We provide a mathematical account of the recent letter by Tarnopolsky, Kruchkov and Vishwanath (Phys. Rev. Lett.122:10 (2019), art. id. 106405). The new contributions are a spectral characterization of magic angles, its accurate numerical implementation and an exponential estimate on the squeezing of all bands as the angle decreases. Pseudospectral phenomena due to the nonhermitian nature of operators appearing in the model considered in the letter of Tarnopolsky et al. play a crucial role in our analysis.