The N.S.A.'s short-term solution to the encryption dilemma has been to urge the C.I.A. to go back to the world of dirty tricks and surreptitious entry.
It is now a given in fiction and on screen that politics is a world of dirty tricks, scandal and compromise.
Every music genre has its seedy underbelly, a world of unspoken tricks of the trade and a code that helps keep things alive (no matter how dirty and scandalous it may appear from the outside).
The idea of a thing that looks like a different thing — it's toast, but it's the Virgin Mary — can be psychically unsettling, reiterating a suspicion that the world is full of tricks, illusions, and prevarications.
Being wrong, she says, reminds us "the world's bag of tricks is not empty".
Using his most significant contribution to the world of special effects the stop trick, where the camera stops rolling while an object is removed or replaced in the frame, creating the illusion of appearance/disappearance Méliès gives the familiar trick new life.
In real world terms, this is the kind of trick that makes it seem like Chrome has been sped up, when really, it's just that sites are loading up behind the scenes.
In the interim, enjoy the rare interview below in which Allen talks about his view of the world, his trick for great directing and his most important attribute as an artist.
"The impressively imagined world of the novel is tricked out in lively prose," Taylor Antrim said here earlier this year.
Similarly, sort of, the greatest trick the world of televised professional darts has ever pulled is actually existing at all.
