining how slammed Lasher was with school, birthday-party performances, and his upcoming bar mitzvah. Then he got the kid to do some magic tricks for me. They were astounding. 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. Mostly for being Jewish. But also for the freaky devil magic. My friend D. A. Wallach, the former lead singer of Chester French turned biotech investor, went to magic camp with Lasher. Back then, Tannen’s Magic Camp was held on Long Island, and Lasher “was the GOAT,” Wallach told me. “He was better at close-up magic than most of the adults. He was the equivalent of Usain Bolt at that age. He could have been a super successful magician with a show in Vegas. Which seems more fun than Congress.” Still, Wallach understands why Lasher doesn’t talk about his childhood fame much. “There’s something shameful about magic. It’s corny,” he said. When I was working on Lasher’s book, my friend Jonathan would call me several times a week, claiming to be “The Amazing Micah” and, with a lisp due to an imaginary retainer that Lasher probably wouldn’t have for several years, said, “Mithter Thtein, thith work ith unacctheptable!” Which wasn’t all that far off. Not long after, Lasher fired me. The idea was that I’d help dig up interesting tidbits from the history of magic, but I could not distinguish between a tidbit and a basic piece of magic history. Lasher’s dad had to call and tell me that my services were no longer required. The Magic of Micah Lasher: More Than Fifty Tricks That Will Amaze and Delight Everyone—Including You came out in 1996 and was a hit, but I didn’t know about it until a few years ago, when I bought a copy. I immediately turned to the acknowledgments. I did not think I would be listed there. But if I were, I expected to read, “I want to thank Joel Stein for teaching me the magic trick where you steal $1,000 from a small boy.” Instead, he doled out the elegant graciousness that one learns from writing stacks of bar-mitzvah thank-you cards: “Joel’s research was his first real trip into the world of magic, and he did a really great job.” Lasher stopped doing magic shortly after he wrote the book. As he eats his cottage cheese, he tells me why: “Magic became very much a part of my identification and it could crowd out other things.” Instead, he became the editor of the Stuyvesant High School newspaper, where he had a fight with the administration over censorship that was covered in The New York Times. Magic had been a bond between him and his father, and Lasher wanted to be his own person. His dad mentored others through the Society of Young Magicians, and when he died in 2020, Lasher inherited his huge library of magic books, which I probably should have looked at for research for his book. Most people go into politics seeking fame, but Lasher had walked away from it. Speaking at rallies and press conferences is the part of the job he likes least, and the part he’s worst at. Even at the height of his magic career, he was famous for close-up magic, not for putting on a David Copperfield show. Schlossberg and Conway, Lasher tells me, promote themselves as politicians who “know how to function in this low-attention economy.” But Lasher isn’t sure that “anybody’s being persuaded in this low-attention economy. We’re generating a lot of content, we’re getting clicks, but I don't know that we’re really moving people that much. The work of change is still work, and it requires relentless persistence. That’s the case that I’m making to voters.” [From the March 2026 issue: The Democrats aren’t built for this] Lasher says he learned some lessons about politics from magic. He’s contemplated writing an essay about it, but feared outing himself as a weird child magician. “Also, it lends itself to all these obvious jokes about politics and trickery,” he says. But if he did write it, this is what he would say: Great magicians start with a goal and work backwards. “There is a way that I could walk into this diner, talk to you for 30 minutes, and…