#bolesbooks — Public Fediverse posts

Ischia is Burning: The Novel I Have Been Writing for Thirty-Six Years

Most books are written. A few are excavated. Ischia is Burning is a book I excavated from a steel filing cabinet in a Manhattan apartment, where it had been sitting for more than three decades inside a folder marked Ischia, in the form of a screenplay I wrote at twenty-five years old in the second year of an MFA program at Columbia. The novel that has just been published is what happened when I sat down with that folder in May, found the staples rusted and half the dialogue wincing, and wrote what the twenty-five-year-old version could not yet write. The novel is now available as a paperback and a Kindle edition, and a complete free web reading edition lives at BolesBooks.com.

I need to tell you where this started, because the thirty-six years between the conception and the delivery are the form of the book, not biographical trivia.

The Steel Filing Cabinet

In the spring of 1990 I was a graduate student in the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Graduate Theatre Studies at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, in the dramatic writing concentration, working on a thesis screenplay for a class taught by Grafton Nunes. Grafton had produced Kathryn Bigelow’s first feature, The Loveless, with Willem Dafoe in his first leading role. He had spent his early career at Paramount. He knew what a film script was supposed to do and he knew when one was doing it.

I wrote a screenplay called Ischia is Burning. The country I had visited once. The island I had never seen. What I had read about it concerned the Greek colonial site at Pithekoussai, the oldest western Greek settlement in the central Mediterranean, founded in the eighth century before Christ on a volcanic island twelve miles off the Bay of Naples. The island had a basin. The basin had a name. I gave the basin sixteen children and four adults, and I gave the four adults eighteen years to build an Iron Age village around the children, and I gave the village a contamination event in the groundwater that would not have happened in the Iron Age.

Grafton read the screenplay. He told me it was the best student screenplay he had ever read. With a teacher’s specificity, he named the adjustments he wanted me to make. Blockbuster was the word he reached for, as if he were predicting a weather event.

I did not make the adjustments.

I gave the screenplay to Sam Crothers at The Producer Circle. Sam read it. He told me he loved it. The cohesion problems were the second thing he raised. After that came the matter of money, which Grafton had not raised at all. The last thing Sam asked me was what I was willing to wait for. Sam got sick within the year. He retired to Florida. We did not speak again. Marty Richards, who ran the Producer Circle, died in November 2012. Sam followed him in April 2013. Neither lived to see the novel.

I put the screenplay in a steel filing cabinet in an apartment on East 13th Street. It stayed there for thirty-six years. From time to time I took it out, read the first ten pages, and put it back. The notebook in which I had written down Grafton’s adjustments was lost in a move sometime in the late 1990s, and after that I told myself for a long set of years that I could not begin the novel because I could not remember what Grafton had said, and to begin without remembering would be to disrespect what he had given me.

I see now that the unremembered adjustments were the alibi. The actual reason was simpler. At twenty-five I was not old enough to write what finding out costs a child. Nor was I old enough to write what finding out costs the adults who have spent eighteen years not telling.

The Basin on Pithekoussai

The novel opens in the autumn of 1986 in a basin on the western flank of the Italian island of Ischia, in a place called Mezzavia. Mezzavia does not exist on any map I have been able to locate, although the road of that name does run between the towns of Forio and Casamicciola Terme on the actual island. In the novel, the basin holds four adults and sixteen children. The children range in age from six to seventeen. The adults are, by training, an anthropologist, a physician, a pilot, and a linguist. They have spent eighteen years building a closed Iron Age village around the children, complete with hand-woven clothing, a small iron mill the children themselves operate, a constructed Germanic dialect rooted in Old Norse and Old High German, an invented cosmology with four gods and eight constellations, and a sky with no airplanes in it.

The children believe they are living in the Iron Age. They believe this because the four adults have withheld twenty-four years of European history from them. No radios enter the basin. No printed page betrays the year. The antibiotic that would tell a child the world contains chemistry beyond the herbal poultice does not exist there.

In September of 1986, a cesium-137 contamination event begins to appear in the basin’s groundwater. The four adults face the question they have spent eighteen years not asking, which is what to do when the constructed world you have built around children begins to poison them, and the only treatment you can offer comes from a century the children are not allowed to know exists.

The title of the book is also a transmitted phrase. A pilot speaks it into a dispatch microphone at zero four sixteen on a Thursday in September 1986, from the cockpit of a plane climbing out of the American air base at Aviano in northeastern Italy. The book takes its thirty-three chapters to answer three questions about that phrase: what is burning, who is speaking it, and where the radio signal is going.

The novel is the answer the four adults arrive at.

The Temptation

The book moves at the velocity of a thriller and the moral architecture of an inquiry, which is what keeps it from settling cleanly into either form. What it pursues is a question older than the basin and older than the Iron Age the basin pretends to be. The question is what happens when a small group of educated people, looking at a larger group of human beings, decides in private that the larger group cannot be trusted with the truth and must be administered the world on a schedule the educated group will determine.

That question runs through the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Willowbrook hepatitis study, Decree 770 of the Socialist Republic of Romania, the Stanford prison experiment of 1971, the closed religious compounds of the American Southwest, and a hundred other documented projects in which one group of people decided what another group would be permitted to know. The Notes on Sources at the back of the novel walks through the historical anchors. Inside the novel itself, those anchors are kept off the page. What sits on the page is fiction. The four adults and the sixteen children of Mezzavia are inventions. What is not invented is the temptation that built them.

I am calling it temptation, and I want to be precise about the word. The four adults are educated, careful, well-spoken people who can defend every individual decision they made, which is precisely why naming them as monsters would let the reader off the hook. The novel is interested in how educated, careful, well-spoken people arrive at a project that, taken in aggregate, looks like the thing they would never have built if they had been able to see the whole shape of it from the outside. What the novel refuses to do is let them off the hook for what they built. It refuses, at the same time, the easy out of calling them monsters, because calling them monsters would close the question of how their colleagues, students, and followers found them defensible while the work was being done.

An Addendum the Way I Wrote It at Twenty-Five

The original 1990 screenplay is reproduced unaltered in the back of the book as Addendum I. The dialogue I made wince in May has been preserved exactly as I committed it in 1990, with its small infelicities and its young confidence both intact. I considered editing the screenplay. I decided against it. The point of including the screenplay at the back of the book is to show the reader the gap, in technique and in moral attention, between what I could write at twenty-five and what I could write at sixty-one, rather than to display the early version as a finished object. The story is identical across both versions, along with the four scientists, the sixteen children, the basin, and the fire. Two different writers, separated by thirty-six years, were working on the same material.

If a reader of the novel goes to the addendum and finds that the screenplay version reaches conclusions the novel does not reach, and lands its moral judgments where the novel will not land its moral judgments, that is the point. The young writer was bolder. The old writer is more careful, and more wounded, and less willing to tell the reader who the villain is.

For the Children Who Were Never Told

The dedication of the book is one sentence long. It reads, For the children who were never told.

I want to be clear about who that dedication is for. First, the sixteen fictional children of the basin on Pithekoussai, who are inventions, although the patterns of behavior they live inside are documented in places that were not inventions. Beyond them, the dedication names every reader who has ever sat across from a parent, or a doctor, or a government, and realized that the version of the world they had been given was a redacted version, edited by someone who had decided, on their behalf, what they could carry. The book is also for the adults who decided. Those four scientists in the basin can defend every individual decision they made. What the novel is interested in is why their defenses sound the way they do, and why those defenses have sounded the same way in every century in which someone has been entrusted with a knowledge that someone else has decided will not be shared.

How to Read the Book

The novel runs around 130,000 words across thirty-three chapters and a closing addendum. Paperback and Kindle edition are available now at Amazon, and a complete free web reading edition lives at BolesBooks.com, where the full bibliography of David Boles Books is also indexed. The Foreword tells the thirty-six-year story I have only summarized here. A Notes on Sources section walks through the historical record the novel draws on. Readers who want to put the book down and argue with somebody about it will find a Reading Group Discussion Guide in the back, which is the use I would most like the book to be put to.

I will be writing about Ischia is Burning at length over the coming weeks, including a Human Meme podcast episode on the moral physics of withheld knowledge, a Prairie Voice investigative piece on the documented American history of closed communities, and a conversation series on BolesBlogs.com about the book’s relationship to the Institutional Autopsy trilogy and to the question of what fiction can do that documentary work cannot. The conversation continues. The book is the entrance into it.

Sam Crothers asked me, in 1990, what I was willing to wait for. The answer arrived thirty-six years later. The book exists.

David Boles is the founder of David Boles Books and the editor of Prairie Voice. His Institutional Autopsy trilogy was completed in March 2026 with the publication of Underwritten. He lives in New York City with the Deaf ASL educator Janna Sweenie and two British Shorthair cats.

Ischia is Burning: The Novel I Have Been Writing for Thirty-Six Years

Most books are written. A few are excavated. Ischia is Burning is a book I excavated from a steel filing cabinet in a Manhattan apartment, where it had been sitting for more than three decades inside a folder marked Ischia, in the form of a screenplay I wrote at twenty-five years old in the second year of an MFA program at Columbia. The novel that has just been published is what happened when I sat down with that folder in May, found the staples rusted and half the dialogue wincing, and wrote what the twenty-five-year-old version could not yet write. The novel is now available as a paperback and a Kindle edition, and a complete free web reading edition lives at BolesBooks.com.

I need to tell you where this started, because the thirty-six years between the conception and the delivery are the form of the book, not biographical trivia.

The Steel Filing Cabinet

In the spring of 1990 I was a graduate student in the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Graduate Theatre Studies at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, in the dramatic writing concentration, working on a thesis screenplay for a class taught by Grafton Nunes. Grafton had produced Kathryn Bigelow’s first feature, The Loveless, with Willem Dafoe in his first leading role. He had spent his early career at Paramount. He knew what a film script was supposed to do and he knew when one was doing it.

I wrote a screenplay called Ischia is Burning. The country I had visited once. The island I had never seen. What I had read about it concerned the Greek colonial site at Pithekoussai, the oldest western Greek settlement in the central Mediterranean, founded in the eighth century before Christ on a volcanic island twelve miles off the Bay of Naples. The island had a basin. The basin had a name. I gave the basin sixteen children and four adults, and I gave the four adults eighteen years to build an Iron Age village around the children, and I gave the village a contamination event in the groundwater that would not have happened in the Iron Age.

Grafton read the screenplay. He told me it was the best student screenplay he had ever read. With a teacher’s specificity, he named the adjustments he wanted me to make. Blockbuster was the word he reached for, as if he were predicting a weather event.

I did not make the adjustments.

I gave the screenplay to Sam Crothers at The Producer Circle. Sam read it. He told me he loved it. The cohesion problems were the second thing he raised. After that came the matter of money, which Grafton had not raised at all. The last thing Sam asked me was what I was willing to wait for. Sam got sick within the year. He retired to Florida. We did not speak again. Marty Richards, who ran the Producer Circle, died in November 2012. Sam followed him in April 2013. Neither lived to see the novel.

I put the screenplay in a steel filing cabinet in an apartment on East 13th Street. It stayed there for thirty-six years. From time to time I took it out, read the first ten pages, and put it back. The notebook in which I had written down Grafton’s adjustments was lost in a move sometime in the late 1990s, and after that I told myself for a long set of years that I could not begin the novel because I could not remember what Grafton had said, and to begin without remembering would be to disrespect what he had given me.

I see now that the unremembered adjustments were the alibi. The actual reason was simpler. At twenty-five I was not old enough to write what finding out costs a child. Nor was I old enough to write what finding out costs the adults who have spent eighteen years not telling.

The Basin on Pithekoussai

The novel opens in the autumn of 1986 in a basin on the western flank of the Italian island of Ischia, in a place called Mezzavia. Mezzavia does not exist on any map I have been able to locate, although the road of that name does run between the towns of Forio and Casamicciola Terme on the actual island. In the novel, the basin holds four adults and sixteen children. The children range in age from six to seventeen. The adults are, by training, an anthropologist, a physician, a pilot, and a linguist. They have spent eighteen years building a closed Iron Age village around the children, complete with hand-woven clothing, a small iron mill the children themselves operate, a constructed Germanic dialect rooted in Old Norse and Old High German, an invented cosmology with four gods and eight constellations, and a sky with no airplanes in it.

The children believe they are living in the Iron Age. They believe this because the four adults have withheld twenty-four years of European history from them. No radios enter the basin. No printed page betrays the year. The antibiotic that would tell a child the world contains chemistry beyond the herbal poultice does not exist there.

In September of 1986, a cesium-137 contamination event begins to appear in the basin’s groundwater. The four adults face the question they have spent eighteen years not asking, which is what to do when the constructed world you have built around children begins to poison them, and the only treatment you can offer comes from a century the children are not allowed to know exists.

The title of the book is also a transmitted phrase. A pilot speaks it into a dispatch microphone at zero four sixteen on a Thursday in September 1986, from the cockpit of a plane climbing out of the American air base at Aviano in northeastern Italy. The book takes its thirty-three chapters to answer three questions about that phrase: what is burning, who is speaking it, and where the radio signal is going.

The novel is the answer the four adults arrive at.

The Temptation

The book moves at the velocity of a thriller and the moral architecture of an inquiry, which is what keeps it from settling cleanly into either form. What it pursues is a question older than the basin and older than the Iron Age the basin pretends to be. The question is what happens when a small group of educated people, looking at a larger group of human beings, decides in private that the larger group cannot be trusted with the truth and must be administered the world on a schedule the educated group will determine.

That question runs through the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Willowbrook hepatitis study, Decree 770 of the Socialist Republic of Romania, the Stanford prison experiment of 1971, the closed religious compounds of the American Southwest, and a hundred other documented projects in which one group of people decided what another group would be permitted to know. The Notes on Sources at the back of the novel walks through the historical anchors. Inside the novel itself, those anchors are kept off the page. What sits on the page is fiction. The four adults and the sixteen children of Mezzavia are inventions. What is not invented is the temptation that built them.

I am calling it temptation, and I want to be precise about the word. The four adults are educated, careful, well-spoken people who can defend every individual decision they made, which is precisely why naming them as monsters would let the reader off the hook. The novel is interested in how educated, careful, well-spoken people arrive at a project that, taken in aggregate, looks like the thing they would never have built if they had been able to see the whole shape of it from the outside. What the novel refuses to do is let them off the hook for what they built. It refuses, at the same time, the easy out of calling them monsters, because calling them monsters would close the question of how their colleagues, students, and followers found them defensible while the work was being done.

An Addendum the Way I Wrote It at Twenty-Five

The original 1990 screenplay is reproduced unaltered in the back of the book as Addendum I. The dialogue I made wince in May has been preserved exactly as I committed it in 1990, with its small infelicities and its young confidence both intact. I considered editing the screenplay. I decided against it. The point of including the screenplay at the back of the book is to show the reader the gap, in technique and in moral attention, between what I could write at twenty-five and what I could write at sixty-one, rather than to display the early version as a finished object. The story is identical across both versions, along with the four scientists, the sixteen children, the basin, and the fire. Two different writers, separated by thirty-six years, were working on the same material.

If a reader of the novel goes to the addendum and finds that the screenplay version reaches conclusions the novel does not reach, and lands its moral judgments where the novel will not land its moral judgments, that is the point. The young writer was bolder. The old writer is more careful, and more wounded, and less willing to tell the reader who the villain is.

For the Children Who Were Never Told

The dedication of the book is one sentence long. It reads, For the children who were never told.

I want to be clear about who that dedication is for. First, the sixteen fictional children of the basin on Pithekoussai, who are inventions, although the patterns of behavior they live inside are documented in places that were not inventions. Beyond them, the dedication names every reader who has ever sat across from a parent, or a doctor, or a government, and realized that the version of the world they had been given was a redacted version, edited by someone who had decided, on their behalf, what they could carry. The book is also for the adults who decided. Those four scientists in the basin can defend every individual decision they made. What the novel is interested in is why their defenses sound the way they do, and why those defenses have sounded the same way in every century in which someone has been entrusted with a knowledge that someone else has decided will not be shared.

How to Read the Book

The novel runs around 130,000 words across thirty-three chapters and a closing addendum. Paperback and Kindle edition are available now at Amazon, and a complete free web reading edition lives at BolesBooks.com, where the full bibliography of David Boles Books is also indexed. The Foreword tells the thirty-six-year story I have only summarized here. A Notes on Sources section walks through the historical record the novel draws on. Readers who want to put the book down and argue with somebody about it will find a Reading Group Discussion Guide in the back, which is the use I would most like the book to be put to.

I will be writing about Ischia is Burning at length over the coming weeks, including a Human Meme podcast episode on the moral physics of withheld knowledge, a Prairie Voice investigative piece on the documented American history of closed communities, and a conversation series on BolesBlogs.com about the book’s relationship to the Institutional Autopsy trilogy and to the question of what fiction can do that documentary work cannot. The conversation continues. The book is the entrance into it.

Sam Crothers asked me, in 1990, what I was willing to wait for. The answer arrived thirty-six years later. The book exists.

David Boles is the founder of David Boles Books and the editor of Prairie Voice. His Institutional Autopsy trilogy was completed in March 2026 with the publication of Underwritten. He lives in New York City with the Deaf ASL educator Janna Sweenie and two British Shorthair cats.

Ischia is Burning: The Novel I Have Been Writing for Thirty-Six Years

Most books are written. A few are excavated. Ischia is Burning is a book I excavated from a steel filing cabinet in a Manhattan apartment, where it had been sitting for more than three decades inside a folder marked Ischia, in the form of a screenplay I wrote at twenty-five years old in the second year of an MFA program at Columbia. The novel that has just been published is what happened when I sat down with that folder in May, found the staples rusted and half the dialogue wincing, and wrote what the twenty-five-year-old version could not yet write. The novel is now available as a paperback and a Kindle edition, and a complete free web reading edition lives at BolesBooks.com.

I need to tell you where this started, because the thirty-six years between the conception and the delivery are the form of the book, not biographical trivia.

The Steel Filing Cabinet

In the spring of 1990 I was a graduate student in the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Graduate Theatre Studies at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, in the dramatic writing concentration, working on a thesis screenplay for a class taught by Grafton Nunes. Grafton had produced Kathryn Bigelow’s first feature, The Loveless, with Willem Dafoe in his first leading role. He had spent his early career at Paramount. He knew what a film script was supposed to do and he knew when one was doing it.

I wrote a screenplay called Ischia is Burning. The country I had visited once. The island I had never seen. What I had read about it concerned the Greek colonial site at Pithekoussai, the oldest western Greek settlement in the central Mediterranean, founded in the eighth century before Christ on a volcanic island twelve miles off the Bay of Naples. The island had a basin. The basin had a name. I gave the basin sixteen children and four adults, and I gave the four adults eighteen years to build an Iron Age village around the children, and I gave the village a contamination event in the groundwater that would not have happened in the Iron Age.

Grafton read the screenplay. He told me it was the best student screenplay he had ever read. With a teacher’s specificity, he named the adjustments he wanted me to make. Blockbuster was the word he reached for, as if he were predicting a weather event.

I did not make the adjustments.

I gave the screenplay to Sam Crothers at The Producer Circle. Sam read it. He told me he loved it. The cohesion problems were the second thing he raised. After that came the matter of money, which Grafton had not raised at all. The last thing Sam asked me was what I was willing to wait for. Sam got sick within the year. He retired to Florida. We did not speak again. Marty Richards, who ran the Producer Circle, died in November 2012. Sam followed him in April 2013. Neither lived to see the novel.

I put the screenplay in a steel filing cabinet in an apartment on East 13th Street. It stayed there for thirty-six years. From time to time I took it out, read the first ten pages, and put it back. The notebook in which I had written down Grafton’s adjustments was lost in a move sometime in the late 1990s, and after that I told myself for a long set of years that I could not begin the novel because I could not remember what Grafton had said, and to begin without remembering would be to disrespect what he had given me.

I see now that the unremembered adjustments were the alibi. The actual reason was simpler. At twenty-five I was not old enough to write what finding out costs a child. Nor was I old enough to write what finding out costs the adults who have spent eighteen years not telling.

The Basin on Pithekoussai

The novel opens in the autumn of 1986 in a basin on the western flank of the Italian island of Ischia, in a place called Mezzavia. Mezzavia does not exist on any map I have been able to locate, although the road of that name does run between the towns of Forio and Casamicciola Terme on the actual island. In the novel, the basin holds four adults and sixteen children. The children range in age from six to seventeen. The adults are, by training, an anthropologist, a physician, a pilot, and a linguist. They have spent eighteen years building a closed Iron Age village around the children, complete with hand-woven clothing, a small iron mill the children themselves operate, a constructed Germanic dialect rooted in Old Norse and Old High German, an invented cosmology with four gods and eight constellations, and a sky with no airplanes in it.

The children believe they are living in the Iron Age. They believe this because the four adults have withheld twenty-four years of European history from them. No radios enter the basin. No printed page betrays the year. The antibiotic that would tell a child the world contains chemistry beyond the herbal poultice does not exist there.

In September of 1986, a cesium-137 contamination event begins to appear in the basin’s groundwater. The four adults face the question they have spent eighteen years not asking, which is what to do when the constructed world you have built around children begins to poison them, and the only treatment you can offer comes from a century the children are not allowed to know exists.

The title of the book is also a transmitted phrase. A pilot speaks it into a dispatch microphone at zero four sixteen on a Thursday in September 1986, from the cockpit of a plane climbing out of the American air base at Aviano in northeastern Italy. The book takes its thirty-three chapters to answer three questions about that phrase: what is burning, who is speaking it, and where the radio signal is going.

The novel is the answer the four adults arrive at.

The Temptation

The book moves at the velocity of a thriller and the moral architecture of an inquiry, which is what keeps it from settling cleanly into either form. What it pursues is a question older than the basin and older than the Iron Age the basin pretends to be. The question is what happens when a small group of educated people, looking at a larger group of human beings, decides in private that the larger group cannot be trusted with the truth and must be administered the world on a schedule the educated group will determine.

That question runs through the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Willowbrook hepatitis study, Decree 770 of the Socialist Republic of Romania, the Stanford prison experiment of 1971, the closed religious compounds of the American Southwest, and a hundred other documented projects in which one group of people decided what another group would be permitted to know. The Notes on Sources at the back of the novel walks through the historical anchors. Inside the novel itself, those anchors are kept off the page. What sits on the page is fiction. The four adults and the sixteen children of Mezzavia are inventions. What is not invented is the temptation that built them.

I am calling it temptation, and I want to be precise about the word. The four adults are educated, careful, well-spoken people who can defend every individual decision they made, which is precisely why naming them as monsters would let the reader off the hook. The novel is interested in how educated, careful, well-spoken people arrive at a project that, taken in aggregate, looks like the thing they would never have built if they had been able to see the whole shape of it from the outside. What the novel refuses to do is let them off the hook for what they built. It refuses, at the same time, the easy out of calling them monsters, because calling them monsters would close the question of how their colleagues, students, and followers found them defensible while the work was being done.

An Addendum the Way I Wrote It at Twenty-Five

The original 1990 screenplay is reproduced unaltered in the back of the book as Addendum I. The dialogue I made wince in May has been preserved exactly as I committed it in 1990, with its small infelicities and its young confidence both intact. I considered editing the screenplay. I decided against it. The point of including the screenplay at the back of the book is to show the reader the gap, in technique and in moral attention, between what I could write at twenty-five and what I could write at sixty-one, rather than to display the early version as a finished object. The story is identical across both versions, along with the four scientists, the sixteen children, the basin, and the fire. Two different writers, separated by thirty-six years, were working on the same material.

If a reader of the novel goes to the addendum and finds that the screenplay version reaches conclusions the novel does not reach, and lands its moral judgments where the novel will not land its moral judgments, that is the point. The young writer was bolder. The old writer is more careful, and more wounded, and less willing to tell the reader who the villain is.

For the Children Who Were Never Told

The dedication of the book is one sentence long. It reads, For the children who were never told.

I want to be clear about who that dedication is for. First, the sixteen fictional children of the basin on Pithekoussai, who are inventions, although the patterns of behavior they live inside are documented in places that were not inventions. Beyond them, the dedication names every reader who has ever sat across from a parent, or a doctor, or a government, and realized that the version of the world they had been given was a redacted version, edited by someone who had decided, on their behalf, what they could carry. The book is also for the adults who decided. Those four scientists in the basin can defend every individual decision they made. What the novel is interested in is why their defenses sound the way they do, and why those defenses have sounded the same way in every century in which someone has been entrusted with a knowledge that someone else has decided will not be shared.

How to Read the Book

The novel runs around 130,000 words across thirty-three chapters and a closing addendum. Paperback and Kindle edition are available now at Amazon, and a complete free web reading edition lives at BolesBooks.com, where the full bibliography of David Boles Books is also indexed. The Foreword tells the thirty-six-year story I have only summarized here. A Notes on Sources section walks through the historical record the novel draws on. Readers who want to put the book down and argue with somebody about it will find a Reading Group Discussion Guide in the back, which is the use I would most like the book to be put to.

I will be writing about Ischia is Burning at length over the coming weeks, including a Human Meme podcast episode on the moral physics of withheld knowledge, a Prairie Voice investigative piece on the documented American history of closed communities, and a conversation series on BolesBlogs.com about the book’s relationship to the Institutional Autopsy trilogy and to the question of what fiction can do that documentary work cannot. The conversation continues. The book is the entrance into it.

Sam Crothers asked me, in 1990, what I was willing to wait for. The answer arrived thirty-six years later. The book exists.

David Boles is the founder of David Boles Books and the editor of Prairie Voice. His Institutional Autopsy trilogy was completed in March 2026 with the publication of Underwritten. He lives in New York City with the Deaf ASL educator Janna Sweenie and two British Shorthair cats.

Ischia is Burning: The Novel I Have Been Writing for Thirty-Six Years

Most books are written. A few are excavated. Ischia is Burning is a book I excavated from a steel filing cabinet in a Manhattan apartment, where it had been sitting for more than three decades inside a folder marked Ischia, in the form of a screenplay I wrote at twenty-five years old in the second year of an MFA program at Columbia. The novel that has just been published is what happened when I sat down with that folder in May, found the staples rusted and half the dialogue wincing, and wrote what the twenty-five-year-old version could not yet write. The novel is now available as a paperback and a Kindle edition, and a complete free web reading edition lives at BolesBooks.com.

I need to tell you where this started, because the thirty-six years between the conception and the delivery are the form of the book, not biographical trivia.

The Steel Filing Cabinet

In the spring of 1990 I was a graduate student in the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Graduate Theatre Studies at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, in the dramatic writing concentration, working on a thesis screenplay for a class taught by Grafton Nunes. Grafton had produced Kathryn Bigelow’s first feature, The Loveless, with Willem Dafoe in his first leading role. He had spent his early career at Paramount. He knew what a film script was supposed to do and he knew when one was doing it.

I wrote a screenplay called Ischia is Burning. The country I had visited once. The island I had never seen. What I had read about it concerned the Greek colonial site at Pithekoussai, the oldest western Greek settlement in the central Mediterranean, founded in the eighth century before Christ on a volcanic island twelve miles off the Bay of Naples. The island had a basin. The basin had a name. I gave the basin sixteen children and four adults, and I gave the four adults eighteen years to build an Iron Age village around the children, and I gave the village a contamination event in the groundwater that would not have happened in the Iron Age.

Grafton read the screenplay. He told me it was the best student screenplay he had ever read. With a teacher’s specificity, he named the adjustments he wanted me to make. Blockbuster was the word he reached for, as if he were predicting a weather event.

I did not make the adjustments.

I gave the screenplay to Sam Crothers at The Producer Circle. Sam read it. He told me he loved it. The cohesion problems were the second thing he raised. After that came the matter of money, which Grafton had not raised at all. The last thing Sam asked me was what I was willing to wait for. Sam got sick within the year. He retired to Florida. We did not speak again. Marty Richards, who ran the Producer Circle, died in November 2012. Sam followed him in April 2013. Neither lived to see the novel.

I put the screenplay in a steel filing cabinet in an apartment on East 13th Street. It stayed there for thirty-six years. From time to time I took it out, read the first ten pages, and put it back. The notebook in which I had written down Grafton’s adjustments was lost in a move sometime in the late 1990s, and after that I told myself for a long set of years that I could not begin the novel because I could not remember what Grafton had said, and to begin without remembering would be to disrespect what he had given me.

I see now that the unremembered adjustments were the alibi. The actual reason was simpler. At twenty-five I was not old enough to write what finding out costs a child. Nor was I old enough to write what finding out costs the adults who have spent eighteen years not telling.

The Basin on Pithekoussai

The novel opens in the autumn of 1986 in a basin on the western flank of the Italian island of Ischia, in a place called Mezzavia. Mezzavia does not exist on any map I have been able to locate, although the road of that name does run between the towns of Forio and Casamicciola Terme on the actual island. In the novel, the basin holds four adults and sixteen children. The children range in age from six to seventeen. The adults are, by training, an anthropologist, a physician, a pilot, and a linguist. They have spent eighteen years building a closed Iron Age village around the children, complete with hand-woven clothing, a small iron mill the children themselves operate, a constructed Germanic dialect rooted in Old Norse and Old High German, an invented cosmology with four gods and eight constellations, and a sky with no airplanes in it.

The children believe they are living in the Iron Age. They believe this because the four adults have withheld twenty-four years of European history from them. No radios enter the basin. No printed page betrays the year. The antibiotic that would tell a child the world contains chemistry beyond the herbal poultice does not exist there.

In September of 1986, a cesium-137 contamination event begins to appear in the basin’s groundwater. The four adults face the question they have spent eighteen years not asking, which is what to do when the constructed world you have built around children begins to poison them, and the only treatment you can offer comes from a century the children are not allowed to know exists.

The title of the book is also a transmitted phrase. A pilot speaks it into a dispatch microphone at zero four sixteen on a Thursday in September 1986, from the cockpit of a plane climbing out of the American air base at Aviano in northeastern Italy. The book takes its thirty-three chapters to answer three questions about that phrase: what is burning, who is speaking it, and where the radio signal is going.

The novel is the answer the four adults arrive at.

The Temptation

The book moves at the velocity of a thriller and the moral architecture of an inquiry, which is what keeps it from settling cleanly into either form. What it pursues is a question older than the basin and older than the Iron Age the basin pretends to be. The question is what happens when a small group of educated people, looking at a larger group of human beings, decides in private that the larger group cannot be trusted with the truth and must be administered the world on a schedule the educated group will determine.

That question runs through the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Willowbrook hepatitis study, Decree 770 of the Socialist Republic of Romania, the Stanford prison experiment of 1971, the closed religious compounds of the American Southwest, and a hundred other documented projects in which one group of people decided what another group would be permitted to know. The Notes on Sources at the back of the novel walks through the historical anchors. Inside the novel itself, those anchors are kept off the page. What sits on the page is fiction. The four adults and the sixteen children of Mezzavia are inventions. What is not invented is the temptation that built them.

I am calling it temptation, and I want to be precise about the word. The four adults are educated, careful, well-spoken people who can defend every individual decision they made, which is precisely why naming them as monsters would let the reader off the hook. The novel is interested in how educated, careful, well-spoken people arrive at a project that, taken in aggregate, looks like the thing they would never have built if they had been able to see the whole shape of it from the outside. What the novel refuses to do is let them off the hook for what they built. It refuses, at the same time, the easy out of calling them monsters, because calling them monsters would close the question of how their colleagues, students, and followers found them defensible while the work was being done.

An Addendum the Way I Wrote It at Twenty-Five

The original 1990 screenplay is reproduced unaltered in the back of the book as Addendum I. The dialogue I made wince in May has been preserved exactly as I committed it in 1990, with its small infelicities and its young confidence both intact. I considered editing the screenplay. I decided against it. The point of including the screenplay at the back of the book is to show the reader the gap, in technique and in moral attention, between what I could write at twenty-five and what I could write at sixty-one, rather than to display the early version as a finished object. The story is identical across both versions, along with the four scientists, the sixteen children, the basin, and the fire. Two different writers, separated by thirty-six years, were working on the same material.

If a reader of the novel goes to the addendum and finds that the screenplay version reaches conclusions the novel does not reach, and lands its moral judgments where the novel will not land its moral judgments, that is the point. The young writer was bolder. The old writer is more careful, and more wounded, and less willing to tell the reader who the villain is.

For the Children Who Were Never Told

The dedication of the book is one sentence long. It reads, For the children who were never told.

I want to be clear about who that dedication is for. First, the sixteen fictional children of the basin on Pithekoussai, who are inventions, although the patterns of behavior they live inside are documented in places that were not inventions. Beyond them, the dedication names every reader who has ever sat across from a parent, or a doctor, or a government, and realized that the version of the world they had been given was a redacted version, edited by someone who had decided, on their behalf, what they could carry. The book is also for the adults who decided. Those four scientists in the basin can defend every individual decision they made. What the novel is interested in is why their defenses sound the way they do, and why those defenses have sounded the same way in every century in which someone has been entrusted with a knowledge that someone else has decided will not be shared.

How to Read the Book

The novel runs around 130,000 words across thirty-three chapters and a closing addendum. Paperback and Kindle edition are available now at Amazon, and a complete free web reading edition lives at BolesBooks.com, where the full bibliography of David Boles Books is also indexed. The Foreword tells the thirty-six-year story I have only summarized here. A Notes on Sources section walks through the historical record the novel draws on. Readers who want to put the book down and argue with somebody about it will find a Reading Group Discussion Guide in the back, which is the use I would most like the book to be put to.

I will be writing about Ischia is Burning at length over the coming weeks, including a Human Meme podcast episode on the moral physics of withheld knowledge, a Prairie Voice investigative piece on the documented American history of closed communities, and a conversation series on BolesBlogs.com about the book’s relationship to the Institutional Autopsy trilogy and to the question of what fiction can do that documentary work cannot. The conversation continues. The book is the entrance into it.

Sam Crothers asked me, in 1990, what I was willing to wait for. The answer arrived thirty-six years later. The book exists.

David Boles is the founder of David Boles Books and the editor of Prairie Voice. His Institutional Autopsy trilogy was completed in March 2026 with the publication of Underwritten. He lives in New York City with the Deaf ASL educator Janna Sweenie and two British Shorthair cats.

Ischia is Burning: The Novel I Have Been Writing for Thirty-Six Years

Most books are written. A few are excavated. Ischia is Burning is a book I excavated from a steel filing cabinet in a Manhattan apartment, where it had been sitting for more than three decades inside a folder marked Ischia, in the form of a screenplay I wrote at twenty-five years old in the second year of an MFA program at Columbia. The novel that has just been published is what happened when I sat down with that folder in May, found the staples rusted and half the dialogue wincing, and wrote what the twenty-five-year-old version could not yet write. The novel is now available as a paperback and a Kindle edition, and a complete free web reading edition lives at BolesBooks.com.

I need to tell you where this started, because the thirty-six years between the conception and the delivery are the form of the book, not biographical trivia.

The Steel Filing Cabinet

In the spring of 1990 I was a graduate student in the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Graduate Theatre Studies at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, in the dramatic writing concentration, working on a thesis screenplay for a class taught by Grafton Nunes. Grafton had produced Kathryn Bigelow’s first feature, The Loveless, with Willem Dafoe in his first leading role. He had spent his early career at Paramount. He knew what a film script was supposed to do and he knew when one was doing it.

I wrote a screenplay called Ischia is Burning. The country I had visited once. The island I had never seen. What I had read about it concerned the Greek colonial site at Pithekoussai, the oldest western Greek settlement in the central Mediterranean, founded in the eighth century before Christ on a volcanic island twelve miles off the Bay of Naples. The island had a basin. The basin had a name. I gave the basin sixteen children and four adults, and I gave the four adults eighteen years to build an Iron Age village around the children, and I gave the village a contamination event in the groundwater that would not have happened in the Iron Age.

Grafton read the screenplay. He told me it was the best student screenplay he had ever read. With a teacher’s specificity, he named the adjustments he wanted me to make. Blockbuster was the word he reached for, as if he were predicting a weather event.

I did not make the adjustments.

I gave the screenplay to Sam Crothers at The Producer Circle. Sam read it. He told me he loved it. The cohesion problems were the second thing he raised. After that came the matter of money, which Grafton had not raised at all. The last thing Sam asked me was what I was willing to wait for. Sam got sick within the year. He retired to Florida. We did not speak again. Marty Richards, who ran the Producer Circle, died in November 2012. Sam followed him in April 2013. Neither lived to see the novel.

I put the screenplay in a steel filing cabinet in an apartment on East 13th Street. It stayed there for thirty-six years. From time to time I took it out, read the first ten pages, and put it back. The notebook in which I had written down Grafton’s adjustments was lost in a move sometime in the late 1990s, and after that I told myself for a long set of years that I could not begin the novel because I could not remember what Grafton had said, and to begin without remembering would be to disrespect what he had given me.

I see now that the unremembered adjustments were the alibi. The actual reason was simpler. At twenty-five I was not old enough to write what finding out costs a child. Nor was I old enough to write what finding out costs the adults who have spent eighteen years not telling.

The Basin on Pithekoussai

The novel opens in the autumn of 1986 in a basin on the western flank of the Italian island of Ischia, in a place called Mezzavia. Mezzavia does not exist on any map I have been able to locate, although the road of that name does run between the towns of Forio and Casamicciola Terme on the actual island. In the novel, the basin holds four adults and sixteen children. The children range in age from six to seventeen. The adults are, by training, an anthropologist, a physician, a pilot, and a linguist. They have spent eighteen years building a closed Iron Age village around the children, complete with hand-woven clothing, a small iron mill the children themselves operate, a constructed Germanic dialect rooted in Old Norse and Old High German, an invented cosmology with four gods and eight constellations, and a sky with no airplanes in it.

The children believe they are living in the Iron Age. They believe this because the four adults have withheld twenty-four years of European history from them. No radios enter the basin. No printed page betrays the year. The antibiotic that would tell a child the world contains chemistry beyond the herbal poultice does not exist there.

In September of 1986, a cesium-137 contamination event begins to appear in the basin’s groundwater. The four adults face the question they have spent eighteen years not asking, which is what to do when the constructed world you have built around children begins to poison them, and the only treatment you can offer comes from a century the children are not allowed to know exists.

The title of the book is also a transmitted phrase. A pilot speaks it into a dispatch microphone at zero four sixteen on a Thursday in September 1986, from the cockpit of a plane climbing out of the American air base at Aviano in northeastern Italy. The book takes its thirty-three chapters to answer three questions about that phrase: what is burning, who is speaking it, and where the radio signal is going.

The novel is the answer the four adults arrive at.

The Temptation

The book moves at the velocity of a thriller and the moral architecture of an inquiry, which is what keeps it from settling cleanly into either form. What it pursues is a question older than the basin and older than the Iron Age the basin pretends to be. The question is what happens when a small group of educated people, looking at a larger group of human beings, decides in private that the larger group cannot be trusted with the truth and must be administered the world on a schedule the educated group will determine.

That question runs through the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Willowbrook hepatitis study, Decree 770 of the Socialist Republic of Romania, the Stanford prison experiment of 1971, the closed religious compounds of the American Southwest, and a hundred other documented projects in which one group of people decided what another group would be permitted to know. The Notes on Sources at the back of the novel walks through the historical anchors. Inside the novel itself, those anchors are kept off the page. What sits on the page is fiction. The four adults and the sixteen children of Mezzavia are inventions. What is not invented is the temptation that built them.

I am calling it temptation, and I want to be precise about the word. The four adults are educated, careful, well-spoken people who can defend every individual decision they made, which is precisely why naming them as monsters would let the reader off the hook. The novel is interested in how educated, careful, well-spoken people arrive at a project that, taken in aggregate, looks like the thing they would never have built if they had been able to see the whole shape of it from the outside. What the novel refuses to do is let them off the hook for what they built. It refuses, at the same time, the easy out of calling them monsters, because calling them monsters would close the question of how their colleagues, students, and followers found them defensible while the work was being done.

An Addendum the Way I Wrote It at Twenty-Five

The original 1990 screenplay is reproduced unaltered in the back of the book as Addendum I. The dialogue I made wince in May has been preserved exactly as I committed it in 1990, with its small infelicities and its young confidence both intact. I considered editing the screenplay. I decided against it. The point of including the screenplay at the back of the book is to show the reader the gap, in technique and in moral attention, between what I could write at twenty-five and what I could write at sixty-one, rather than to display the early version as a finished object. The story is identical across both versions, along with the four scientists, the sixteen children, the basin, and the fire. Two different writers, separated by thirty-six years, were working on the same material.

If a reader of the novel goes to the addendum and finds that the screenplay version reaches conclusions the novel does not reach, and lands its moral judgments where the novel will not land its moral judgments, that is the point. The young writer was bolder. The old writer is more careful, and more wounded, and less willing to tell the reader who the villain is.

For the Children Who Were Never Told

The dedication of the book is one sentence long. It reads, For the children who were never told.

I want to be clear about who that dedication is for. First, the sixteen fictional children of the basin on Pithekoussai, who are inventions, although the patterns of behavior they live inside are documented in places that were not inventions. Beyond them, the dedication names every reader who has ever sat across from a parent, or a doctor, or a government, and realized that the version of the world they had been given was a redacted version, edited by someone who had decided, on their behalf, what they could carry. The book is also for the adults who decided. Those four scientists in the basin can defend every individual decision they made. What the novel is interested in is why their defenses sound the way they do, and why those defenses have sounded the same way in every century in which someone has been entrusted with a knowledge that someone else has decided will not be shared.

How to Read the Book

The novel runs around 130,000 words across thirty-three chapters and a closing addendum. Paperback and Kindle edition are available now at Amazon, and a complete free web reading edition lives at BolesBooks.com, where the full bibliography of David Boles Books is also indexed. The Foreword tells the thirty-six-year story I have only summarized here. A Notes on Sources section walks through the historical record the novel draws on. Readers who want to put the book down and argue with somebody about it will find a Reading Group Discussion Guide in the back, which is the use I would most like the book to be put to.

I will be writing about Ischia is Burning at length over the coming weeks, including a Human Meme podcast episode on the moral physics of withheld knowledge, a Prairie Voice investigative piece on the documented American history of closed communities, and a conversation series on BolesBlogs.com about the book’s relationship to the Institutional Autopsy trilogy and to the question of what fiction can do that documentary work cannot. The conversation continues. The book is the entrance into it.

Sam Crothers asked me, in 1990, what I was willing to wait for. The answer arrived thirty-six years later. The book exists.

David Boles is the founder of David Boles Books and the editor of Prairie Voice. His Institutional Autopsy trilogy was completed in March 2026 with the publication of Underwritten. He lives in New York City with the Deaf ASL educator Janna Sweenie and two British Shorthair cats.

What the First Photographer Knew

Photography spent its first half-century being mocked. The painters who controlled the academies and the salons looked at the daguerreotypists and saw mechanics. You pressed a button. You waited for the silver to fix. The machine did the work. Real art required a hand, an eye, a soul, a brush moving through hours of decision. The photographers were craftsmen at best, vandals at worst, and certainly not making Art. This was the consensus from Daguerre’s 1839 announcement until the Photo-Secession movement around 1900, when Alfred Stieglitz spent decades arguing the opposite and slowly won. The Museum of Modern Art opened its photography department in 1940. The Metropolitan Museum followed eventually. By 1980 photographs sold at auction for sums that would have stunned the painters who once sneered at them. The mockers were wrong, and they were wrong in a particular way that matters here.

What the first photographers knew, and what their mockers missed, is the subject of this article. An aphorism is a short saying that compresses a big idea into a single sentence, the sort of thing that fits on a poster or a coffee mug. The one I started with proposes that science is the discovery of what was true before anyone said so, and art is the act of bringing into existence what was never there. The aphorism has a problem its critics quickly identify. Most of what we call art does not require originating an unprecedented thing. A choir performing Mozart is making art without inventing anything. A workshop apprentice executing a Madonna in the master’s style is operating within a tradition. The strict reading of the aphorism would disqualify them both, and that contradicts how galleries and concert halls use the word.

So here is the refined position the photography story points toward. The originating act is what art and science share. Both fields contain a small number of moments when a particular human consciousness brings into existence a thing or a method or a way of seeing that was never there before, followed by an enormous number of practitioners who apply the new thing well or badly. Niépce making the first surviving heliograph in 1826 was an artist because the act of fixing a stable image with light had never been done. Daguerre refining the process into commercial viability in 1839 was an artist because the daguerreotype as a finished method had never existed. The studio photographer in 1860 producing his ten thousandth carte de visite was a craftsman applying invented technique. Same physical action, different category. The originating moment is what carries the honor.

The same cut runs through science. Newton’s invention of the calculus was an originating act; the engineer applying calculus to bridge stress in 1955 was a competent technician. Mendel’s first articulation of inheritance ratios was an originating act; the corn breeder applying Mendelian principles in 1962 was a working agronomist. The radiologist who first describes a previously unrecorded lesion pattern is doing what Mendel did. The radiologist applying established categories to the morning’s queue is doing what the agronomist did. The cut runs through both fields. This is the position photography forces us to, and it is the position I have been calling the Scientific Aesthetic across this network for fifteen years: the claim that science is itself a form of art, and that arts and sciences converge through a shared originating operation.

Consider a thought experiment that sharpens it further. I own a camera and take a position near the Eiffel Tower. After pressing the button, I hand the camera to you. You stand exactly where I stood and produce a second exposure. The photographs are identical. Who is the artist? Whose work is it? Does the camera’s owner have a stronger claim than the button-presser? Does the second photograph constitute imitation of the first, or are they both equally derivative of the tower itself? The thought experiment exposes that pressing the button was never the originating act. The originating act was Niépce’s, then Daguerre’s, then a long succession of inventors who established lenses, film stocks, exposure indices, and the conventions of framing. By the time you and I arrive at the spot and produce identical images, the originating work was done a century earlier. We are operating an invented machine within an invented set of conventions. Neither of us is making art in the strict sense; we are tourists with a camera doing what tourists do.

Copyright law, which has to give a practical answer, gives a strange one. Each of us would own the copyright in the photograph our hand caused to exist, and the copyrights would coexist for identical images. This is legally coherent and philosophically unsatisfying. Coherent because intellectual property law tracks proximate cause, and our fingers are the proximate cause of the shutters. Unsatisfying because it locates art in the trigger pull, which is exactly the location the painters of 1839 mocked and were partly right to mock. Where the painters were wrong was in thinking that no photographer had ever done the originating work. Niépce had. The 1839 mockery had the wrong target. The studio operators churning out cartes de visite were the proper subject of the criticism; the inventors of the medium had earned exemption. The same distinction applies inside painting itself, where the first to use linear perspective was making art and the thousandth competent perspective drawer was making decoration.

Now the harder example. Karl Barth wrote that Bach went to heaven while Mozart came from heaven. The distinction is real and worth holding up to the light. Bach as the worker who climbed the structure of counterpoint until it produced sublime architecture, every voice mathematically accounted for, every chorale prelude a piece of theological engineering. Mozart as the channel through which finished music seemed to arrive, the manuscripts famously cleaner than they should have been, the working method opaque even to his contemporaries. Both originated. Bach invented the practical possibilities of equal temperament and brought the fugue to a development nobody had imagined. Mozart developed the mature Classical style and pushed forms in opera and symphony to a depth that shaped the next century. By the originating-act test, both are artists in the strictest sense.

Yet the heaven attribution tracks something the originating-act test does not capture. It tracks the phenomenology of the artist’s experience of making. Bach made through labor. Mozart made through reception. The work appeared to arrive through Mozart from somewhere beyond him, and his role was to be present, conscious, equipped to receive what came. This Romantic conception of genius as channel has been mocked too, especially by twentieth-century critics who wanted to demystify the artist and rehabilitate the worker. But the distinction is not mystical, even if the metaphor is. Some originators labor toward what they make. Others find what they make arriving in them already largely formed. Both kinds of originator are artists. The distinction is internal to the category, and both kinds satisfy the originating-act test.

This matters because it tells us what the consciousness contributes. If Mozart was a channel, what he contributed was the readiness, the trained ear, the mind shaped by every piece of music he had absorbed since childhood, the working hand fast enough to capture what arrived. The channel had to be made before anything could come through it. The making of the channel was the labor; what came through it was the work. By this account, even the channel-artist is doing work; the work is just earlier in the process. Mozart’s effort had been spent before the moment of composition. Bach’s was spent during. Both consciousnesses originated, and the difference is the timing of the labor.

Hold this conclusion against the AI question, because it does work the older formulations cannot do. A language model produces text that no human assembled before. By the strict never-before-existed test, the output qualifies as PhD thesis. By the originating-act test, the output qualifies as imitation. The model invented nothing. Researchers invented its architecture. Human writers produced the training corpus. The inference itself is the application of an existing method to an existing prompt. The model occupies the position of the 1880 studio photographer, two generations downstream from Niépce. It plays the engineer’s role to Newton’s mathematics. The output may be useful, beautiful, even surprising, but it is not the originating act of a particular consciousness, because there is no consciousness in the model to do the originating. There may eventually be one, and that day will require revisiting this argument, but the present-day large language model is a competent technician of an invented process.

The first person to use a language model in a way nobody had used one before may have done something originating. Someone who discovers that a particular kind of prompt produces a particular kind of result, then builds a body of work around that discovery, may be an artist by the test I am proposing. The millionth person to type a prompt and accept the output is no more an artist than the millionth person to photograph the Eiffel Tower. This is consistent with the photography case. The category of the new medium has room for originators and for technicians, and most users in either field will be technicians.

A final consequence. The originating-act test resists political abuse better than the discovery-creation aphorism does. Authoritarian regimes police the canon by rewriting who counts as the first, the true, the founding artist or scientist. Entartete Kunst was an attempt to remove modernist innovators from the canon of true German art and replace them with academic painters of approved subjects. Lysenko was promoted as the first practitioner of authentically Soviet biology, with Mendel’s followers cast as bourgeois imitators of foreign error. The Cultural Revolution displaced the founding figures of Chinese music and physics in favor of approved rivals. Each regime understood that controlling the canon means controlling who is remembered as the originator and who is dismissed as the imitator. The originating-act test gives us a tool for resisting this. Every claim about who was first is a historical question with material evidence behind it. Niépce’s 1826 plate exists in a museum in Texas. Newton’s papers exist in Cambridge. Mendel’s notebooks exist in Brno. The canon can be argued from material evidence. The aphorism, by contrast, gives us no way to argue. It only gives us a slogan to either accept or reject.

So here is the position the photography story, the identical photograph thought experiment, and the Bach-Mozart distinction together support. Science is the revelation by a particular consciousness of something that was true before that consciousness named it. Art is the bringing into existence by a particular consciousness of something that was not there before that consciousness made it. Both fields contain a few originators and many imitators. The honor in both fields belongs to the originators. The imitators do necessary and sometimes excellent work, but they are not the artists or the scientists in the strict sense the words deserve. This is more austere than the everyday use of the words, and it is closer to what we mean when we say someone was a great artist or a great scientist. We mean they were the first. Competent application of established method has its own honor and its own name, and that name is craft. Together they constitute the Scientific Aesthetic, the position this whole article has been working toward.

The painters of 1839 looked at the daguerreotypists and saw machine operators. They were right about most of them and wrong about the founders. The same vision will be required for AI. Most outputs will be the work of technicians applying an invented process. A few may be the work of someone who saw what nobody had seen before about what the new instrument could do. Distinguishing the two is the task that always falls to the next generation, and the next generation is usually slow about it. We are slow about it now. We will be less slow if we hold the originating-act test in mind and apply it ruthlessly, to ourselves and to everyone else.

The Scientific Aesthetic: An Operating Theory is available now from David Boles Books. The paperback runs four hundred ninety-five pages and the Kindle eBook is also for sale through Amazon. Readers who prefer screen reading, home printing, or an editable archive copy will find a website-download PDF and a DOCX safety file at BolesBooks.com on the title’s landing page. The audiobook is in production and will follow.

What the First Photographer Knew

Photography spent its first half-century being mocked. The painters who controlled the academies and the salons looked at the daguerreotypists and saw mechanics. You pressed a button. You waited for the silver to fix. The machine did the work. Real art required a hand, an eye, a soul, a brush moving through hours of decision. The photographers were craftsmen at best, vandals at worst, and certainly not making Art. This was the consensus from Daguerre’s 1839 announcement until the Photo-Secession movement around 1900, when Alfred Stieglitz spent decades arguing the opposite and slowly won. The Museum of Modern Art opened its photography department in 1940. The Metropolitan Museum followed eventually. By 1980 photographs sold at auction for sums that would have stunned the painters who once sneered at them. The mockers were wrong, and they were wrong in a particular way that matters here.

What the first photographers knew, and what their mockers missed, is the subject of this article. An aphorism is a short saying that compresses a big idea into a single sentence, the sort of thing that fits on a poster or a coffee mug. The one I started with proposes that science is the discovery of what was true before anyone said so, and art is the act of bringing into existence what was never there. The aphorism has a problem its critics quickly identify. Most of what we call art does not require originating an unprecedented thing. A choir performing Mozart is making art without inventing anything. A workshop apprentice executing a Madonna in the master’s style is operating within a tradition. The strict reading of the aphorism would disqualify them both, and that contradicts how galleries and concert halls use the word.

So here is the refined position the photography story points toward. The originating act is what art and science share. Both fields contain a small number of moments when a particular human consciousness brings into existence a thing or a method or a way of seeing that was never there before, followed by an enormous number of practitioners who apply the new thing well or badly. Niépce making the first surviving heliograph in 1826 was an artist because the act of fixing a stable image with light had never been done. Daguerre refining the process into commercial viability in 1839 was an artist because the daguerreotype as a finished method had never existed. The studio photographer in 1860 producing his ten thousandth carte de visite was a craftsman applying invented technique. Same physical action, different category. The originating moment is what carries the honor.

The same cut runs through science. Newton’s invention of the calculus was an originating act; the engineer applying calculus to bridge stress in 1955 was a competent technician. Mendel’s first articulation of inheritance ratios was an originating act; the corn breeder applying Mendelian principles in 1962 was a working agronomist. The radiologist who first describes a previously unrecorded lesion pattern is doing what Mendel did. The radiologist applying established categories to the morning’s queue is doing what the agronomist did. The cut runs through both fields. This is the position photography forces us to, and it is the position I have been calling the Scientific Aesthetic across this network for fifteen years: the claim that science is itself a form of art, and that arts and sciences converge through a shared originating operation.

Consider a thought experiment that sharpens it further. I own a camera and take a position near the Eiffel Tower. After pressing the button, I hand the camera to you. You stand exactly where I stood and produce a second exposure. The photographs are identical. Who is the artist? Whose work is it? Does the camera’s owner have a stronger claim than the button-presser? Does the second photograph constitute imitation of the first, or are they both equally derivative of the tower itself? The thought experiment exposes that pressing the button was never the originating act. The originating act was Niépce’s, then Daguerre’s, then a long succession of inventors who established lenses, film stocks, exposure indices, and the conventions of framing. By the time you and I arrive at the spot and produce identical images, the originating work was done a century earlier. We are operating an invented machine within an invented set of conventions. Neither of us is making art in the strict sense; we are tourists with a camera doing what tourists do.

Copyright law, which has to give a practical answer, gives a strange one. Each of us would own the copyright in the photograph our hand caused to exist, and the copyrights would coexist for identical images. This is legally coherent and philosophically unsatisfying. Coherent because intellectual property law tracks proximate cause, and our fingers are the proximate cause of the shutters. Unsatisfying because it locates art in the trigger pull, which is exactly the location the painters of 1839 mocked and were partly right to mock. Where the painters were wrong was in thinking that no photographer had ever done the originating work. Niépce had. The 1839 mockery had the wrong target. The studio operators churning out cartes de visite were the proper subject of the criticism; the inventors of the medium had earned exemption. The same distinction applies inside painting itself, where the first to use linear perspective was making art and the thousandth competent perspective drawer was making decoration.

Now the harder example. Karl Barth wrote that Bach went to heaven while Mozart came from heaven. The distinction is real and worth holding up to the light. Bach as the worker who climbed the structure of counterpoint until it produced sublime architecture, every voice mathematically accounted for, every chorale prelude a piece of theological engineering. Mozart as the channel through which finished music seemed to arrive, the manuscripts famously cleaner than they should have been, the working method opaque even to his contemporaries. Both originated. Bach invented the practical possibilities of equal temperament and brought the fugue to a development nobody had imagined. Mozart developed the mature Classical style and pushed forms in opera and symphony to a depth that shaped the next century. By the originating-act test, both are artists in the strictest sense.

Yet the heaven attribution tracks something the originating-act test does not capture. It tracks the phenomenology of the artist’s experience of making. Bach made through labor. Mozart made through reception. The work appeared to arrive through Mozart from somewhere beyond him, and his role was to be present, conscious, equipped to receive what came. This Romantic conception of genius as channel has been mocked too, especially by twentieth-century critics who wanted to demystify the artist and rehabilitate the worker. But the distinction is not mystical, even if the metaphor is. Some originators labor toward what they make. Others find what they make arriving in them already largely formed. Both kinds of originator are artists. The distinction is internal to the category, and both kinds satisfy the originating-act test.

This matters because it tells us what the consciousness contributes. If Mozart was a channel, what he contributed was the readiness, the trained ear, the mind shaped by every piece of music he had absorbed since childhood, the working hand fast enough to capture what arrived. The channel had to be made before anything could come through it. The making of the channel was the labor; what came through it was the work. By this account, even the channel-artist is doing work; the work is just earlier in the process. Mozart’s effort had been spent before the moment of composition. Bach’s was spent during. Both consciousnesses originated, and the difference is the timing of the labor.

Hold this conclusion against the AI question, because it does work the older formulations cannot do. A language model produces text that no human assembled before. By the strict never-before-existed test, the output qualifies as PhD thesis. By the originating-act test, the output qualifies as imitation. The model invented nothing. Researchers invented its architecture. Human writers produced the training corpus. The inference itself is the application of an existing method to an existing prompt. The model occupies the position of the 1880 studio photographer, two generations downstream from Niépce. It plays the engineer’s role to Newton’s mathematics. The output may be useful, beautiful, even surprising, but it is not the originating act of a particular consciousness, because there is no consciousness in the model to do the originating. There may eventually be one, and that day will require revisiting this argument, but the present-day large language model is a competent technician of an invented process.

The first person to use a language model in a way nobody had used one before may have done something originating. Someone who discovers that a particular kind of prompt produces a particular kind of result, then builds a body of work around that discovery, may be an artist by the test I am proposing. The millionth person to type a prompt and accept the output is no more an artist than the millionth person to photograph the Eiffel Tower. This is consistent with the photography case. The category of the new medium has room for originators and for technicians, and most users in either field will be technicians.

A final consequence. The originating-act test resists political abuse better than the discovery-creation aphorism does. Authoritarian regimes police the canon by rewriting who counts as the first, the true, the founding artist or scientist. Entartete Kunst was an attempt to remove modernist innovators from the canon of true German art and replace them with academic painters of approved subjects. Lysenko was promoted as the first practitioner of authentically Soviet biology, with Mendel’s followers cast as bourgeois imitators of foreign error. The Cultural Revolution displaced the founding figures of Chinese music and physics in favor of approved rivals. Each regime understood that controlling the canon means controlling who is remembered as the originator and who is dismissed as the imitator. The originating-act test gives us a tool for resisting this. Every claim about who was first is a historical question with material evidence behind it. Niépce’s 1826 plate exists in a museum in Texas. Newton’s papers exist in Cambridge. Mendel’s notebooks exist in Brno. The canon can be argued from material evidence. The aphorism, by contrast, gives us no way to argue. It only gives us a slogan to either accept or reject.

So here is the position the photography story, the identical photograph thought experiment, and the Bach-Mozart distinction together support. Science is the revelation by a particular consciousness of something that was true before that consciousness named it. Art is the bringing into existence by a particular consciousness of something that was not there before that consciousness made it. Both fields contain a few originators and many imitators. The honor in both fields belongs to the originators. The imitators do necessary and sometimes excellent work, but they are not the artists or the scientists in the strict sense the words deserve. This is more austere than the everyday use of the words, and it is closer to what we mean when we say someone was a great artist or a great scientist. We mean they were the first. Competent application of established method has its own honor and its own name, and that name is craft. Together they constitute the Scientific Aesthetic, the position this whole article has been working toward.

The painters of 1839 looked at the daguerreotypists and saw machine operators. They were right about most of them and wrong about the founders. The same vision will be required for AI. Most outputs will be the work of technicians applying an invented process. A few may be the work of someone who saw what nobody had seen before about what the new instrument could do. Distinguishing the two is the task that always falls to the next generation, and the next generation is usually slow about it. We are slow about it now. We will be less slow if we hold the originating-act test in mind and apply it ruthlessly, to ourselves and to everyone else.

The Scientific Aesthetic: An Operating Theory is available now from David Boles Books. The paperback runs four hundred ninety-five pages and the Kindle eBook is also for sale through Amazon. Readers who prefer screen reading, home printing, or an editable archive copy will find a website-download PDF and a DOCX safety file at BolesBooks.com on the title’s landing page. The audiobook is in production and will follow.

The Claim I Filed in 2006

This week I published The Claimed Body: How American Institutions Divided the Human Organism Among Themselves. Fifteen chapters, 559 pages in paperback, 349 in the web edition, a Kindle ebook, and a wraparound cover that took the shape of a parcel map of the body. The book is out on Amazon and through BolesBooks.com. Readers who have followed the constellation for any length of time will recognize the argument before they finish the first chapter. I have been writing toward this book since December of 2006, when I first used these pages to ask a question I did not yet have the vocabulary to answer.

The question back then was why the prison kept showing up in parts of American life that were not prisons. A school discipline policy reads like a booking protocol. An employer’s drug screen reads like a parole condition. A hospital discharge summary reads like a court order. The architecture of the panopticon, which Jeremy Bentham proposed in 1791 as a specific building, kept turning up in places where no building existed. In 2008 I registered domains around the word panopticonic to hold the argument I was beginning to see, having found only a single prior usage of the word in a 1959 issue of Time magazine. The word gave me a handle. It did not yet give me the book.

That book, the first one, arrived last year as Carceral Nation: How the Prison Escaped Its Walls and Made a Panopticonic Society. Carceral Nation did what I had been trying to do for two decades: it named the institutional logic that moved the prison’s discipline out of the prison and into schools, workplaces, clinics, data systems, and the texture of ordinary American life. I thought when I finished Carceral Nation that I had written the book the 2006 post wanted to become.

I was wrong. Carceral Nation was one half of a pair. The Claimed Body is the other half, and the pair is now complete.

Here is how the two books relate. Carceral Nation tracks one institution, the prison, and the way its logic escaped its physical walls to operate across institutional domains that were not prisons. The Claimed Body reverses the telescope. It tracks one body, the American body, and the way many institutions file claims on portions of it across the life cycle. Not one institution escaping its walls. Many institutions operating on the body simultaneously, each with its own filing mechanism, each with its own jurisdiction, each with its own enforcement apparatus, and no single forum where the body can contest the overlapping and contradictory claims.

The Homestead Act of 1862 is the organizing metaphor. Signed by Lincoln during the Civil War, the Act distributed continental land through a specific mechanism: a settler filed a claim on 160 acres of public land, lived on the parcel for five years, improved it, and received title. The claim, the parcel, the boundary line, the survey marker, the adjudicating court if the claim was contested. Between 1862 and 1976, the United States distributed approximately 270 million acres of continental North America this way. My argument is that the logic of the registered claim did not retire with the Act. It migrated from land to body. A hospital claims your birth. A school claims your developmental measurements. An insurer claims your diagnostic history. An employer claims your labor capacity. The state claims your reproductive eligibility and your military eligibility. If the criminal claim succeeds, a prison holds you. At the other end of life, a dying registry claims your cessation and a funeral corporation claims your remains. Operating in the shadow of all of these, a data broker sells your patterns forward to whoever will pay.

Fifteen chapters because fifteen is the number of major institutional domains that currently hold active claims on the American body. I did not invent the number. I counted the claimants.

What changed between Carceral Nation and The Claimed Body is the scale of the argument. Carceral Nation made its case by tracking one institution across domains. The Claimed Body makes its case by tracking one body across institutions. A reader who has read both books will see that the carceral logic described in the first is a special case of the claim-filing structure described in the second. The prison is one of fifteen claimants. The book you just finished and the book you are about to start belong to a single continuous argument, rendered from two sides. I needed the first book to get the vocabulary to write the second.

A note on why these books are appearing now, in 2026, rather than ten years ago. The answer is that the data layer has closed. Until recently, the hospital did not know what the pharmacist knew, and the pharmacist did not know what the school knew, and the school did not know what the employer knew. Each institutional claim operated in relative isolation. That is no longer true. The data broker industry, which occupies Chapter 13 of The Claimed Body under the heading of the Datafied Body, federates institutional claims into a single behavioral profile that any paying party can access. The body used to be claimed by many institutions operating in isolation. It is now claimed by many institutions operating through a shared back end. That shift, which accelerated across the past ten years and consolidated across the past five, is what made the argument urgent enough to warrant the book now rather than a decade ago.

A second note. I worry that the institutional claim on the American body is tightening at the same moment American democratic capacity to reform institutions is weakening. A claim that cannot be challenged in a public forum, by citizens with political standing, is no longer a claim in the Homestead sense. It is a confiscation. The Precarious Republic, the manuscript I continue to work on, argues that American democratic capacity is in measurable decline. The Claimed Body documents what that decline looks like from inside a single institutional domain: the domain of bodily life. The two manuscripts are cousins. They are not the same argument. They describe the same condition from different angles.

Readers who have come with me from the December 2006 post through Carceral Nation and now to The Claimed Body, thank you. The arc took twenty years. It took me the twenty years to learn how to name what I was trying to name. This blog is where the learning happened in public. Every half-formed post, every revision I never ran back, every idea that did not hold up on the second read, was part of the process by which I became able to write these books. Readers who are newer to the constellation, welcome. The books are the consolidated version of what has been going on here all along.

The Claimed Body is available now on Amazon in Kindle and paperback, and through BolesBooks.com for direct ordering and for free web reading. A Human Meme podcast episode and a Prairie Voice article accompany the launch. More work follows.

The homestead did not end. It turned inward.

And the claim I filed here in 2006 finally has its title document.

David Boles has operated the Boles web constellation since 1995. His most recent books are Carceral Nation and The Claimed Body and Selling Saturday Morning.

The Claim I Filed in 2006

This week I published The Claimed Body: How American Institutions Divided the Human Organism Among Themselves. Fifteen chapters, 559 pages in paperback, 349 in the web edition, a Kindle ebook, and a wraparound cover that took the shape of a parcel map of the body. The book is out on Amazon and through BolesBooks.com. Readers who have followed the constellation for any length of time will recognize the argument before they finish the first chapter. I have been writing toward this book since December of 2006, when I first used these pages to ask a question I did not yet have the vocabulary to answer.

The question back then was why the prison kept showing up in parts of American life that were not prisons. A school discipline policy reads like a booking protocol. An employer’s drug screen reads like a parole condition. A hospital discharge summary reads like a court order. The architecture of the panopticon, which Jeremy Bentham proposed in 1791 as a specific building, kept turning up in places where no building existed. In 2008 I registered domains around the word panopticonic to hold the argument I was beginning to see, having found only a single prior usage of the word in a 1959 issue of Time magazine. The word gave me a handle. It did not yet give me the book.

That book, the first one, arrived last year as Carceral Nation: How the Prison Escaped Its Walls and Made a Panopticonic Society. Carceral Nation did what I had been trying to do for two decades: it named the institutional logic that moved the prison’s discipline out of the prison and into schools, workplaces, clinics, data systems, and the texture of ordinary American life. I thought when I finished Carceral Nation that I had written the book the 2006 post wanted to become.

I was wrong. Carceral Nation was one half of a pair. The Claimed Body is the other half, and the pair is now complete.

Here is how the two books relate. Carceral Nation tracks one institution, the prison, and the way its logic escaped its physical walls to operate across institutional domains that were not prisons. The Claimed Body reverses the telescope. It tracks one body, the American body, and the way many institutions file claims on portions of it across the life cycle. Not one institution escaping its walls. Many institutions operating on the body simultaneously, each with its own filing mechanism, each with its own jurisdiction, each with its own enforcement apparatus, and no single forum where the body can contest the overlapping and contradictory claims.

The Homestead Act of 1862 is the organizing metaphor. Signed by Lincoln during the Civil War, the Act distributed continental land through a specific mechanism: a settler filed a claim on 160 acres of public land, lived on the parcel for five years, improved it, and received title. The claim, the parcel, the boundary line, the survey marker, the adjudicating court if the claim was contested. Between 1862 and 1976, the United States distributed approximately 270 million acres of continental North America this way. My argument is that the logic of the registered claim did not retire with the Act. It migrated from land to body. A hospital claims your birth. A school claims your developmental measurements. An insurer claims your diagnostic history. An employer claims your labor capacity. The state claims your reproductive eligibility and your military eligibility. If the criminal claim succeeds, a prison holds you. At the other end of life, a dying registry claims your cessation and a funeral corporation claims your remains. Operating in the shadow of all of these, a data broker sells your patterns forward to whoever will pay.

Fifteen chapters because fifteen is the number of major institutional domains that currently hold active claims on the American body. I did not invent the number. I counted the claimants.

What changed between Carceral Nation and The Claimed Body is the scale of the argument. Carceral Nation made its case by tracking one institution across domains. The Claimed Body makes its case by tracking one body across institutions. A reader who has read both books will see that the carceral logic described in the first is a special case of the claim-filing structure described in the second. The prison is one of fifteen claimants. The book you just finished and the book you are about to start belong to a single continuous argument, rendered from two sides. I needed the first book to get the vocabulary to write the second.

A note on why these books are appearing now, in 2026, rather than ten years ago. The answer is that the data layer has closed. Until recently, the hospital did not know what the pharmacist knew, and the pharmacist did not know what the school knew, and the school did not know what the employer knew. Each institutional claim operated in relative isolation. That is no longer true. The data broker industry, which occupies Chapter 13 of The Claimed Body under the heading of the Datafied Body, federates institutional claims into a single behavioral profile that any paying party can access. The body used to be claimed by many institutions operating in isolation. It is now claimed by many institutions operating through a shared back end. That shift, which accelerated across the past ten years and consolidated across the past five, is what made the argument urgent enough to warrant the book now rather than a decade ago.

A second note. I worry that the institutional claim on the American body is tightening at the same moment American democratic capacity to reform institutions is weakening. A claim that cannot be challenged in a public forum, by citizens with political standing, is no longer a claim in the Homestead sense. It is a confiscation. The Precarious Republic, the manuscript I continue to work on, argues that American democratic capacity is in measurable decline. The Claimed Body documents what that decline looks like from inside a single institutional domain: the domain of bodily life. The two manuscripts are cousins. They are not the same argument. They describe the same condition from different angles.

Readers who have come with me from the December 2006 post through Carceral Nation and now to The Claimed Body, thank you. The arc took twenty years. It took me the twenty years to learn how to name what I was trying to name. This blog is where the learning happened in public. Every half-formed post, every revision I never ran back, every idea that did not hold up on the second read, was part of the process by which I became able to write these books. Readers who are newer to the constellation, welcome. The books are the consolidated version of what has been going on here all along.

The Claimed Body is available now on Amazon in Kindle and paperback, and through BolesBooks.com for direct ordering and for free web reading. A Human Meme podcast episode and a Prairie Voice article accompany the launch. More work follows.

The homestead did not end. It turned inward.

And the claim I filed here in 2006 finally has its title document.

David Boles has operated the Boles web constellation since 1995. His most recent books are Carceral Nation and The Claimed Body and Selling Saturday Morning.

The Claim I Filed in 2006

This week I published The Claimed Body: How American Institutions Divided the Human Organism Among Themselves. Fifteen chapters, 559 pages in paperback, 349 in the web edition, a Kindle ebook, and a wraparound cover that took the shape of a parcel map of the body. The book is out on Amazon and through BolesBooks.com. Readers who have followed the constellation for any length of time will recognize the argument before they finish the first chapter. I have been writing toward this book since December of 2006, when I first used these pages to ask a question I did not yet have the vocabulary to answer.

The question back then was why the prison kept showing up in parts of American life that were not prisons. A school discipline policy reads like a booking protocol. An employer’s drug screen reads like a parole condition. A hospital discharge summary reads like a court order. The architecture of the panopticon, which Jeremy Bentham proposed in 1791 as a specific building, kept turning up in places where no building existed. In 2008 I registered domains around the word panopticonic to hold the argument I was beginning to see, having found only a single prior usage of the word in a 1959 issue of Time magazine. The word gave me a handle. It did not yet give me the book.

That book, the first one, arrived last year as Carceral Nation: How the Prison Escaped Its Walls and Made a Panopticonic Society. Carceral Nation did what I had been trying to do for two decades: it named the institutional logic that moved the prison’s discipline out of the prison and into schools, workplaces, clinics, data systems, and the texture of ordinary American life. I thought when I finished Carceral Nation that I had written the book the 2006 post wanted to become.

I was wrong. Carceral Nation was one half of a pair. The Claimed Body is the other half, and the pair is now complete.

Here is how the two books relate. Carceral Nation tracks one institution, the prison, and the way its logic escaped its physical walls to operate across institutional domains that were not prisons. The Claimed Body reverses the telescope. It tracks one body, the American body, and the way many institutions file claims on portions of it across the life cycle. Not one institution escaping its walls. Many institutions operating on the body simultaneously, each with its own filing mechanism, each with its own jurisdiction, each with its own enforcement apparatus, and no single forum where the body can contest the overlapping and contradictory claims.

The Homestead Act of 1862 is the organizing metaphor. Signed by Lincoln during the Civil War, the Act distributed continental land through a specific mechanism: a settler filed a claim on 160 acres of public land, lived on the parcel for five years, improved it, and received title. The claim, the parcel, the boundary line, the survey marker, the adjudicating court if the claim was contested. Between 1862 and 1976, the United States distributed approximately 270 million acres of continental North America this way. My argument is that the logic of the registered claim did not retire with the Act. It migrated from land to body. A hospital claims your birth. A school claims your developmental measurements. An insurer claims your diagnostic history. An employer claims your labor capacity. The state claims your reproductive eligibility and your military eligibility. If the criminal claim succeeds, a prison holds you. At the other end of life, a dying registry claims your cessation and a funeral corporation claims your remains. Operating in the shadow of all of these, a data broker sells your patterns forward to whoever will pay.

Fifteen chapters because fifteen is the number of major institutional domains that currently hold active claims on the American body. I did not invent the number. I counted the claimants.

What changed between Carceral Nation and The Claimed Body is the scale of the argument. Carceral Nation made its case by tracking one institution across domains. The Claimed Body makes its case by tracking one body across institutions. A reader who has read both books will see that the carceral logic described in the first is a special case of the claim-filing structure described in the second. The prison is one of fifteen claimants. The book you just finished and the book you are about to start belong to a single continuous argument, rendered from two sides. I needed the first book to get the vocabulary to write the second.

A note on why these books are appearing now, in 2026, rather than ten years ago. The answer is that the data layer has closed. Until recently, the hospital did not know what the pharmacist knew, and the pharmacist did not know what the school knew, and the school did not know what the employer knew. Each institutional claim operated in relative isolation. That is no longer true. The data broker industry, which occupies Chapter 13 of The Claimed Body under the heading of the Datafied Body, federates institutional claims into a single behavioral profile that any paying party can access. The body used to be claimed by many institutions operating in isolation. It is now claimed by many institutions operating through a shared back end. That shift, which accelerated across the past ten years and consolidated across the past five, is what made the argument urgent enough to warrant the book now rather than a decade ago.

A second note. I worry that the institutional claim on the American body is tightening at the same moment American democratic capacity to reform institutions is weakening. A claim that cannot be challenged in a public forum, by citizens with political standing, is no longer a claim in the Homestead sense. It is a confiscation. The Precarious Republic, the manuscript I continue to work on, argues that American democratic capacity is in measurable decline. The Claimed Body documents what that decline looks like from inside a single institutional domain: the domain of bodily life. The two manuscripts are cousins. They are not the same argument. They describe the same condition from different angles.

Readers who have come with me from the December 2006 post through Carceral Nation and now to The Claimed Body, thank you. The arc took twenty years. It took me the twenty years to learn how to name what I was trying to name. This blog is where the learning happened in public. Every half-formed post, every revision I never ran back, every idea that did not hold up on the second read, was part of the process by which I became able to write these books. Readers who are newer to the constellation, welcome. The books are the consolidated version of what has been going on here all along.

The Claimed Body is available now on Amazon in Kindle and paperback, and through BolesBooks.com for direct ordering and for free web reading. A Human Meme podcast episode and a Prairie Voice article accompany the launch. More work follows.

The homestead did not end. It turned inward.

And the claim I filed here in 2006 finally has its title document.

David Boles has operated the Boles web constellation since 1995. His most recent books are Carceral Nation and The Claimed Body and Selling Saturday Morning.

The Claim I Filed in 2006

This week I published The Claimed Body: How American Institutions Divided the Human Organism Among Themselves. Fifteen chapters, 559 pages in paperback, 349 in the web edition, a Kindle ebook, and a wraparound cover that took the shape of a parcel map of the body. The book is out on Amazon and through BolesBooks.com. Readers who have followed the constellation for any length of time will recognize the argument before they finish the first chapter. I have been writing toward this book since December of 2006, when I first used these pages to ask a question I did not yet have the vocabulary to answer.

The question back then was why the prison kept showing up in parts of American life that were not prisons. A school discipline policy reads like a booking protocol. An employer’s drug screen reads like a parole condition. A hospital discharge summary reads like a court order. The architecture of the panopticon, which Jeremy Bentham proposed in 1791 as a specific building, kept turning up in places where no building existed. In 2008 I registered domains around the word panopticonic to hold the argument I was beginning to see, having found only a single prior usage of the word in a 1959 issue of Time magazine. The word gave me a handle. It did not yet give me the book.

That book, the first one, arrived last year as Carceral Nation: How the Prison Escaped Its Walls and Made a Panopticonic Society. Carceral Nation did what I had been trying to do for two decades: it named the institutional logic that moved the prison’s discipline out of the prison and into schools, workplaces, clinics, data systems, and the texture of ordinary American life. I thought when I finished Carceral Nation that I had written the book the 2006 post wanted to become.

I was wrong. Carceral Nation was one half of a pair. The Claimed Body is the other half, and the pair is now complete.

Here is how the two books relate. Carceral Nation tracks one institution, the prison, and the way its logic escaped its physical walls to operate across institutional domains that were not prisons. The Claimed Body reverses the telescope. It tracks one body, the American body, and the way many institutions file claims on portions of it across the life cycle. Not one institution escaping its walls. Many institutions operating on the body simultaneously, each with its own filing mechanism, each with its own jurisdiction, each with its own enforcement apparatus, and no single forum where the body can contest the overlapping and contradictory claims.

The Homestead Act of 1862 is the organizing metaphor. Signed by Lincoln during the Civil War, the Act distributed continental land through a specific mechanism: a settler filed a claim on 160 acres of public land, lived on the parcel for five years, improved it, and received title. The claim, the parcel, the boundary line, the survey marker, the adjudicating court if the claim was contested. Between 1862 and 1976, the United States distributed approximately 270 million acres of continental North America this way. My argument is that the logic of the registered claim did not retire with the Act. It migrated from land to body. A hospital claims your birth. A school claims your developmental measurements. An insurer claims your diagnostic history. An employer claims your labor capacity. The state claims your reproductive eligibility and your military eligibility. If the criminal claim succeeds, a prison holds you. At the other end of life, a dying registry claims your cessation and a funeral corporation claims your remains. Operating in the shadow of all of these, a data broker sells your patterns forward to whoever will pay.

Fifteen chapters because fifteen is the number of major institutional domains that currently hold active claims on the American body. I did not invent the number. I counted the claimants.

What changed between Carceral Nation and The Claimed Body is the scale of the argument. Carceral Nation made its case by tracking one institution across domains. The Claimed Body makes its case by tracking one body across institutions. A reader who has read both books will see that the carceral logic described in the first is a special case of the claim-filing structure described in the second. The prison is one of fifteen claimants. The book you just finished and the book you are about to start belong to a single continuous argument, rendered from two sides. I needed the first book to get the vocabulary to write the second.

A note on why these books are appearing now, in 2026, rather than ten years ago. The answer is that the data layer has closed. Until recently, the hospital did not know what the pharmacist knew, and the pharmacist did not know what the school knew, and the school did not know what the employer knew. Each institutional claim operated in relative isolation. That is no longer true. The data broker industry, which occupies Chapter 13 of The Claimed Body under the heading of the Datafied Body, federates institutional claims into a single behavioral profile that any paying party can access. The body used to be claimed by many institutions operating in isolation. It is now claimed by many institutions operating through a shared back end. That shift, which accelerated across the past ten years and consolidated across the past five, is what made the argument urgent enough to warrant the book now rather than a decade ago.

A second note. I worry that the institutional claim on the American body is tightening at the same moment American democratic capacity to reform institutions is weakening. A claim that cannot be challenged in a public forum, by citizens with political standing, is no longer a claim in the Homestead sense. It is a confiscation. The Precarious Republic, the manuscript I continue to work on, argues that American democratic capacity is in measurable decline. The Claimed Body documents what that decline looks like from inside a single institutional domain: the domain of bodily life. The two manuscripts are cousins. They are not the same argument. They describe the same condition from different angles.

Readers who have come with me from the December 2006 post through Carceral Nation and now to The Claimed Body, thank you. The arc took twenty years. It took me the twenty years to learn how to name what I was trying to name. This blog is where the learning happened in public. Every half-formed post, every revision I never ran back, every idea that did not hold up on the second read, was part of the process by which I became able to write these books. Readers who are newer to the constellation, welcome. The books are the consolidated version of what has been going on here all along.

The Claimed Body is available now on Amazon in Kindle and paperback, and through BolesBooks.com for direct ordering and for free web reading. A Human Meme podcast episode and a Prairie Voice article accompany the launch. More work follows.

The homestead did not end. It turned inward.

And the claim I filed here in 2006 finally has its title document.

David Boles has operated the Boles web constellation since 1995. His most recent books are Carceral Nation and The Claimed Body and Selling Saturday Morning.

The Claim I Filed in 2006

This week I published The Claimed Body: How American Institutions Divided the Human Organism Among Themselves. Fifteen chapters, 559 pages in paperback, 349 in the web edition, a Kindle ebook, and a wraparound cover that took the shape of a parcel map of the body. The book is out on Amazon and through BolesBooks.com. Readers who have followed the constellation for any length of time will recognize the argument before they finish the first chapter. I have been writing toward this book since December of 2006, when I first used these pages to ask a question I did not yet have the vocabulary to answer.

The question back then was why the prison kept showing up in parts of American life that were not prisons. A school discipline policy reads like a booking protocol. An employer’s drug screen reads like a parole condition. A hospital discharge summary reads like a court order. The architecture of the panopticon, which Jeremy Bentham proposed in 1791 as a specific building, kept turning up in places where no building existed. In 2008 I registered domains around the word panopticonic to hold the argument I was beginning to see, having found only a single prior usage of the word in a 1959 issue of Time magazine. The word gave me a handle. It did not yet give me the book.

That book, the first one, arrived last year as Carceral Nation: How the Prison Escaped Its Walls and Made a Panopticonic Society. Carceral Nation did what I had been trying to do for two decades: it named the institutional logic that moved the prison’s discipline out of the prison and into schools, workplaces, clinics, data systems, and the texture of ordinary American life. I thought when I finished Carceral Nation that I had written the book the 2006 post wanted to become.

I was wrong. Carceral Nation was one half of a pair. The Claimed Body is the other half, and the pair is now complete.

Here is how the two books relate. Carceral Nation tracks one institution, the prison, and the way its logic escaped its physical walls to operate across institutional domains that were not prisons. The Claimed Body reverses the telescope. It tracks one body, the American body, and the way many institutions file claims on portions of it across the life cycle. Not one institution escaping its walls. Many institutions operating on the body simultaneously, each with its own filing mechanism, each with its own jurisdiction, each with its own enforcement apparatus, and no single forum where the body can contest the overlapping and contradictory claims.

The Homestead Act of 1862 is the organizing metaphor. Signed by Lincoln during the Civil War, the Act distributed continental land through a specific mechanism: a settler filed a claim on 160 acres of public land, lived on the parcel for five years, improved it, and received title. The claim, the parcel, the boundary line, the survey marker, the adjudicating court if the claim was contested. Between 1862 and 1976, the United States distributed approximately 270 million acres of continental North America this way. My argument is that the logic of the registered claim did not retire with the Act. It migrated from land to body. A hospital claims your birth. A school claims your developmental measurements. An insurer claims your diagnostic history. An employer claims your labor capacity. The state claims your reproductive eligibility and your military eligibility. If the criminal claim succeeds, a prison holds you. At the other end of life, a dying registry claims your cessation and a funeral corporation claims your remains. Operating in the shadow of all of these, a data broker sells your patterns forward to whoever will pay.

Fifteen chapters because fifteen is the number of major institutional domains that currently hold active claims on the American body. I did not invent the number. I counted the claimants.

What changed between Carceral Nation and The Claimed Body is the scale of the argument. Carceral Nation made its case by tracking one institution across domains. The Claimed Body makes its case by tracking one body across institutions. A reader who has read both books will see that the carceral logic described in the first is a special case of the claim-filing structure described in the second. The prison is one of fifteen claimants. The book you just finished and the book you are about to start belong to a single continuous argument, rendered from two sides. I needed the first book to get the vocabulary to write the second.

A note on why these books are appearing now, in 2026, rather than ten years ago. The answer is that the data layer has closed. Until recently, the hospital did not know what the pharmacist knew, and the pharmacist did not know what the school knew, and the school did not know what the employer knew. Each institutional claim operated in relative isolation. That is no longer true. The data broker industry, which occupies Chapter 13 of The Claimed Body under the heading of the Datafied Body, federates institutional claims into a single behavioral profile that any paying party can access. The body used to be claimed by many institutions operating in isolation. It is now claimed by many institutions operating through a shared back end. That shift, which accelerated across the past ten years and consolidated across the past five, is what made the argument urgent enough to warrant the book now rather than a decade ago.

A second note. I worry that the institutional claim on the American body is tightening at the same moment American democratic capacity to reform institutions is weakening. A claim that cannot be challenged in a public forum, by citizens with political standing, is no longer a claim in the Homestead sense. It is a confiscation. The Precarious Republic, the manuscript I continue to work on, argues that American democratic capacity is in measurable decline. The Claimed Body documents what that decline looks like from inside a single institutional domain: the domain of bodily life. The two manuscripts are cousins. They are not the same argument. They describe the same condition from different angles.

Readers who have come with me from the December 2006 post through Carceral Nation and now to The Claimed Body, thank you. The arc took twenty years. It took me the twenty years to learn how to name what I was trying to name. This blog is where the learning happened in public. Every half-formed post, every revision I never ran back, every idea that did not hold up on the second read, was part of the process by which I became able to write these books. Readers who are newer to the constellation, welcome. The books are the consolidated version of what has been going on here all along.

The Claimed Body is available now on Amazon in Kindle and paperback, and through BolesBooks.com for direct ordering and for free web reading. A Human Meme podcast episode and a Prairie Voice article accompany the launch. More work follows.

The homestead did not end. It turned inward.

And the claim I filed here in 2006 finally has its title document.

David Boles has operated the Boles web constellation since 1995. His most recent books are Carceral Nation and The Claimed Body and Selling Saturday Morning.

Carceral Nation: Twenty Years from Blog Post to Book

In December 2006, I published an article on this blog about mass incarceration, racial disparities in the American prison system, and a concept I was trying to name: the carceral citizen, the person whose freedom exists in a state of permanent conditional revocation. The article was one entry among many in the Boles Blogs Network, which at its peak ran fourteen blogs across a range of subjects. One of those fourteen was called Panopticonic.

Panopticonic was the blog where I wrote about surveillance, inspection, the legacy of Bentham’s prison design, and the spreading logic of watching as governance. The writing accumulated across years, and in October 2008 I registered two domains: CarceralNation.com and Panopticonic.com. Registering those names was the moment the concept took a shape I could hold. The articles continued. The Panopticonic archives were collected into the first volume of Best of Boles Blogs alongside material from WordPunk, Memeingful, and Celebrity Semiotic. Through all of it, the question never changed: what happens when a society that calls itself free organizes its civic life around the assumption that everyone is being watched?

That question has been running underneath this blog for twenty years. Carceral Nation: How the Prison Escaped Its Walls and Made a Panopticonic Society is the book that question became. It is available now from David Boles Books in paperback, Kindle, and as a free PDF download.

From Blog to Book

The difference between writing about surveillance on a blog and writing a book about surveillance is the difference between accumulating observations and constructing an argument. The blog posts were reactions: a new camera program in New York, a data-sharing agreement between a police department and a tech company, a court ruling on warrantless cell phone tracking. Each post identified a piece of the architecture. The book assembles the pieces into a single structure and asks what the completed building looks like.

The answer required going back further than I had gone on the blog. Carceral Nation begins in the 1680s, with colonial lantern laws that required enslaved people to carry lit candles after dark so that white citizens could see them coming. Forced visibility. The first American surveillance technology was fire in a Black hand. From there, the principle of compulsory visibility moves through Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon and Michel Foucault’s theoretical expansion of the panoptic principle, then forward through the fingerprint registry, the Cold War intelligence apparatus, the post-September 11 mass surveillance state, the commercial data economy, and the neighborhood platforms where your neighbors now report your movements to one another.

What the Blog Could Not Say

Twenty years of blog posts taught me the facts. The book taught me something about myself that the blog format never forced me to confront. During the three years I spent writing Carceral Nation, I changed my own behavior. I became more careful about what I searched. I reconsidered certain article topics for Prairie Voice because I wondered whether the research trail itself might attract attention. I paused before typing phrases into search engines that, in a different political climate, might be unremarkable but that in 2025 felt like they carried weight. I caught myself performing exactly the self-censorship the book describes, and I kept writing anyway, because documenting the condition seemed more important than pretending I was exempt from it.

Bentham called the panoptic principle “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind.” He was describing a building. What we have built is a condition in which the writer researching the surveillance state modifies his own research behavior because of the surveillance state. The book is its own evidence. I am its own case study.

The Word “Panopticonic”

The subtitle uses a word I need to account for: “panopticonic.” The adjective “panoptic,” meaning all-seeing, has existed since Bentham. “Panopticonic” appeared once in the prior record, a 1959 Time piece using it casually to describe the audience’s experience of watching prison life through cinema. The word was never developed, defined, or repeated. Carceral Nation reclaims it and gives it a specific definition: a panopticonic society is one in which the panoptic principle has escaped the institutional settings Foucault described and has become the organizing logic of civic life itself. A panopticonic society is one in which the panoptic principle has escaped the institutional settings Foucault described and has become the organizing logic of civic life itself. Prison logic has dissolved into the society. Guard towers have been replaced by smartphones, doorbell cameras, and algorithmic risk scores. The walls came down, and the logic walked out through the gap.

Connecting the Constellation

Readers of this blog will find threads connecting Carceral Nation to work published across the Boles web constellation over the past year. The Human Meme podcast episode “The Pause Before You Speak” examines how the surveillance condition reshapes consciousness, building on the earlier episode “Pause Before the Lie” to explore what happens when self-censorship becomes continuous rather than momentary. Prairie Voice published “The Watcher on the County Road,” investigating how Flock Safety cameras, school surveillance systems, and correctional culture have wired rural America into the same panopticonic infrastructure the book describes at the national level. The book has also been developed through the same production pipeline we have refined across across The Broadway Machine, The Counterfeit Bargain, and The Human Universal Beautiful: manuscript through multiple editorial passes, KDP paperback interior with embedded DejaVu Serif typography, wraparound cover, Kindle edition, and web PDF for free download.

The cover design deserves a word. The front panel shows a red brick wall with an irregular breach revealing a surveillance camera lens behind the bricks. Falling bricks cascade around the title text. The image is the argument in visual form: the prison wall has been broken from behind, and what looks out through the gap is an eye that records everything it sees. The brick pattern continues across the spine and back cover as a single continuous wall, because the surveillance infrastructure does not recognize the boundaries between public, private, and personal.

Getting Carceral Nation

Carceral Nation: How the Prison Escaped Its Walls and Made a Panopticonic Society by David Boles is published by David Boles Books Writing & Publishing, New York City. 2026.

Kindle ebook: $9.95 Paperback: $19.95 Free PDF: BolesBooks.com

The book is also available on Amazon.

Carceral Nation: Twenty Years from Blog Post to Book

In December 2006, I published an article on this blog about mass incarceration, racial disparities in the American prison system, and a concept I was trying to name: the carceral citizen, the person whose freedom exists in a state of permanent conditional revocation. The article was one entry among many in the Boles Blogs Network, which at its peak ran fourteen blogs across a range of subjects. One of those fourteen was called Panopticonic.

Panopticonic was the blog where I wrote about surveillance, inspection, the legacy of Bentham’s prison design, and the spreading logic of watching as governance. The writing accumulated across years, and in October 2008 I registered two domains: CarceralNation.com and Panopticonic.com. Registering those names was the moment the concept took a shape I could hold. The articles continued. The Panopticonic archives were collected into the first volume of Best of Boles Blogs alongside material from WordPunk, Memeingful, and Celebrity Semiotic. Through all of it, the question never changed: what happens when a society that calls itself free organizes its civic life around the assumption that everyone is being watched?

That question has been running underneath this blog for twenty years. Carceral Nation: How the Prison Escaped Its Walls and Made a Panopticonic Society is the book that question became. It is available now from David Boles Books in paperback, Kindle, and as a free PDF download.

From Blog to Book

The difference between writing about surveillance on a blog and writing a book about surveillance is the difference between accumulating observations and constructing an argument. The blog posts were reactions: a new camera program in New York, a data-sharing agreement between a police department and a tech company, a court ruling on warrantless cell phone tracking. Each post identified a piece of the architecture. The book assembles the pieces into a single structure and asks what the completed building looks like.

The answer required going back further than I had gone on the blog. Carceral Nation begins in the 1680s, with colonial lantern laws that required enslaved people to carry lit candles after dark so that white citizens could see them coming. Forced visibility. The first American surveillance technology was fire in a Black hand. From there, the principle of compulsory visibility moves through Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon and Michel Foucault’s theoretical expansion of the panoptic principle, then forward through the fingerprint registry, the Cold War intelligence apparatus, the post-September 11 mass surveillance state, the commercial data economy, and the neighborhood platforms where your neighbors now report your movements to one another.

What the Blog Could Not Say

Twenty years of blog posts taught me the facts. The book taught me something about myself that the blog format never forced me to confront. During the three years I spent writing Carceral Nation, I changed my own behavior. I became more careful about what I searched. I reconsidered certain article topics for Prairie Voice because I wondered whether the research trail itself might attract attention. I paused before typing phrases into search engines that, in a different political climate, might be unremarkable but that in 2025 felt like they carried weight. I caught myself performing exactly the self-censorship the book describes, and I kept writing anyway, because documenting the condition seemed more important than pretending I was exempt from it.

Bentham called the panoptic principle “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind.” He was describing a building. What we have built is a condition in which the writer researching the surveillance state modifies his own research behavior because of the surveillance state. The book is its own evidence. I am its own case study.

The Word “Panopticonic”

The subtitle uses a word I need to account for: “panopticonic.” The adjective “panoptic,” meaning all-seeing, has existed since Bentham. “Panopticonic” appeared once in the prior record, a 1959 Time piece using it casually to describe the audience’s experience of watching prison life through cinema. The word was never developed, defined, or repeated. Carceral Nation reclaims it and gives it a specific definition: a panopticonic society is one in which the panoptic principle has escaped the institutional settings Foucault described and has become the organizing logic of civic life itself. A panopticonic society is one in which the panoptic principle has escaped the institutional settings Foucault described and has become the organizing logic of civic life itself. Prison logic has dissolved into the society. Guard towers have been replaced by smartphones, doorbell cameras, and algorithmic risk scores. The walls came down, and the logic walked out through the gap.

Connecting the Constellation

Readers of this blog will find threads connecting Carceral Nation to work published across the Boles web constellation over the past year. The Human Meme podcast episode “The Pause Before You Speak” examines how the surveillance condition reshapes consciousness, building on the earlier episode “Pause Before the Lie” to explore what happens when self-censorship becomes continuous rather than momentary. Prairie Voice published “The Watcher on the County Road,” investigating how Flock Safety cameras, school surveillance systems, and correctional culture have wired rural America into the same panopticonic infrastructure the book describes at the national level. The book has also been developed through the same production pipeline we have refined across across The Broadway Machine, The Counterfeit Bargain, and The Human Universal Beautiful: manuscript through multiple editorial passes, KDP paperback interior with embedded DejaVu Serif typography, wraparound cover, Kindle edition, and web PDF for free download.

The cover design deserves a word. The front panel shows a red brick wall with an irregular breach revealing a surveillance camera lens behind the bricks. Falling bricks cascade around the title text. The image is the argument in visual form: the prison wall has been broken from behind, and what looks out through the gap is an eye that records everything it sees. The brick pattern continues across the spine and back cover as a single continuous wall, because the surveillance infrastructure does not recognize the boundaries between public, private, and personal.

Getting Carceral Nation

Carceral Nation: How the Prison Escaped Its Walls and Made a Panopticonic Society by David Boles is published by David Boles Books Writing & Publishing, New York City. 2026.

Kindle ebook: $9.95 Paperback: $19.95 Free PDF: BolesBooks.com

The book is also available on Amazon.

Carceral Nation: Twenty Years from Blog Post to Book

In December 2006, I published an article on this blog about mass incarceration, racial disparities in the American prison system, and a concept I was trying to name: the carceral citizen, the person whose freedom exists in a state of permanent conditional revocation. The article was one entry among many in the Boles Blogs Network, which at its peak ran fourteen blogs across a range of subjects. One of those fourteen was called Panopticonic.

Panopticonic was the blog where I wrote about surveillance, inspection, the legacy of Bentham’s prison design, and the spreading logic of watching as governance. The writing accumulated across years, and in October 2008 I registered two domains: CarceralNation.com and Panopticonic.com. Registering those names was the moment the concept took a shape I could hold. The articles continued. The Panopticonic archives were collected into the first volume of Best of Boles Blogs alongside material from WordPunk, Memeingful, and Celebrity Semiotic. Through all of it, the question never changed: what happens when a society that calls itself free organizes its civic life around the assumption that everyone is being watched?

That question has been running underneath this blog for twenty years. Carceral Nation: How the Prison Escaped Its Walls and Made a Panopticonic Society is the book that question became. It is available now from David Boles Books in paperback, Kindle, and as a free PDF download.

From Blog to Book

The difference between writing about surveillance on a blog and writing a book about surveillance is the difference between accumulating observations and constructing an argument. The blog posts were reactions: a new camera program in New York, a data-sharing agreement between a police department and a tech company, a court ruling on warrantless cell phone tracking. Each post identified a piece of the architecture. The book assembles the pieces into a single structure and asks what the completed building looks like.

The answer required going back further than I had gone on the blog. Carceral Nation begins in the 1680s, with colonial lantern laws that required enslaved people to carry lit candles after dark so that white citizens could see them coming. Forced visibility. The first American surveillance technology was fire in a Black hand. From there, the principle of compulsory visibility moves through Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon and Michel Foucault’s theoretical expansion of the panoptic principle, then forward through the fingerprint registry, the Cold War intelligence apparatus, the post-September 11 mass surveillance state, the commercial data economy, and the neighborhood platforms where your neighbors now report your movements to one another.

What the Blog Could Not Say

Twenty years of blog posts taught me the facts. The book taught me something about myself that the blog format never forced me to confront. During the three years I spent writing Carceral Nation, I changed my own behavior. I became more careful about what I searched. I reconsidered certain article topics for Prairie Voice because I wondered whether the research trail itself might attract attention. I paused before typing phrases into search engines that, in a different political climate, might be unremarkable but that in 2025 felt like they carried weight. I caught myself performing exactly the self-censorship the book describes, and I kept writing anyway, because documenting the condition seemed more important than pretending I was exempt from it.

Bentham called the panoptic principle “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind.” He was describing a building. What we have built is a condition in which the writer researching the surveillance state modifies his own research behavior because of the surveillance state. The book is its own evidence. I am its own case study.

The Word “Panopticonic”

The subtitle uses a word I need to account for: “panopticonic.” The adjective “panoptic,” meaning all-seeing, has existed since Bentham. “Panopticonic” appeared once in the prior record, a 1959 Time piece using it casually to describe the audience’s experience of watching prison life through cinema. The word was never developed, defined, or repeated. Carceral Nation reclaims it and gives it a specific definition: a panopticonic society is one in which the panoptic principle has escaped the institutional settings Foucault described and has become the organizing logic of civic life itself. A panopticonic society is one in which the panoptic principle has escaped the institutional settings Foucault described and has become the organizing logic of civic life itself. Prison logic has dissolved into the society. Guard towers have been replaced by smartphones, doorbell cameras, and algorithmic risk scores. The walls came down, and the logic walked out through the gap.

Connecting the Constellation

Readers of this blog will find threads connecting Carceral Nation to work published across the Boles web constellation over the past year. The Human Meme podcast episode “The Pause Before You Speak” examines how the surveillance condition reshapes consciousness, building on the earlier episode “Pause Before the Lie” to explore what happens when self-censorship becomes continuous rather than momentary. Prairie Voice published “The Watcher on the County Road,” investigating how Flock Safety cameras, school surveillance systems, and correctional culture have wired rural America into the same panopticonic infrastructure the book describes at the national level. The book has also been developed through the same production pipeline we have refined across across The Broadway Machine, The Counterfeit Bargain, and The Human Universal Beautiful: manuscript through multiple editorial passes, KDP paperback interior with embedded DejaVu Serif typography, wraparound cover, Kindle edition, and web PDF for free download.

The cover design deserves a word. The front panel shows a red brick wall with an irregular breach revealing a surveillance camera lens behind the bricks. Falling bricks cascade around the title text. The image is the argument in visual form: the prison wall has been broken from behind, and what looks out through the gap is an eye that records everything it sees. The brick pattern continues across the spine and back cover as a single continuous wall, because the surveillance infrastructure does not recognize the boundaries between public, private, and personal.

Getting Carceral Nation

Carceral Nation: How the Prison Escaped Its Walls and Made a Panopticonic Society by David Boles is published by David Boles Books Writing & Publishing, New York City. 2026.

Kindle ebook: $9.95 Paperback: $19.95 Free PDF: BolesBooks.com

The book is also available on Amazon.

Carceral Nation: Twenty Years from Blog Post to Book

In December 2006, I published an article on this blog about mass incarceration, racial disparities in the American prison system, and a concept I was trying to name: the carceral citizen, the person whose freedom exists in a state of permanent conditional revocation. The article was one entry among many in the Boles Blogs Network, which at its peak ran fourteen blogs across a range of subjects. One of those fourteen was called Panopticonic.

Panopticonic was the blog where I wrote about surveillance, inspection, the legacy of Bentham’s prison design, and the spreading logic of watching as governance. The writing accumulated across years, and in October 2008 I registered two domains: CarceralNation.com and Panopticonic.com. Registering those names was the moment the concept took a shape I could hold. The articles continued. The Panopticonic archives were collected into the first volume of Best of Boles Blogs alongside material from WordPunk, Memeingful, and Celebrity Semiotic. Through all of it, the question never changed: what happens when a society that calls itself free organizes its civic life around the assumption that everyone is being watched?

That question has been running underneath this blog for twenty years. Carceral Nation: How the Prison Escaped Its Walls and Made a Panopticonic Society is the book that question became. It is available now from David Boles Books in paperback, Kindle, and as a free PDF download.

From Blog to Book

The difference between writing about surveillance on a blog and writing a book about surveillance is the difference between accumulating observations and constructing an argument. The blog posts were reactions: a new camera program in New York, a data-sharing agreement between a police department and a tech company, a court ruling on warrantless cell phone tracking. Each post identified a piece of the architecture. The book assembles the pieces into a single structure and asks what the completed building looks like.

The answer required going back further than I had gone on the blog. Carceral Nation begins in the 1680s, with colonial lantern laws that required enslaved people to carry lit candles after dark so that white citizens could see them coming. Forced visibility. The first American surveillance technology was fire in a Black hand. From there, the principle of compulsory visibility moves through Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon and Michel Foucault’s theoretical expansion of the panoptic principle, then forward through the fingerprint registry, the Cold War intelligence apparatus, the post-September 11 mass surveillance state, the commercial data economy, and the neighborhood platforms where your neighbors now report your movements to one another.

What the Blog Could Not Say

Twenty years of blog posts taught me the facts. The book taught me something about myself that the blog format never forced me to confront. During the three years I spent writing Carceral Nation, I changed my own behavior. I became more careful about what I searched. I reconsidered certain article topics for Prairie Voice because I wondered whether the research trail itself might attract attention. I paused before typing phrases into search engines that, in a different political climate, might be unremarkable but that in 2025 felt like they carried weight. I caught myself performing exactly the self-censorship the book describes, and I kept writing anyway, because documenting the condition seemed more important than pretending I was exempt from it.

Bentham called the panoptic principle “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind.” He was describing a building. What we have built is a condition in which the writer researching the surveillance state modifies his own research behavior because of the surveillance state. The book is its own evidence. I am its own case study.

The Word “Panopticonic”

The subtitle uses a word I need to account for: “panopticonic.” The adjective “panoptic,” meaning all-seeing, has existed since Bentham. “Panopticonic” appeared once in the prior record, a 1959 Time piece using it casually to describe the audience’s experience of watching prison life through cinema. The word was never developed, defined, or repeated. Carceral Nation reclaims it and gives it a specific definition: a panopticonic society is one in which the panoptic principle has escaped the institutional settings Foucault described and has become the organizing logic of civic life itself. A panopticonic society is one in which the panoptic principle has escaped the institutional settings Foucault described and has become the organizing logic of civic life itself. Prison logic has dissolved into the society. Guard towers have been replaced by smartphones, doorbell cameras, and algorithmic risk scores. The walls came down, and the logic walked out through the gap.

Connecting the Constellation

Readers of this blog will find threads connecting Carceral Nation to work published across the Boles web constellation over the past year. The Human Meme podcast episode “The Pause Before You Speak” examines how the surveillance condition reshapes consciousness, building on the earlier episode “Pause Before the Lie” to explore what happens when self-censorship becomes continuous rather than momentary. Prairie Voice published “The Watcher on the County Road,” investigating how Flock Safety cameras, school surveillance systems, and correctional culture have wired rural America into the same panopticonic infrastructure the book describes at the national level. The book has also been developed through the same production pipeline we have refined across across The Broadway Machine, The Counterfeit Bargain, and The Human Universal Beautiful: manuscript through multiple editorial passes, KDP paperback interior with embedded DejaVu Serif typography, wraparound cover, Kindle edition, and web PDF for free download.

The cover design deserves a word. The front panel shows a red brick wall with an irregular breach revealing a surveillance camera lens behind the bricks. Falling bricks cascade around the title text. The image is the argument in visual form: the prison wall has been broken from behind, and what looks out through the gap is an eye that records everything it sees. The brick pattern continues across the spine and back cover as a single continuous wall, because the surveillance infrastructure does not recognize the boundaries between public, private, and personal.

Getting Carceral Nation

Carceral Nation: How the Prison Escaped Its Walls and Made a Panopticonic Society by David Boles is published by David Boles Books Writing & Publishing, New York City. 2026.

Kindle ebook: $9.95 Paperback: $19.95 Free PDF: BolesBooks.com

The book is also available on Amazon.

Carceral Nation: Twenty Years from Blog Post to Book

In December 2006, I published an article on this blog about mass incarceration, racial disparities in the American prison system, and a concept I was trying to name: the carceral citizen, the person whose freedom exists in a state of permanent conditional revocation. The article was one entry among many in the Boles Blogs Network, which at its peak ran fourteen blogs across a range of subjects. One of those fourteen was called Panopticonic.

Panopticonic was the blog where I wrote about surveillance, inspection, the legacy of Bentham’s prison design, and the spreading logic of watching as governance. The writing accumulated across years, and in October 2008 I registered two domains: CarceralNation.com and Panopticonic.com. Registering those names was the moment the concept took a shape I could hold. The articles continued. The Panopticonic archives were collected into the first volume of Best of Boles Blogs alongside material from WordPunk, Memeingful, and Celebrity Semiotic. Through all of it, the question never changed: what happens when a society that calls itself free organizes its civic life around the assumption that everyone is being watched?

That question has been running underneath this blog for twenty years. Carceral Nation: How the Prison Escaped Its Walls and Made a Panopticonic Society is the book that question became. It is available now from David Boles Books in paperback, Kindle, and as a free PDF download.

From Blog to Book

The difference between writing about surveillance on a blog and writing a book about surveillance is the difference between accumulating observations and constructing an argument. The blog posts were reactions: a new camera program in New York, a data-sharing agreement between a police department and a tech company, a court ruling on warrantless cell phone tracking. Each post identified a piece of the architecture. The book assembles the pieces into a single structure and asks what the completed building looks like.

The answer required going back further than I had gone on the blog. Carceral Nation begins in the 1680s, with colonial lantern laws that required enslaved people to carry lit candles after dark so that white citizens could see them coming. Forced visibility. The first American surveillance technology was fire in a Black hand. From there, the principle of compulsory visibility moves through Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon and Michel Foucault’s theoretical expansion of the panoptic principle, then forward through the fingerprint registry, the Cold War intelligence apparatus, the post-September 11 mass surveillance state, the commercial data economy, and the neighborhood platforms where your neighbors now report your movements to one another.

What the Blog Could Not Say

Twenty years of blog posts taught me the facts. The book taught me something about myself that the blog format never forced me to confront. During the three years I spent writing Carceral Nation, I changed my own behavior. I became more careful about what I searched. I reconsidered certain article topics for Prairie Voice because I wondered whether the research trail itself might attract attention. I paused before typing phrases into search engines that, in a different political climate, might be unremarkable but that in 2025 felt like they carried weight. I caught myself performing exactly the self-censorship the book describes, and I kept writing anyway, because documenting the condition seemed more important than pretending I was exempt from it.

Bentham called the panoptic principle “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind.” He was describing a building. What we have built is a condition in which the writer researching the surveillance state modifies his own research behavior because of the surveillance state. The book is its own evidence. I am its own case study.

The Word “Panopticonic”

The subtitle uses a word I need to account for: “panopticonic.” The adjective “panoptic,” meaning all-seeing, has existed since Bentham. “Panopticonic” appeared once in the prior record, a 1959 Time piece using it casually to describe the audience’s experience of watching prison life through cinema. The word was never developed, defined, or repeated. Carceral Nation reclaims it and gives it a specific definition: a panopticonic society is one in which the panoptic principle has escaped the institutional settings Foucault described and has become the organizing logic of civic life itself. A panopticonic society is one in which the panoptic principle has escaped the institutional settings Foucault described and has become the organizing logic of civic life itself. Prison logic has dissolved into the society. Guard towers have been replaced by smartphones, doorbell cameras, and algorithmic risk scores. The walls came down, and the logic walked out through the gap.

Connecting the Constellation

Readers of this blog will find threads connecting Carceral Nation to work published across the Boles web constellation over the past year. The Human Meme podcast episode “The Pause Before You Speak” examines how the surveillance condition reshapes consciousness, building on the earlier episode “Pause Before the Lie” to explore what happens when self-censorship becomes continuous rather than momentary. Prairie Voice published “The Watcher on the County Road,” investigating how Flock Safety cameras, school surveillance systems, and correctional culture have wired rural America into the same panopticonic infrastructure the book describes at the national level. The book has also been developed through the same production pipeline we have refined across across The Broadway Machine, The Counterfeit Bargain, and The Human Universal Beautiful: manuscript through multiple editorial passes, KDP paperback interior with embedded DejaVu Serif typography, wraparound cover, Kindle edition, and web PDF for free download.

The cover design deserves a word. The front panel shows a red brick wall with an irregular breach revealing a surveillance camera lens behind the bricks. Falling bricks cascade around the title text. The image is the argument in visual form: the prison wall has been broken from behind, and what looks out through the gap is an eye that records everything it sees. The brick pattern continues across the spine and back cover as a single continuous wall, because the surveillance infrastructure does not recognize the boundaries between public, private, and personal.

Getting Carceral Nation

Carceral Nation: How the Prison Escaped Its Walls and Made a Panopticonic Society by David Boles is published by David Boles Books Writing & Publishing, New York City. 2026.

Kindle ebook: $9.95 Paperback: $19.95 Free PDF: BolesBooks.com

The book is also available on Amazon.

Your Three-Year-Old Already Knows the Brand Name

Watch a three-year-old in a grocery store. Watch her eyes when you turn into the cereal aisle. Her gaze is not scanning the shelves the way you scan them, evaluating prices and nutritional labels and unit costs. A search is underway. The child already knows what she wants, and she knows it by name, and she knows the name because a screen taught it to her before she could read the word printed on the box. The box appears in her sightline. A finger goes up. The name comes out of her mouth. You have just witnessed the end product of a commercial pedagogy that has been operating in American media for more than fifty years, and the child has no idea it happened to her.

Neither did I, when I was her age.

My new book, Selling Saturday Morning: Television, Advertising, and the Making of the Child Consumer, reconstructs the system that taught me and every other American child of the 1970s how to want. Between 1968 and 1980, a commercial pedagogy was built inside three-network broadcast television and delivered through Saturday morning cartoons to a captive audience of millions of children who could not skip the commercials, could not change the channel without crossing the room, could not record for later, and could not comprehend that the animated tiger selling them cereal was, in fact, selling them cereal. Developmental research conducted during that decade demonstrated that children under eight could not understand the persuasive intent of advertising. A cereal commercial was, for a seven-year-old, just another cartoon about a tiger who liked cereal. The selling was invisible because the child’s cognitive equipment could not make it visible.

The system used five mechanisms, and I call their combined effect the Grammar of Want. Recognition: the child learns to identify the product instantly through spokescharacters, jingles, and packaging design. Desire: the commercial creates a gap between what the child has and what the screen shows she could have. Articulation: the commercial gives the child language to express the want by brand name. Normalization: the commercial shows other children wanting and having the product, teaching the viewing child that wanting is normal and that being sold to is a natural condition of watching anything. Repetition: the closed room of broadcast delivers these lessons fifty times per Saturday morning, thousands of times per year, tens of thousands across a childhood. Skipping was impossible. Fast-forwarding did not exist. Escape was not an option.

When regulators tried to stop it, they lost. Action for Children’s Television filed petitions. The FTC proposed a ban on advertising directed at children too young to understand its purpose. The Washington Post called the FTC “a great national nanny.” The cereal, toy, candy, and fast-food industries spent sixteen million dollars fighting the rulemaking. Congress stripped the FTC of its authority to act. By 1980, the commercial model of childhood was politically ratified, and every attempt to regulate it since has failed to restore what was lost in that defeat.

This story comes from inside the system, because the system trained me. A seven-year-old boy in Nebraska sitting on red shag carpeting in front of a wood-grain television console, absorbing the full commercial curriculum of Saturday morning: that was my education. Cap’n Crunch was identifiable by the blue of his hat from twenty feet away in a grocery aisle. Jingles from 1975 remain in my memory, though I cannot remember learning them. The Super Bowl held my attention well into adulthood because of the commercials, and I never found this strange, because the childhood training had produced an adult who experienced advertising as entertainment. Fusion was complete. Grammar held.

Here is why this matters in 2026, and here is why I am not writing a nostalgia piece about cartoons.

The Grammar of Want did not end when Saturday morning cartoons declined. It migrated. Cable fractured the three-network monopoly in the 1980s, and the techniques followed the audience into Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network and Disney Channel. The internet fractured cable in the 2000s, and the techniques followed the audience into branded websites, advergames, and social media. Smartphones fractured the internet into individual screens, and the techniques followed the audience into YouTube, TikTok, and algorithmically curated content feeds that address each child individually with a precision the 1970s system could not have imagined.

The 1970s system needed a fixed schedule to guarantee repetition. The algorithm provides repetition without a schedule. A child who watches one toy-unboxing video on YouTube is immediately served another, and another, and another. The algorithm, trained on engagement data from millions of children, knows which videos hold attention longest and serves them in sequence. Repetition is no longer the product of a broadcast grid. It is the product of a feedback loop in which the child’s own viewing behavior trains the system to deliver more of what holds her attention, and what holds her attention is, with high frequency, commercial content dressed as entertainment.

The 1970s system needed separation devices, bumpers that said “We’ll be right back after these messages,” to mark the boundary between the cartoon and the commercial. The algorithm has no bumpers. A child watching a YouTube creator play with a toy, eat a branded snack, and express delight is absorbing an advertisement delivered through a parasocial relationship with a trusted figure. The commercial message is embedded in the performance of daily life. The creator’s endorsement is implicit in the act of consumption. No jingle is required. Selling is the content.

Consider what has not changed. In the 1970s, the system operated on children who could not understand persuasive intent. In the 2020s, that same system operates on children who cannot understand persuasive intent. That finding was about children, not about media. The cognitive limitation that made the 1970s system effective has not changed, because child development has not changed. A five-year-old in 2026 processes a sponsored YouTube video the same way a five-year-old in 1977 processed a Frosted Flakes commercial: as entertainment from a trusted source, with no awareness that the entertainment is designed to make her want something.

Architecture survived its medium. The closed room opened, and the curriculum walked out.

This is what the three-year-old in the cereal aisle is demonstrating when she points at the box and says the name. She has been trained. She does not know she has been trained. Her parents may not know she has been trained, because the training happened on a screen they handed her to keep her occupied, in videos selected by an algorithm they did not program, featuring creators whose commercial relationships they cannot see. The system is working on their child the way it worked on me in 1972, with greater precision, greater reach, and fewer regulatory constraints than the Saturday morning model ever achieved.

Selling Saturday Morning is the history of how that system was built, who tried to stop it, and why it persists. I wrote it because understanding the architecture is the first obligation of anyone who was trained by it, and because the boy on the red shag carpeting deserves to know what the screen was teaching him while he thought he was just watching cartoons.

The book is available now from David Boles Books Writing & Publishing.

Your Three-Year-Old Already Knows the Brand Name

Watch a three-year-old in a grocery store. Watch her eyes when you turn into the cereal aisle. Her gaze is not scanning the shelves the way you scan them, evaluating prices and nutritional labels and unit costs. A search is underway. The child already knows what she wants, and she knows it by name, and she knows the name because a screen taught it to her before she could read the word printed on the box. The box appears in her sightline. A finger goes up. The name comes out of her mouth. You have just witnessed the end product of a commercial pedagogy that has been operating in American media for more than fifty years, and the child has no idea it happened to her.

Neither did I, when I was her age.

My new book, Selling Saturday Morning: Television, Advertising, and the Making of the Child Consumer, reconstructs the system that taught me and every other American child of the 1970s how to want. Between 1968 and 1980, a commercial pedagogy was built inside three-network broadcast television and delivered through Saturday morning cartoons to a captive audience of millions of children who could not skip the commercials, could not change the channel without crossing the room, could not record for later, and could not comprehend that the animated tiger selling them cereal was, in fact, selling them cereal. Developmental research conducted during that decade demonstrated that children under eight could not understand the persuasive intent of advertising. A cereal commercial was, for a seven-year-old, just another cartoon about a tiger who liked cereal. The selling was invisible because the child’s cognitive equipment could not make it visible.

The system used five mechanisms, and I call their combined effect the Grammar of Want. Recognition: the child learns to identify the product instantly through spokescharacters, jingles, and packaging design. Desire: the commercial creates a gap between what the child has and what the screen shows she could have. Articulation: the commercial gives the child language to express the want by brand name. Normalization: the commercial shows other children wanting and having the product, teaching the viewing child that wanting is normal and that being sold to is a natural condition of watching anything. Repetition: the closed room of broadcast delivers these lessons fifty times per Saturday morning, thousands of times per year, tens of thousands across a childhood. Skipping was impossible. Fast-forwarding did not exist. Escape was not an option.

When regulators tried to stop it, they lost. Action for Children’s Television filed petitions. The FTC proposed a ban on advertising directed at children too young to understand its purpose. The Washington Post called the FTC “a great national nanny.” The cereal, toy, candy, and fast-food industries spent sixteen million dollars fighting the rulemaking. Congress stripped the FTC of its authority to act. By 1980, the commercial model of childhood was politically ratified, and every attempt to regulate it since has failed to restore what was lost in that defeat.

This story comes from inside the system, because the system trained me. A seven-year-old boy in Nebraska sitting on red shag carpeting in front of a wood-grain television console, absorbing the full commercial curriculum of Saturday morning: that was my education. Cap’n Crunch was identifiable by the blue of his hat from twenty feet away in a grocery aisle. Jingles from 1975 remain in my memory, though I cannot remember learning them. The Super Bowl held my attention well into adulthood because of the commercials, and I never found this strange, because the childhood training had produced an adult who experienced advertising as entertainment. Fusion was complete. Grammar held.

Here is why this matters in 2026, and here is why I am not writing a nostalgia piece about cartoons.

The Grammar of Want did not end when Saturday morning cartoons declined. It migrated. Cable fractured the three-network monopoly in the 1980s, and the techniques followed the audience into Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network and Disney Channel. The internet fractured cable in the 2000s, and the techniques followed the audience into branded websites, advergames, and social media. Smartphones fractured the internet into individual screens, and the techniques followed the audience into YouTube, TikTok, and algorithmically curated content feeds that address each child individually with a precision the 1970s system could not have imagined.

The 1970s system needed a fixed schedule to guarantee repetition. The algorithm provides repetition without a schedule. A child who watches one toy-unboxing video on YouTube is immediately served another, and another, and another. The algorithm, trained on engagement data from millions of children, knows which videos hold attention longest and serves them in sequence. Repetition is no longer the product of a broadcast grid. It is the product of a feedback loop in which the child’s own viewing behavior trains the system to deliver more of what holds her attention, and what holds her attention is, with high frequency, commercial content dressed as entertainment.

The 1970s system needed separation devices, bumpers that said “We’ll be right back after these messages,” to mark the boundary between the cartoon and the commercial. The algorithm has no bumpers. A child watching a YouTube creator play with a toy, eat a branded snack, and express delight is absorbing an advertisement delivered through a parasocial relationship with a trusted figure. The commercial message is embedded in the performance of daily life. The creator’s endorsement is implicit in the act of consumption. No jingle is required. Selling is the content.

Consider what has not changed. In the 1970s, the system operated on children who could not understand persuasive intent. In the 2020s, that same system operates on children who cannot understand persuasive intent. That finding was about children, not about media. The cognitive limitation that made the 1970s system effective has not changed, because child development has not changed. A five-year-old in 2026 processes a sponsored YouTube video the same way a five-year-old in 1977 processed a Frosted Flakes commercial: as entertainment from a trusted source, with no awareness that the entertainment is designed to make her want something.

Architecture survived its medium. The closed room opened, and the curriculum walked out.

This is what the three-year-old in the cereal aisle is demonstrating when she points at the box and says the name. She has been trained. She does not know she has been trained. Her parents may not know she has been trained, because the training happened on a screen they handed her to keep her occupied, in videos selected by an algorithm they did not program, featuring creators whose commercial relationships they cannot see. The system is working on their child the way it worked on me in 1972, with greater precision, greater reach, and fewer regulatory constraints than the Saturday morning model ever achieved.

Selling Saturday Morning is the history of how that system was built, who tried to stop it, and why it persists. I wrote it because understanding the architecture is the first obligation of anyone who was trained by it, and because the boy on the red shag carpeting deserves to know what the screen was teaching him while he thought he was just watching cartoons.

The book is available now from David Boles Books Writing & Publishing.

Your Three-Year-Old Already Knows the Brand Name

Watch a three-year-old in a grocery store. Watch her eyes when you turn into the cereal aisle. Her gaze is not scanning the shelves the way you scan them, evaluating prices and nutritional labels and unit costs. A search is underway. The child already knows what she wants, and she knows it by name, and she knows the name because a screen taught it to her before she could read the word printed on the box. The box appears in her sightline. A finger goes up. The name comes out of her mouth. You have just witnessed the end product of a commercial pedagogy that has been operating in American media for more than fifty years, and the child has no idea it happened to her.

Neither did I, when I was her age.

My new book, Selling Saturday Morning: Television, Advertising, and the Making of the Child Consumer, reconstructs the system that taught me and every other American child of the 1970s how to want. Between 1968 and 1980, a commercial pedagogy was built inside three-network broadcast television and delivered through Saturday morning cartoons to a captive audience of millions of children who could not skip the commercials, could not change the channel without crossing the room, could not record for later, and could not comprehend that the animated tiger selling them cereal was, in fact, selling them cereal. Developmental research conducted during that decade demonstrated that children under eight could not understand the persuasive intent of advertising. A cereal commercial was, for a seven-year-old, just another cartoon about a tiger who liked cereal. The selling was invisible because the child’s cognitive equipment could not make it visible.

The system used five mechanisms, and I call their combined effect the Grammar of Want. Recognition: the child learns to identify the product instantly through spokescharacters, jingles, and packaging design. Desire: the commercial creates a gap between what the child has and what the screen shows she could have. Articulation: the commercial gives the child language to express the want by brand name. Normalization: the commercial shows other children wanting and having the product, teaching the viewing child that wanting is normal and that being sold to is a natural condition of watching anything. Repetition: the closed room of broadcast delivers these lessons fifty times per Saturday morning, thousands of times per year, tens of thousands across a childhood. Skipping was impossible. Fast-forwarding did not exist. Escape was not an option.

When regulators tried to stop it, they lost. Action for Children’s Television filed petitions. The FTC proposed a ban on advertising directed at children too young to understand its purpose. The Washington Post called the FTC “a great national nanny.” The cereal, toy, candy, and fast-food industries spent sixteen million dollars fighting the rulemaking. Congress stripped the FTC of its authority to act. By 1980, the commercial model of childhood was politically ratified, and every attempt to regulate it since has failed to restore what was lost in that defeat.

This story comes from inside the system, because the system trained me. A seven-year-old boy in Nebraska sitting on red shag carpeting in front of a wood-grain television console, absorbing the full commercial curriculum of Saturday morning: that was my education. Cap’n Crunch was identifiable by the blue of his hat from twenty feet away in a grocery aisle. Jingles from 1975 remain in my memory, though I cannot remember learning them. The Super Bowl held my attention well into adulthood because of the commercials, and I never found this strange, because the childhood training had produced an adult who experienced advertising as entertainment. Fusion was complete. Grammar held.

Here is why this matters in 2026, and here is why I am not writing a nostalgia piece about cartoons.

The Grammar of Want did not end when Saturday morning cartoons declined. It migrated. Cable fractured the three-network monopoly in the 1980s, and the techniques followed the audience into Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network and Disney Channel. The internet fractured cable in the 2000s, and the techniques followed the audience into branded websites, advergames, and social media. Smartphones fractured the internet into individual screens, and the techniques followed the audience into YouTube, TikTok, and algorithmically curated content feeds that address each child individually with a precision the 1970s system could not have imagined.

The 1970s system needed a fixed schedule to guarantee repetition. The algorithm provides repetition without a schedule. A child who watches one toy-unboxing video on YouTube is immediately served another, and another, and another. The algorithm, trained on engagement data from millions of children, knows which videos hold attention longest and serves them in sequence. Repetition is no longer the product of a broadcast grid. It is the product of a feedback loop in which the child’s own viewing behavior trains the system to deliver more of what holds her attention, and what holds her attention is, with high frequency, commercial content dressed as entertainment.

The 1970s system needed separation devices, bumpers that said “We’ll be right back after these messages,” to mark the boundary between the cartoon and the commercial. The algorithm has no bumpers. A child watching a YouTube creator play with a toy, eat a branded snack, and express delight is absorbing an advertisement delivered through a parasocial relationship with a trusted figure. The commercial message is embedded in the performance of daily life. The creator’s endorsement is implicit in the act of consumption. No jingle is required. Selling is the content.

Consider what has not changed. In the 1970s, the system operated on children who could not understand persuasive intent. In the 2020s, that same system operates on children who cannot understand persuasive intent. That finding was about children, not about media. The cognitive limitation that made the 1970s system effective has not changed, because child development has not changed. A five-year-old in 2026 processes a sponsored YouTube video the same way a five-year-old in 1977 processed a Frosted Flakes commercial: as entertainment from a trusted source, with no awareness that the entertainment is designed to make her want something.

Architecture survived its medium. The closed room opened, and the curriculum walked out.

This is what the three-year-old in the cereal aisle is demonstrating when she points at the box and says the name. She has been trained. She does not know she has been trained. Her parents may not know she has been trained, because the training happened on a screen they handed her to keep her occupied, in videos selected by an algorithm they did not program, featuring creators whose commercial relationships they cannot see. The system is working on their child the way it worked on me in 1972, with greater precision, greater reach, and fewer regulatory constraints than the Saturday morning model ever achieved.

Selling Saturday Morning is the history of how that system was built, who tried to stop it, and why it persists. I wrote it because understanding the architecture is the first obligation of anyone who was trained by it, and because the boy on the red shag carpeting deserves to know what the screen was teaching him while he thought he was just watching cartoons.

The book is available now from David Boles Books Writing & Publishing.

Your Three-Year-Old Already Knows the Brand Name

Watch a three-year-old in a grocery store. Watch her eyes when you turn into the cereal aisle. Her gaze is not scanning the shelves the way you scan them, evaluating prices and nutritional labels and unit costs. A search is underway. The child already knows what she wants, and she knows it by name, and she knows the name because a screen taught it to her before she could read the word printed on the box. The box appears in her sightline. A finger goes up. The name comes out of her mouth. You have just witnessed the end product of a commercial pedagogy that has been operating in American media for more than fifty years, and the child has no idea it happened to her.

Neither did I, when I was her age.

My new book, Selling Saturday Morning: Television, Advertising, and the Making of the Child Consumer, reconstructs the system that taught me and every other American child of the 1970s how to want. Between 1968 and 1980, a commercial pedagogy was built inside three-network broadcast television and delivered through Saturday morning cartoons to a captive audience of millions of children who could not skip the commercials, could not change the channel without crossing the room, could not record for later, and could not comprehend that the animated tiger selling them cereal was, in fact, selling them cereal. Developmental research conducted during that decade demonstrated that children under eight could not understand the persuasive intent of advertising. A cereal commercial was, for a seven-year-old, just another cartoon about a tiger who liked cereal. The selling was invisible because the child’s cognitive equipment could not make it visible.

The system used five mechanisms, and I call their combined effect the Grammar of Want. Recognition: the child learns to identify the product instantly through spokescharacters, jingles, and packaging design. Desire: the commercial creates a gap between what the child has and what the screen shows she could have. Articulation: the commercial gives the child language to express the want by brand name. Normalization: the commercial shows other children wanting and having the product, teaching the viewing child that wanting is normal and that being sold to is a natural condition of watching anything. Repetition: the closed room of broadcast delivers these lessons fifty times per Saturday morning, thousands of times per year, tens of thousands across a childhood. Skipping was impossible. Fast-forwarding did not exist. Escape was not an option.

When regulators tried to stop it, they lost. Action for Children’s Television filed petitions. The FTC proposed a ban on advertising directed at children too young to understand its purpose. The Washington Post called the FTC “a great national nanny.” The cereal, toy, candy, and fast-food industries spent sixteen million dollars fighting the rulemaking. Congress stripped the FTC of its authority to act. By 1980, the commercial model of childhood was politically ratified, and every attempt to regulate it since has failed to restore what was lost in that defeat.

This story comes from inside the system, because the system trained me. A seven-year-old boy in Nebraska sitting on red shag carpeting in front of a wood-grain television console, absorbing the full commercial curriculum of Saturday morning: that was my education. Cap’n Crunch was identifiable by the blue of his hat from twenty feet away in a grocery aisle. Jingles from 1975 remain in my memory, though I cannot remember learning them. The Super Bowl held my attention well into adulthood because of the commercials, and I never found this strange, because the childhood training had produced an adult who experienced advertising as entertainment. Fusion was complete. Grammar held.

Here is why this matters in 2026, and here is why I am not writing a nostalgia piece about cartoons.

The Grammar of Want did not end when Saturday morning cartoons declined. It migrated. Cable fractured the three-network monopoly in the 1980s, and the techniques followed the audience into Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network and Disney Channel. The internet fractured cable in the 2000s, and the techniques followed the audience into branded websites, advergames, and social media. Smartphones fractured the internet into individual screens, and the techniques followed the audience into YouTube, TikTok, and algorithmically curated content feeds that address each child individually with a precision the 1970s system could not have imagined.

The 1970s system needed a fixed schedule to guarantee repetition. The algorithm provides repetition without a schedule. A child who watches one toy-unboxing video on YouTube is immediately served another, and another, and another. The algorithm, trained on engagement data from millions of children, knows which videos hold attention longest and serves them in sequence. Repetition is no longer the product of a broadcast grid. It is the product of a feedback loop in which the child’s own viewing behavior trains the system to deliver more of what holds her attention, and what holds her attention is, with high frequency, commercial content dressed as entertainment.

The 1970s system needed separation devices, bumpers that said “We’ll be right back after these messages,” to mark the boundary between the cartoon and the commercial. The algorithm has no bumpers. A child watching a YouTube creator play with a toy, eat a branded snack, and express delight is absorbing an advertisement delivered through a parasocial relationship with a trusted figure. The commercial message is embedded in the performance of daily life. The creator’s endorsement is implicit in the act of consumption. No jingle is required. Selling is the content.

Consider what has not changed. In the 1970s, the system operated on children who could not understand persuasive intent. In the 2020s, that same system operates on children who cannot understand persuasive intent. That finding was about children, not about media. The cognitive limitation that made the 1970s system effective has not changed, because child development has not changed. A five-year-old in 2026 processes a sponsored YouTube video the same way a five-year-old in 1977 processed a Frosted Flakes commercial: as entertainment from a trusted source, with no awareness that the entertainment is designed to make her want something.

Architecture survived its medium. The closed room opened, and the curriculum walked out.

This is what the three-year-old in the cereal aisle is demonstrating when she points at the box and says the name. She has been trained. She does not know she has been trained. Her parents may not know she has been trained, because the training happened on a screen they handed her to keep her occupied, in videos selected by an algorithm they did not program, featuring creators whose commercial relationships they cannot see. The system is working on their child the way it worked on me in 1972, with greater precision, greater reach, and fewer regulatory constraints than the Saturday morning model ever achieved.

Selling Saturday Morning is the history of how that system was built, who tried to stop it, and why it persists. I wrote it because understanding the architecture is the first obligation of anyone who was trained by it, and because the boy on the red shag carpeting deserves to know what the screen was teaching him while he thought he was just watching cartoons.

The book is available now from David Boles Books Writing & Publishing.

The Failed City: I Wrote a Book About What We Bury

I have been staring at a patch of asphalt in Jersey City for thirteen years. That is not a figure of speech. I mean that in late September 2013, I watched a road crew roll fresh blacktop over 150-year-old granite cobblestones on Baldwin Avenue in the Heights, and the image has not released me since. The cobblestones were ballast stones, carried across the Atlantic Ocean in the holds of empty cargo ships and dumped on American docks because the ships needed the weight for the crossing and needed to shed it to load American exports for the return trip. Those stones were repurposed as paving. They became streets. They outlasted the ships, the shipping companies, the trade routes, the empires that commissioned them. And in 2013, a man in a road roller buried them under asphalt because, as he told me with the patience of someone explaining gravity, cobblestones eat up tires.

That exchange is where the book starts. It is also where the book’s argument starts, because what happened on Baldwin Avenue is a precise physical enactment of a larger institutional habit: the preference for covering failure rather than studying it, for smoothing the surface rather than examining what lies beneath.

The Failed City: An Autopsy of Urban Collapse is now available from David Boles Books.

What the Book Does

The book conducts autopsies. Twenty of them, organized into five taxonomies of urban failure, spanning two millennia, three continents, and one diagnostic framework that I built to answer a question nobody in the urban planning literature seemed to be asking: why do we refuse to study the cities that died with the same rigor we bring to the cities that worked?

The five taxonomies are catastrophic erasure, economic exsanguination, the utopian misfire, slow municipal death, and the never-built city. Each describes a distinct mode of urban death. Each contains case studies drawn from published sources, government records, journalistic accounts, and in several cases my own observation. I have walked the streets described in this book. I have taught at the universities that serve them. The Jersey City Heights, Camden, Newark: these are places I know from the sidewalk, not from the satellite view.

Pompeii is in the book because it is the oldest and most complete case of catastrophic erasure in the Western record. Pripyat is in the book because it is the newest, a city of 49,000 people evacuated in thirty-six hours after Chernobyl and never reoccupied. Centralia, Pennsylvania, is in the book because the coal mine fire that started beneath it in 1962 is still burning, and because the state’s decision to bury Graffiti Highway under dirt is the most literal act of concealment I have encountered in any case study. Galveston is in the book because it was the largest city in Texas in 1900 and it is not anymore, and the reason it is not anymore is that Houston built a ship channel and absorbed Galveston’s port function, which meant that the hurricane that destroyed Galveston was fatal precisely because the economic function that would have justified rebuilding had already migrated fifty miles inland.

Gary, Indiana, is in the book because U.S. Steel built it in 1906 and then left. Cairo, Illinois, is in the book because its own governing class burned it down through a sustained campaign of racial violence so thorough that the city lost ninety percent of its population. Flint is in the book because the governance structure appointed to save money ended by poisoning the water. Pittsburgh is in the book because it did not die, and the reasons it survived expose the reasons the others did not.

Laurent, South Dakota, is in the book because it is the most instructive failure I have ever encountered. A planned Deaf community where more than a hundred families signed reservation forms and zero relocated. The idea was serious, the enthusiasm was real, and the distance between signing a form and packing a truck turned out to be the distance between a vision and a life. I have worked in the Deaf community for decades through HardcoreASL.com, ASL-Opera.com, and the CUNY-SPS ASL Program, and Janna Sweenie’s characterization of Laurent as a “Deaf Utopia” captures the arc perfectly: enthusiastic communal aspiration followed by collective inaction.

Where the Argument Came From

A colleague of mine at Rutgers-Newark, years ago, made a case for the publication of failure that I have carried forward as an intellectual commitment ever since. His field was research methodology, and his contention was that failed scholarship, research rigorously conducted that ended by disproving its own thesis, deserved publication with the same velocity and seriousness as research that confirmed its hypothesis. Journals published findings. Careers advanced on discoveries. The experiments that did not find what they were looking for were filed away, and the filing-away constituted a loss of the knowledge that the failure itself contained.

He was not a person I admired, and the reasons for that are his own business. But the argument he made that day was better than the person who made it. That fact is itself a version of the thesis this book advances: useful knowledge does not confine itself to attractive sources.

The Failed City applies that principle to urban collapse. Failed cities generate data. Abandoned plans produce evidence. Collapsed communities contain information about what went wrong, when it went wrong, and what the conditions were that made the failure possible. That data is as valuable as the data generated by the cities that succeeded. Our refusal to publish it, to study it, to assemble it into a systematic account, guarantees the repetition of errors that have already been committed and documented and then filed away.

The Diagnostic

The book builds a diagnostic framework with three levels: the baseline condition (what the city had before the crisis), the triggering condition (what initiated the decline), and the cascade (the self-reinforcing cycle that follows). The framework is offered as a tool. It works for every case study in the book, and I suspect it works for cases the book does not examine. The Prairie Voice article I published alongside this book, “The Other Side of the Blacktop,” argues that the same framework applies to rural collapse with equal precision. Any rancher in western Kansas who has watched the feedlot close and the equipment dealer follow it and the diner follow that can diagram the cascade on a napkin.

Jane Jacobs and the Missing Half

Jane Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961. The title promises a study of death and life. The book delivers overwhelmingly on the life. It is one of the great books of the twentieth century, and I assign it in every course I teach that touches urban questions. It is also a book that does not deliver on the first word of its own title. Jacobs studied what makes cities work. She did not study what makes them die.

The Failed City is the death half of the equation, the book that Jacobs’ title promises and her text does not deliver. Jacobs remains one of the great urbanists. The gap in the literature remains real. No comparable book exists. The field has single-city studies (Sugrue on Detroit, Gillette on Camden, Gordon on St. Louis) and academic shrinking-cities literature, but no cross-taxonomic diagnostic framework for a general readership. The Failed City is, as far as I have been able to determine, the first.

The Cobblestones

The cobblestones are still there. Under the asphalt on Baldwin Avenue, under the dirt that covers Graffiti Highway in Centralia, under the grass that grows over the graded roads of California City. The evidence of failure is more durable than the surfaces we lay on top of it. Asphalt cracks. Dirt erodes. Grass thins. And the substrate will still be there, waiting to be examined by anyone willing to look at what lies beneath the blacktop.

The answer is beneath the blacktop. It has been there the whole time.

The Failed City: I Wrote a Book About What We Bury

I have been staring at a patch of asphalt in Jersey City for thirteen years. That is not a figure of speech. I mean that in late September 2013, I watched a road crew roll fresh blacktop over 150-year-old granite cobblestones on Baldwin Avenue in the Heights, and the image has not released me since. The cobblestones were ballast stones, carried across the Atlantic Ocean in the holds of empty cargo ships and dumped on American docks because the ships needed the weight for the crossing and needed to shed it to load American exports for the return trip. Those stones were repurposed as paving. They became streets. They outlasted the ships, the shipping companies, the trade routes, the empires that commissioned them. And in 2013, a man in a road roller buried them under asphalt because, as he told me with the patience of someone explaining gravity, cobblestones eat up tires.

That exchange is where the book starts. It is also where the book’s argument starts, because what happened on Baldwin Avenue is a precise physical enactment of a larger institutional habit: the preference for covering failure rather than studying it, for smoothing the surface rather than examining what lies beneath.

The Failed City: An Autopsy of Urban Collapse is now available from David Boles Books.

What the Book Does

The book conducts autopsies. Twenty of them, organized into five taxonomies of urban failure, spanning two millennia, three continents, and one diagnostic framework that I built to answer a question nobody in the urban planning literature seemed to be asking: why do we refuse to study the cities that died with the same rigor we bring to the cities that worked?

The five taxonomies are catastrophic erasure, economic exsanguination, the utopian misfire, slow municipal death, and the never-built city. Each describes a distinct mode of urban death. Each contains case studies drawn from published sources, government records, journalistic accounts, and in several cases my own observation. I have walked the streets described in this book. I have taught at the universities that serve them. The Jersey City Heights, Camden, Newark: these are places I know from the sidewalk, not from the satellite view.

Pompeii is in the book because it is the oldest and most complete case of catastrophic erasure in the Western record. Pripyat is in the book because it is the newest, a city of 49,000 people evacuated in thirty-six hours after Chernobyl and never reoccupied. Centralia, Pennsylvania, is in the book because the coal mine fire that started beneath it in 1962 is still burning, and because the state’s decision to bury Graffiti Highway under dirt is the most literal act of concealment I have encountered in any case study. Galveston is in the book because it was the largest city in Texas in 1900 and it is not anymore, and the reason it is not anymore is that Houston built a ship channel and absorbed Galveston’s port function, which meant that the hurricane that destroyed Galveston was fatal precisely because the economic function that would have justified rebuilding had already migrated fifty miles inland.

Gary, Indiana, is in the book because U.S. Steel built it in 1906 and then left. Cairo, Illinois, is in the book because its own governing class burned it down through a sustained campaign of racial violence so thorough that the city lost ninety percent of its population. Flint is in the book because the governance structure appointed to save money ended by poisoning the water. Pittsburgh is in the book because it did not die, and the reasons it survived expose the reasons the others did not.

Laurent, South Dakota, is in the book because it is the most instructive failure I have ever encountered. A planned Deaf community where more than a hundred families signed reservation forms and zero relocated. The idea was serious, the enthusiasm was real, and the distance between signing a form and packing a truck turned out to be the distance between a vision and a life. I have worked in the Deaf community for decades through HardcoreASL.com, ASL-Opera.com, and the CUNY-SPS ASL Program, and Janna Sweenie’s characterization of Laurent as a “Deaf Utopia” captures the arc perfectly: enthusiastic communal aspiration followed by collective inaction.

Where the Argument Came From

A colleague of mine at Rutgers-Newark, years ago, made a case for the publication of failure that I have carried forward as an intellectual commitment ever since. His field was research methodology, and his contention was that failed scholarship, research rigorously conducted that ended by disproving its own thesis, deserved publication with the same velocity and seriousness as research that confirmed its hypothesis. Journals published findings. Careers advanced on discoveries. The experiments that did not find what they were looking for were filed away, and the filing-away constituted a loss of the knowledge that the failure itself contained.

He was not a person I admired, and the reasons for that are his own business. But the argument he made that day was better than the person who made it. That fact is itself a version of the thesis this book advances: useful knowledge does not confine itself to attractive sources.

The Failed City applies that principle to urban collapse. Failed cities generate data. Abandoned plans produce evidence. Collapsed communities contain information about what went wrong, when it went wrong, and what the conditions were that made the failure possible. That data is as valuable as the data generated by the cities that succeeded. Our refusal to publish it, to study it, to assemble it into a systematic account, guarantees the repetition of errors that have already been committed and documented and then filed away.

The Diagnostic

The book builds a diagnostic framework with three levels: the baseline condition (what the city had before the crisis), the triggering condition (what initiated the decline), and the cascade (the self-reinforcing cycle that follows). The framework is offered as a tool. It works for every case study in the book, and I suspect it works for cases the book does not examine. The Prairie Voice article I published alongside this book, “The Other Side of the Blacktop,” argues that the same framework applies to rural collapse with equal precision. Any rancher in western Kansas who has watched the feedlot close and the equipment dealer follow it and the diner follow that can diagram the cascade on a napkin.

Jane Jacobs and the Missing Half

Jane Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961. The title promises a study of death and life. The book delivers overwhelmingly on the life. It is one of the great books of the twentieth century, and I assign it in every course I teach that touches urban questions. It is also a book that does not deliver on the first word of its own title. Jacobs studied what makes cities work. She did not study what makes them die.

The Failed City is the death half of the equation, the book that Jacobs’ title promises and her text does not deliver. Jacobs remains one of the great urbanists. The gap in the literature remains real. No comparable book exists. The field has single-city studies (Sugrue on Detroit, Gillette on Camden, Gordon on St. Louis) and academic shrinking-cities literature, but no cross-taxonomic diagnostic framework for a general readership. The Failed City is, as far as I have been able to determine, the first.

The Cobblestones

The cobblestones are still there. Under the asphalt on Baldwin Avenue, under the dirt that covers Graffiti Highway in Centralia, under the grass that grows over the graded roads of California City. The evidence of failure is more durable than the surfaces we lay on top of it. Asphalt cracks. Dirt erodes. Grass thins. And the substrate will still be there, waiting to be examined by anyone willing to look at what lies beneath the blacktop.

The answer is beneath the blacktop. It has been there the whole time.

The Failed City: I Wrote a Book About What We Bury

I have been staring at a patch of asphalt in Jersey City for thirteen years. That is not a figure of speech. I mean that in late September 2013, I watched a road crew roll fresh blacktop over 150-year-old granite cobblestones on Baldwin Avenue in the Heights, and the image has not released me since. The cobblestones were ballast stones, carried across the Atlantic Ocean in the holds of empty cargo ships and dumped on American docks because the ships needed the weight for the crossing and needed to shed it to load American exports for the return trip. Those stones were repurposed as paving. They became streets. They outlasted the ships, the shipping companies, the trade routes, the empires that commissioned them. And in 2013, a man in a road roller buried them under asphalt because, as he told me with the patience of someone explaining gravity, cobblestones eat up tires.

That exchange is where the book starts. It is also where the book’s argument starts, because what happened on Baldwin Avenue is a precise physical enactment of a larger institutional habit: the preference for covering failure rather than studying it, for smoothing the surface rather than examining what lies beneath.

The Failed City: An Autopsy of Urban Collapse is now available from David Boles Books.

What the Book Does

The book conducts autopsies. Twenty of them, organized into five taxonomies of urban failure, spanning two millennia, three continents, and one diagnostic framework that I built to answer a question nobody in the urban planning literature seemed to be asking: why do we refuse to study the cities that died with the same rigor we bring to the cities that worked?

The five taxonomies are catastrophic erasure, economic exsanguination, the utopian misfire, slow municipal death, and the never-built city. Each describes a distinct mode of urban death. Each contains case studies drawn from published sources, government records, journalistic accounts, and in several cases my own observation. I have walked the streets described in this book. I have taught at the universities that serve them. The Jersey City Heights, Camden, Newark: these are places I know from the sidewalk, not from the satellite view.

Pompeii is in the book because it is the oldest and most complete case of catastrophic erasure in the Western record. Pripyat is in the book because it is the newest, a city of 49,000 people evacuated in thirty-six hours after Chernobyl and never reoccupied. Centralia, Pennsylvania, is in the book because the coal mine fire that started beneath it in 1962 is still burning, and because the state’s decision to bury Graffiti Highway under dirt is the most literal act of concealment I have encountered in any case study. Galveston is in the book because it was the largest city in Texas in 1900 and it is not anymore, and the reason it is not anymore is that Houston built a ship channel and absorbed Galveston’s port function, which meant that the hurricane that destroyed Galveston was fatal precisely because the economic function that would have justified rebuilding had already migrated fifty miles inland.

Gary, Indiana, is in the book because U.S. Steel built it in 1906 and then left. Cairo, Illinois, is in the book because its own governing class burned it down through a sustained campaign of racial violence so thorough that the city lost ninety percent of its population. Flint is in the book because the governance structure appointed to save money ended by poisoning the water. Pittsburgh is in the book because it did not die, and the reasons it survived expose the reasons the others did not.

Laurent, South Dakota, is in the book because it is the most instructive failure I have ever encountered. A planned Deaf community where more than a hundred families signed reservation forms and zero relocated. The idea was serious, the enthusiasm was real, and the distance between signing a form and packing a truck turned out to be the distance between a vision and a life. I have worked in the Deaf community for decades through HardcoreASL.com, ASL-Opera.com, and the CUNY-SPS ASL Program, and Janna Sweenie’s characterization of Laurent as a “Deaf Utopia” captures the arc perfectly: enthusiastic communal aspiration followed by collective inaction.

Where the Argument Came From

A colleague of mine at Rutgers-Newark, years ago, made a case for the publication of failure that I have carried forward as an intellectual commitment ever since. His field was research methodology, and his contention was that failed scholarship, research rigorously conducted that ended by disproving its own thesis, deserved publication with the same velocity and seriousness as research that confirmed its hypothesis. Journals published findings. Careers advanced on discoveries. The experiments that did not find what they were looking for were filed away, and the filing-away constituted a loss of the knowledge that the failure itself contained.

He was not a person I admired, and the reasons for that are his own business. But the argument he made that day was better than the person who made it. That fact is itself a version of the thesis this book advances: useful knowledge does not confine itself to attractive sources.

The Failed City applies that principle to urban collapse. Failed cities generate data. Abandoned plans produce evidence. Collapsed communities contain information about what went wrong, when it went wrong, and what the conditions were that made the failure possible. That data is as valuable as the data generated by the cities that succeeded. Our refusal to publish it, to study it, to assemble it into a systematic account, guarantees the repetition of errors that have already been committed and documented and then filed away.

The Diagnostic

The book builds a diagnostic framework with three levels: the baseline condition (what the city had before the crisis), the triggering condition (what initiated the decline), and the cascade (the self-reinforcing cycle that follows). The framework is offered as a tool. It works for every case study in the book, and I suspect it works for cases the book does not examine. The Prairie Voice article I published alongside this book, “The Other Side of the Blacktop,” argues that the same framework applies to rural collapse with equal precision. Any rancher in western Kansas who has watched the feedlot close and the equipment dealer follow it and the diner follow that can diagram the cascade on a napkin.

Jane Jacobs and the Missing Half

Jane Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961. The title promises a study of death and life. The book delivers overwhelmingly on the life. It is one of the great books of the twentieth century, and I assign it in every course I teach that touches urban questions. It is also a book that does not deliver on the first word of its own title. Jacobs studied what makes cities work. She did not study what makes them die.

The Failed City is the death half of the equation, the book that Jacobs’ title promises and her text does not deliver. Jacobs remains one of the great urbanists. The gap in the literature remains real. No comparable book exists. The field has single-city studies (Sugrue on Detroit, Gillette on Camden, Gordon on St. Louis) and academic shrinking-cities literature, but no cross-taxonomic diagnostic framework for a general readership. The Failed City is, as far as I have been able to determine, the first.

The Cobblestones

The cobblestones are still there. Under the asphalt on Baldwin Avenue, under the dirt that covers Graffiti Highway in Centralia, under the grass that grows over the graded roads of California City. The evidence of failure is more durable than the surfaces we lay on top of it. Asphalt cracks. Dirt erodes. Grass thins. And the substrate will still be there, waiting to be examined by anyone willing to look at what lies beneath the blacktop.

The answer is beneath the blacktop. It has been there the whole time.

Cry Later: The Culture That Taught You Not to Grieve

The commands arrive early. They arrive in childhood, in the voices of parents and teachers and coaches and older relatives, and they are delivered with the same authority as instructions about traffic and hot stoves. Cry later. Hold it in. Do not show your emotions. Do not embarrass us. Be strong. Be brave. Be a man. There will be time for that later. Not here. Not now. Not in front of people.

These are grief suppressors. They are issued so routinely and across so many contexts that they have acquired the appearance of common sense. They are not common sense. They are commands to override a biological response that the body is producing for a reason. When a child is told not to cry at a funeral, the child is being told to suppress a neurochemical cascade that is already in progress. The cortisol is elevated, the amygdala has fired, and the body is doing what millions of years of evolution designed it to do when it registers the absence of an attachment figure. The command does not eliminate the response. It drives it underground, where it persists in forms the child cannot name and the adults will not recognize as grief when it resurfaces months or years later as insomnia, stomach pain, an inability to concentrate, a persistent anxiety with no identifiable source.

I have written a book about this. It is called “Go to Every Funeral: How Grief Defines the Living,” and it is published by David Boles Books Writing and Publishing, and the title comes from something I overheard in a cafe in Newark, New Jersey, about twenty-five years ago. A mother told her college-age daughter to go to every funeral, even if she did not want to, even if she did not know the dead person, because funerals are for the living and absence is remembered. I carried those six words for a quarter of a century, through the deaths of my grandmother, my grandfather, my mother, my mentor, two friends, and a cat who sat on my desk for fifteen years, and the book is the result of trying to understand why those words were true and why nobody else had ever said them to me.

The book covers a lot of ground: the neuroscience of grief, the mourning practices of elephants and crows, the history of funerals from the domestic parlor to the corporate funeral home, the economics of death as a market, the global range of mourning from the Torajan highlands to the jazz funerals of New Orleans. But the section I want to talk about here is Part Five, which is about permission. Specifically, about who gets to grieve and who gets told to stop.

The suppression commands are not distributed equally. They fall with particular weight on men, on children, on employees, and on anyone whose grief is judged to be inconvenient by the people around them. Boys are told not to cry with a frequency and an intensity that girls are not, and the instruction begins early enough that by adolescence many boys have internalized it so completely that they experience the suppression as personality rather than training. They do not cry because they are “not the kind of person who cries.” The self-description obscures the years of conditioning that produced it.

The consequences are visible in the data. Men die by suicide at rates roughly four times higher than women in the United States. They are less likely to seek mental health treatment, more likely to self-medicate with alcohol, more likely to convert emotional distress into physical aggression. These are not biological inevitabilities. They are the downstream effects of a culture that tells half its population to suppress the emotional responses the other half is permitted to express. The man who cannot cry at his father’s funeral because he was told, at age six, that men do not cry is not displaying strength. He is displaying the result of a training program that disconnected him from his own grief response, and the disconnection does not eliminate the grief. It makes the grief dangerous, because grief that cannot be expressed as grief will be expressed as something else.

The workplace runs on the same logic. The standard bereavement leave in the United States is three days for the death of an immediate family member. Three days. The body has not even begun to metabolize the cortisol surge in three days. The cognitive map has not begun to update. The neurological process of revising the brain’s internal model of the world, recognizing at the cellular level that the dead person is absent from every context in which they were expected, has barely started. And the employer expects you back at your desk, functioning, participating in meetings about quarterly targets while the fact that your mother is dead has not yet reached the parts of your brain that govern concentration.

Some companies offer five days. Some offer none. Some distinguish between the death of a spouse and the death of a parent and the death of a sibling, granting fewer days as the relationship moves outward from the nuclear center, as though the grief for a brother can be mathematically demonstrated to require less processing time than the grief for a child. The taxonomy of bereavement leave is a document written by human resources departments, and it tells the employee, in the plainest possible terms, how long their grief is permitted to inconvenience the organization.

Then there is the clinical manual. In 2022, prolonged grief disorder was added to the DSM-5-TR, giving clinicians a formal diagnostic category for grief that persists at debilitating intensity beyond twelve months. The addition was controversial among grief researchers, and the controversy is worth understanding, because it reveals how the medical establishment processes the same impulse that drives the workplace policy and the childhood command: the impulse to draw a line, to say that grief is acceptable on this side and pathological on the other, and to give the line the authority of science.

The proponents of the diagnosis argued that a subset of bereaved people, estimated at roughly ten percent, experience grief that does not follow the typical trajectory. The pain does not diminish over time. Functioning does not return. The preoccupation with the dead person remains so intense that it dominates waking life months and years after the death. These people need clinical help, and the diagnosis gives clinicians a framework for providing it, including the possibility of insurance reimbursement for treatment.

The opponents argued that pathologizing grief at twelve months imposes an arbitrary timeline on a process that has no natural expiration date. The twelve-month threshold was chosen because the clinical data showed it as a statistically significant inflection point, the point at which the probability of spontaneous recovery drops sharply. But statistical inflection points are not the same as biological boundaries. The griever at month thirteen is not clinically different from the griever at month eleven. The line exists because the diagnostic system requires lines, and the existence of the line communicates something to the broader culture: that grief beyond a year is officially a mental illness. The employer who was already impatient at three days now has clinical validation for the suspicion that the employee who is still struggling at fourteen months has something wrong with them.

The book argues that this entire apparatus, the childhood commands, the workplace policies, the diagnostic thresholds, is part of a single cultural project: the management of grief for the convenience of everyone except the griever. The child is told to stop because the adults are uncomfortable. The employee is expected back at the desk because the organization needs the labor. The patient receives a diagnosis because the clinical system requires categories. None of these interventions exists primarily to serve the person who is grieving. They exist to contain the grief, to keep it within boundaries that allow the surrounding systems to continue operating without interruption.

Meanwhile, the culture has produced a substitute for communal grief that is worse than the absence of communal grief. Social media has made performative mourning the default public response to death. When a public figure dies, the speed with which users post their condolences has become a measure of social attentiveness. The posts follow a formula: a photograph of the deceased, a statement of shock, a brief personal connection however thin, and a closing declaration of love and loss. The formula is so consistent it has been parodied, and the parodies have not slowed it down, because the function of the post is to perform belonging, to demonstrate that you are the kind of person who feels things, who notices when important people die, who participates in the rituals of the digital public square.

Some of the grief is sincere. The rest is performance, and the performance crowds out the reality. When the feeds are flooded with grief posts after a celebrity death, the person who is actually devastated, the person who had a real connection to the deceased and is not performing but drowning, finds their grief indistinguishable from the display. Their signal disappears into the noise. The communal mourning that is supposed to support the bereaved instead competes with them, reducing a specific and irreplaceable loss to one post among thousands, all using the same photographs, the same phrases, the same hashtags.

This is the inversion of what the mother in the Newark cafe was describing. She said you go to the funeral. You show up. You put your name in the book. You sit in the pew. You bring food to the house afterward. The obligation is physical: you move your body to the place where the grief is, and your presence there is the message. Social media offers the simulation of this presence without the physical fact of it. You post. You perform the gesture. You do not move your body anywhere. You do not sit in an uncomfortable chair in a room that smells like flowers and floor polish. You do not look at the face of the bereaved and allow them to see that you came. You post, and the post is seen or not seen, liked or not liked, and it scrolls away, and the next post is about something else, and the grief has been acknowledged in the same medium and at the same depth as a restaurant recommendation.

Kenneth Doka coined the term “disenfranchised grief” to describe losses the culture refuses to recognize. The death of an ex-spouse. The death of a pet. The death of a patient if you are a nurse. The death of a public figure you never met but whose work was woven into the structure of your daily life. These are real losses producing real grief, and the culture’s refusal to recognize them does not dissolve the grief. It isolates the griever, who cannot bring their loss into the social spaces where grief is processed because the spaces will not admit it. The colleague who lost a dog cannot mention it at work. The fan grieving a musician cannot break down at dinner. A nurse whose patient died that morning cannot ask for a day off. The grief has no approved venue, no sanctioned expression, no communal witness. It persists alone.

What the book asks, across all six of its parts and all seventeen of its chapters, is what happens when you add all of this up. The suppression that begins in childhood and hardens along gendered lines. The workplace that contains it in three days. The diagnostic manual that pathologizes it at twelve months. The industry that monetizes it. The digital platform that simulates it. The disenfranchisement of entire categories of loss. What you get is a culture in which millions of people grieve alone, in private, without the communal infrastructure that every human society in history built to distribute the weight of death across many shoulders. The weight did not get lighter because the infrastructure was removed. The shoulders carrying it just got fewer.

The mother in the cafe knew this. She did not use these words. She did not cite the neuroscience or the sociology or the economics. She tapped the table and told her daughter to go to every funeral, and the instruction contained everything: that grief is communal, that the community is constituted by the people who show up, that presence is the oldest technology of mourning and still the most effective, and that the dead have no needs left, and the living have every need there is.

Go to every funeral. The book is available at BolesBooks.com as a free download, and on Amazon in Kindle ($9.99) and paperback ($15.99) editions.

Cry Later: The Culture That Taught You Not to Grieve

The commands arrive early. They arrive in childhood, in the voices of parents and teachers and coaches and older relatives, and they are delivered with the same authority as instructions about traffic and hot stoves. Cry later. Hold it in. Do not show your emotions. Do not embarrass us. Be strong. Be brave. Be a man. There will be time for that later. Not here. Not now. Not in front of people.

Content Note: This book contains accounts of suicide, suicidal crisis, and the deaths of family members, friends, and companion animals. Part Five includes detailed accounts of suicidal ideation and completed suicide. If you or someone you know is experiencing a mental health crisis, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7 by phone or text at 988. The Crisis Text Line is available by texting HOME to 741741.

These are grief suppressors. They are issued so routinely and across so many contexts that they have acquired the appearance of common sense. They are not common sense. They are commands to override a biological response that the body is producing for a reason. When a child is told not to cry at a funeral, the child is being told to suppress a neurochemical cascade that is already in progress. The cortisol is elevated, the amygdala has fired, and the body is doing what millions of years of evolution designed it to do when it registers the absence of an attachment figure. The command does not eliminate the response. It drives it underground, where it persists in forms the child cannot name and the adults will not recognize as grief when it resurfaces months or years later as insomnia, stomach pain, an inability to concentrate, a persistent anxiety with no identifiable source.

I have written a book about this. It is called “Go to Every Funeral: How Grief Defines the Living,” and it is published by David Boles Books Writing and Publishing, and the title comes from something I overheard in a cafe in Newark, New Jersey, about twenty-five years ago. A mother told her college-age daughter to go to every funeral, even if she did not want to, even if she did not know the dead person, because funerals are for the living and absence is remembered. I carried those six words for a quarter of a century, through the deaths of my grandmother, my grandfather, my mother, my mentor, two friends, and a cat who sat on my desk for fifteen years, and the book is the result of trying to understand why those words were true and why nobody else had ever said them to me.

The book covers a lot of ground: the neuroscience of grief, the mourning practices of elephants and crows, the history of funerals from the domestic parlor to the corporate funeral home, the economics of death as a market, the global range of mourning from the Torajan highlands to the jazz funerals of New Orleans. But the section I want to talk about here is Part Five, which is about permission. Specifically, about who gets to grieve and who gets told to stop.

The suppression commands are not distributed equally. They fall with particular weight on men, on children, on employees, and on anyone whose grief is judged to be inconvenient by the people around them. Boys are told not to cry with a frequency and an intensity that girls are not, and the instruction begins early enough that by adolescence many boys have internalized it so completely that they experience the suppression as personality rather than training. They do not cry because they are “not the kind of person who cries.” The self-description obscures the years of conditioning that produced it.

The consequences are visible in the data. Men die by suicide at rates roughly four times higher than women in the United States. They are less likely to seek mental health treatment, more likely to self-medicate with alcohol, more likely to convert emotional distress into physical aggression. These are not biological inevitabilities. They are the downstream effects of a culture that tells half its population to suppress the emotional responses the other half is permitted to express. The man who cannot cry at his father’s funeral because he was told, at age six, that men do not cry is not displaying strength. He is displaying the result of a training program that disconnected him from his own grief response, and the disconnection does not eliminate the grief. It makes the grief dangerous, because grief that cannot be expressed as grief will be expressed as something else.

The workplace runs on the same logic. The standard bereavement leave in the United States is three days for the death of an immediate family member. Three days. The body has not even begun to metabolize the cortisol surge in three days. The cognitive map has not begun to update. The neurological process of revising the brain’s internal model of the world, recognizing at the cellular level that the dead person is absent from every context in which they were expected, has barely started. And the employer expects you back at your desk, functioning, participating in meetings about quarterly targets while the fact that your mother is dead has not yet reached the parts of your brain that govern concentration.

Some companies offer five days. Some offer none. Some distinguish between the death of a spouse and the death of a parent and the death of a sibling, granting fewer days as the relationship moves outward from the nuclear center, as though the grief for a brother can be mathematically demonstrated to require less processing time than the grief for a child. The taxonomy of bereavement leave is a document written by human resources departments, and it tells the employee, in the plainest possible terms, how long their grief is permitted to inconvenience the organization.

Then there is the clinical manual. In 2022, prolonged grief disorder was added to the DSM-5-TR, giving clinicians a formal diagnostic category for grief that persists at debilitating intensity beyond twelve months. The addition was controversial among grief researchers, and the controversy is worth understanding, because it reveals how the medical establishment processes the same impulse that drives the workplace policy and the childhood command: the impulse to draw a line, to say that grief is acceptable on this side and pathological on the other, and to give the line the authority of science.

The proponents of the diagnosis argued that a subset of bereaved people, estimated at roughly ten percent, experience grief that does not follow the typical trajectory. The pain does not diminish over time. Functioning does not return. The preoccupation with the dead person remains so intense that it dominates waking life months and years after the death. These people need clinical help, and the diagnosis gives clinicians a framework for providing it, including the possibility of insurance reimbursement for treatment.

The opponents argued that pathologizing grief at twelve months imposes an arbitrary timeline on a process that has no natural expiration date. The twelve-month threshold was chosen because the clinical data showed it as a statistically significant inflection point, the point at which the probability of spontaneous recovery drops sharply. But statistical inflection points are not the same as biological boundaries. The griever at month thirteen is not clinically different from the griever at month eleven. The line exists because the diagnostic system requires lines, and the existence of the line communicates something to the broader culture: that grief beyond a year is officially a mental illness. The employer who was already impatient at three days now has clinical validation for the suspicion that the employee who is still struggling at fourteen months has something wrong with them.

The book argues that this entire apparatus, the childhood commands, the workplace policies, the diagnostic thresholds, is part of a single cultural project: the management of grief for the convenience of everyone except the griever. The child is told to stop because the adults are uncomfortable. The employee is expected back at the desk because the organization needs the labor. The patient receives a diagnosis because the clinical system requires categories. None of these interventions exists primarily to serve the person who is grieving. They exist to contain the grief, to keep it within boundaries that allow the surrounding systems to continue operating without interruption.

Meanwhile, the culture has produced a substitute for communal grief that is worse than the absence of communal grief. Social media has made performative mourning the default public response to death. When a public figure dies, the speed with which users post their condolences has become a measure of social attentiveness. The posts follow a formula: a photograph of the deceased, a statement of shock, a brief personal connection however thin, and a closing declaration of love and loss. The formula is so consistent it has been parodied, and the parodies have not slowed it down, because the function of the post is to perform belonging, to demonstrate that you are the kind of person who feels things, who notices when important people die, who participates in the rituals of the digital public square.

Some of the grief is sincere. The rest is performance, and the performance crowds out the reality. When the feeds are flooded with grief posts after a celebrity death, the person who is actually devastated, the person who had a real connection to the deceased and is not performing but drowning, finds their grief indistinguishable from the display. Their signal disappears into the noise. The communal mourning that is supposed to support the bereaved instead competes with them, reducing a specific and irreplaceable loss to one post among thousands, all using the same photographs, the same phrases, the same hashtags.

This is the inversion of what the mother in the Newark cafe was describing. She said you go to the funeral. You show up. You put your name in the book. You sit in the pew. You bring food to the house afterward. The obligation is physical: you move your body to the place where the grief is, and your presence there is the message. Social media offers the simulation of this presence without the physical fact of it. You post. You perform the gesture. You do not move your body anywhere. You do not sit in an uncomfortable chair in a room that smells like flowers and floor polish. You do not look at the face of the bereaved and allow them to see that you came. You post, and the post is seen or not seen, liked or not liked, and it scrolls away, and the next post is about something else, and the grief has been acknowledged in the same medium and at the same depth as a restaurant recommendation.

Kenneth Doka coined the term “disenfranchised grief” to describe losses the culture refuses to recognize. The death of an ex-spouse. The death of a pet. The death of a patient if you are a nurse. The death of a public figure you never met but whose work was woven into the structure of your daily life. These are real losses producing real grief, and the culture’s refusal to recognize them does not dissolve the grief. It isolates the griever, who cannot bring their loss into the social spaces where grief is processed because the spaces will not admit it. The colleague who lost a dog cannot mention it at work. The fan grieving a musician cannot break down at dinner. A nurse whose patient died that morning cannot ask for a day off. The grief has no approved venue, no sanctioned expression, no communal witness. It persists alone.

What the book asks, across all six of its parts and all seventeen of its chapters, is what happens when you add all of this up. The suppression that begins in childhood and hardens along gendered lines. The workplace that contains it in three days. The diagnostic manual that pathologizes it at twelve months. The industry that monetizes it. The digital platform that simulates it. The disenfranchisement of entire categories of loss. What you get is a culture in which millions of people grieve alone, in private, without the communal infrastructure that every human society in history built to distribute the weight of death across many shoulders. The weight did not get lighter because the infrastructure was removed. The shoulders carrying it just got fewer.

The mother in the cafe knew this. She did not use these words. She did not cite the neuroscience or the sociology or the economics. She tapped the table and told her daughter to go to every funeral, and the instruction contained everything: that grief is communal, that the community is constituted by the people who show up, that presence is the oldest technology of mourning and still the most effective, and that the dead have no needs left, and the living have every need there is.

Go to every funeral. The book is available at BolesBooks.com as a free download, and on Amazon in Kindle ($9.99) and paperback ($15.99) editions.

Cry Later: The Culture That Taught You Not to Grieve

The commands arrive early. They arrive in childhood, in the voices of parents and teachers and coaches and older relatives, and they are delivered with the same authority as instructions about traffic and hot stoves. Cry later. Hold it in. Do not show your emotions. Do not embarrass us. Be strong. Be brave. Be a man. There will be time for that later. Not here. Not now. Not in front of people.

These are grief suppressors. They are issued so routinely and across so many contexts that they have acquired the appearance of common sense. They are not common sense. They are commands to override a biological response that the body is producing for a reason. When a child is told not to cry at a funeral, the child is being told to suppress a neurochemical cascade that is already in progress. The cortisol is elevated, the amygdala has fired, and the body is doing what millions of years of evolution designed it to do when it registers the absence of an attachment figure. The command does not eliminate the response. It drives it underground, where it persists in forms the child cannot name and the adults will not recognize as grief when it resurfaces months or years later as insomnia, stomach pain, an inability to concentrate, a persistent anxiety with no identifiable source.

I have written a book about this. It is called “Go to Every Funeral: How Grief Defines the Living,” and it is published by David Boles Books Writing and Publishing, and the title comes from something I overheard in a cafe in Newark, New Jersey, about twenty-five years ago. A mother told her college-age daughter to go to every funeral, even if she did not want to, even if she did not know the dead person, because funerals are for the living and absence is remembered. I carried those six words for a quarter of a century, through the deaths of my grandmother, my grandfather, my mother, my mentor, two friends, and a cat who sat on my desk for fifteen years, and the book is the result of trying to understand why those words were true and why nobody else had ever said them to me.

The book covers a lot of ground: the neuroscience of grief, the mourning practices of elephants and crows, the history of funerals from the domestic parlor to the corporate funeral home, the economics of death as a market, the global range of mourning from the Torajan highlands to the jazz funerals of New Orleans. But the section I want to talk about here is Part Five, which is about permission. Specifically, about who gets to grieve and who gets told to stop.

The suppression commands are not distributed equally. They fall with particular weight on men, on children, on employees, and on anyone whose grief is judged to be inconvenient by the people around them. Boys are told not to cry with a frequency and an intensity that girls are not, and the instruction begins early enough that by adolescence many boys have internalized it so completely that they experience the suppression as personality rather than training. They do not cry because they are “not the kind of person who cries.” The self-description obscures the years of conditioning that produced it.

The consequences are visible in the data. Men die by suicide at rates roughly four times higher than women in the United States. They are less likely to seek mental health treatment, more likely to self-medicate with alcohol, more likely to convert emotional distress into physical aggression. These are not biological inevitabilities. They are the downstream effects of a culture that tells half its population to suppress the emotional responses the other half is permitted to express. The man who cannot cry at his father’s funeral because he was told, at age six, that men do not cry is not displaying strength. He is displaying the result of a training program that disconnected him from his own grief response, and the disconnection does not eliminate the grief. It makes the grief dangerous, because grief that cannot be expressed as grief will be expressed as something else.

The workplace runs on the same logic. The standard bereavement leave in the United States is three days for the death of an immediate family member. Three days. The body has not even begun to metabolize the cortisol surge in three days. The cognitive map has not begun to update. The neurological process of revising the brain’s internal model of the world, recognizing at the cellular level that the dead person is absent from every context in which they were expected, has barely started. And the employer expects you back at your desk, functioning, participating in meetings about quarterly targets while the fact that your mother is dead has not yet reached the parts of your brain that govern concentration.

Some companies offer five days. Some offer none. Some distinguish between the death of a spouse and the death of a parent and the death of a sibling, granting fewer days as the relationship moves outward from the nuclear center, as though the grief for a brother can be mathematically demonstrated to require less processing time than the grief for a child. The taxonomy of bereavement leave is a document written by human resources departments, and it tells the employee, in the plainest possible terms, how long their grief is permitted to inconvenience the organization.

Then there is the clinical manual. In 2022, prolonged grief disorder was added to the DSM-5-TR, giving clinicians a formal diagnostic category for grief that persists at debilitating intensity beyond twelve months. The addition was controversial among grief researchers, and the controversy is worth understanding, because it reveals how the medical establishment processes the same impulse that drives the workplace policy and the childhood command: the impulse to draw a line, to say that grief is acceptable on this side and pathological on the other, and to give the line the authority of science.

The proponents of the diagnosis argued that a subset of bereaved people, estimated at roughly ten percent, experience grief that does not follow the typical trajectory. The pain does not diminish over time. Functioning does not return. The preoccupation with the dead person remains so intense that it dominates waking life months and years after the death. These people need clinical help, and the diagnosis gives clinicians a framework for providing it, including the possibility of insurance reimbursement for treatment.

The opponents argued that pathologizing grief at twelve months imposes an arbitrary timeline on a process that has no natural expiration date. The twelve-month threshold was chosen because the clinical data showed it as a statistically significant inflection point, the point at which the probability of spontaneous recovery drops sharply. But statistical inflection points are not the same as biological boundaries. The griever at month thirteen is not clinically different from the griever at month eleven. The line exists because the diagnostic system requires lines, and the existence of the line communicates something to the broader culture: that grief beyond a year is officially a mental illness. The employer who was already impatient at three days now has clinical validation for the suspicion that the employee who is still struggling at fourteen months has something wrong with them.

The book argues that this entire apparatus, the childhood commands, the workplace policies, the diagnostic thresholds, is part of a single cultural project: the management of grief for the convenience of everyone except the griever. The child is told to stop because the adults are uncomfortable. The employee is expected back at the desk because the organization needs the labor. The patient receives a diagnosis because the clinical system requires categories. None of these interventions exists primarily to serve the person who is grieving. They exist to contain the grief, to keep it within boundaries that allow the surrounding systems to continue operating without interruption.

Meanwhile, the culture has produced a substitute for communal grief that is worse than the absence of communal grief. Social media has made performative mourning the default public response to death. When a public figure dies, the speed with which users post their condolences has become a measure of social attentiveness. The posts follow a formula: a photograph of the deceased, a statement of shock, a brief personal connection however thin, and a closing declaration of love and loss. The formula is so consistent it has been parodied, and the parodies have not slowed it down, because the function of the post is to perform belonging, to demonstrate that you are the kind of person who feels things, who notices when important people die, who participates in the rituals of the digital public square.

Some of the grief is sincere. The rest is performance, and the performance crowds out the reality. When the feeds are flooded with grief posts after a celebrity death, the person who is actually devastated, the person who had a real connection to the deceased and is not performing but drowning, finds their grief indistinguishable from the display. Their signal disappears into the noise. The communal mourning that is supposed to support the bereaved instead competes with them, reducing a specific and irreplaceable loss to one post among thousands, all using the same photographs, the same phrases, the same hashtags.

This is the inversion of what the mother in the Newark cafe was describing. She said you go to the funeral. You show up. You put your name in the book. You sit in the pew. You bring food to the house afterward. The obligation is physical: you move your body to the place where the grief is, and your presence there is the message. Social media offers the simulation of this presence without the physical fact of it. You post. You perform the gesture. You do not move your body anywhere. You do not sit in an uncomfortable chair in a room that smells like flowers and floor polish. You do not look at the face of the bereaved and allow them to see that you came. You post, and the post is seen or not seen, liked or not liked, and it scrolls away, and the next post is about something else, and the grief has been acknowledged in the same medium and at the same depth as a restaurant recommendation.

Kenneth Doka coined the term “disenfranchised grief” to describe losses the culture refuses to recognize. The death of an ex-spouse. The death of a pet. The death of a patient if you are a nurse. The death of a public figure you never met but whose work was woven into the structure of your daily life. These are real losses producing real grief, and the culture’s refusal to recognize them does not dissolve the grief. It isolates the griever, who cannot bring their loss into the social spaces where grief is processed because the spaces will not admit it. The colleague who lost a dog cannot mention it at work. The fan grieving a musician cannot break down at dinner. A nurse whose patient died that morning cannot ask for a day off. The grief has no approved venue, no sanctioned expression, no communal witness. It persists alone.

What the book asks, across all six of its parts and all seventeen of its chapters, is what happens when you add all of this up. The suppression that begins in childhood and hardens along gendered lines. The workplace that contains it in three days. The diagnostic manual that pathologizes it at twelve months. The industry that monetizes it. The digital platform that simulates it. The disenfranchisement of entire categories of loss. What you get is a culture in which millions of people grieve alone, in private, without the communal infrastructure that every human society in history built to distribute the weight of death across many shoulders. The weight did not get lighter because the infrastructure was removed. The shoulders carrying it just got fewer.

The mother in the cafe knew this. She did not use these words. She did not cite the neuroscience or the sociology or the economics. She tapped the table and told her daughter to go to every funeral, and the instruction contained everything: that grief is communal, that the community is constituted by the people who show up, that presence is the oldest technology of mourning and still the most effective, and that the dead have no needs left, and the living have every need there is.

Go to every funeral. The book is available at BolesBooks.com as a free download, and on Amazon in Kindle ($9.99) and paperback ($15.99) editions.

Cry Later: The Culture That Taught You Not to Grieve

The commands arrive early. They arrive in childhood, in the voices of parents and teachers and coaches and older relatives, and they are delivered with the same authority as instructions about traffic and hot stoves. Cry later. Hold it in. Do not show your emotions. Do not embarrass us. Be strong. Be brave. Be a man. There will be time for that later. Not here. Not now. Not in front of people.

These are grief suppressors. They are issued so routinely and across so many contexts that they have acquired the appearance of common sense. They are not common sense. They are commands to override a biological response that the body is producing for a reason. When a child is told not to cry at a funeral, the child is being told to suppress a neurochemical cascade that is already in progress. The cortisol is elevated, the amygdala has fired, and the body is doing what millions of years of evolution designed it to do when it registers the absence of an attachment figure. The command does not eliminate the response. It drives it underground, where it persists in forms the child cannot name and the adults will not recognize as grief when it resurfaces months or years later as insomnia, stomach pain, an inability to concentrate, a persistent anxiety with no identifiable source.

I have written a book about this. It is called “Go to Every Funeral: How Grief Defines the Living,” and it is published by David Boles Books Writing and Publishing, and the title comes from something I overheard in a cafe in Newark, New Jersey, about twenty-five years ago. A mother told her college-age daughter to go to every funeral, even if she did not want to, even if she did not know the dead person, because funerals are for the living and absence is remembered. I carried those six words for a quarter of a century, through the deaths of my grandmother, my grandfather, my mother, my mentor, two friends, and a cat who sat on my desk for fifteen years, and the book is the result of trying to understand why those words were true and why nobody else had ever said them to me.

The book covers a lot of ground: the neuroscience of grief, the mourning practices of elephants and crows, the history of funerals from the domestic parlor to the corporate funeral home, the economics of death as a market, the global range of mourning from the Torajan highlands to the jazz funerals of New Orleans. But the section I want to talk about here is Part Five, which is about permission. Specifically, about who gets to grieve and who gets told to stop.

The suppression commands are not distributed equally. They fall with particular weight on men, on children, on employees, and on anyone whose grief is judged to be inconvenient by the people around them. Boys are told not to cry with a frequency and an intensity that girls are not, and the instruction begins early enough that by adolescence many boys have internalized it so completely that they experience the suppression as personality rather than training. They do not cry because they are “not the kind of person who cries.” The self-description obscures the years of conditioning that produced it.

The consequences are visible in the data. Men die by suicide at rates roughly four times higher than women in the United States. They are less likely to seek mental health treatment, more likely to self-medicate with alcohol, more likely to convert emotional distress into physical aggression. These are not biological inevitabilities. They are the downstream effects of a culture that tells half its population to suppress the emotional responses the other half is permitted to express. The man who cannot cry at his father’s funeral because he was told, at age six, that men do not cry is not displaying strength. He is displaying the result of a training program that disconnected him from his own grief response, and the disconnection does not eliminate the grief. It makes the grief dangerous, because grief that cannot be expressed as grief will be expressed as something else.

The workplace runs on the same logic. The standard bereavement leave in the United States is three days for the death of an immediate family member. Three days. The body has not even begun to metabolize the cortisol surge in three days. The cognitive map has not begun to update. The neurological process of revising the brain’s internal model of the world, recognizing at the cellular level that the dead person is absent from every context in which they were expected, has barely started. And the employer expects you back at your desk, functioning, participating in meetings about quarterly targets while the fact that your mother is dead has not yet reached the parts of your brain that govern concentration.

Some companies offer five days. Some offer none. Some distinguish between the death of a spouse and the death of a parent and the death of a sibling, granting fewer days as the relationship moves outward from the nuclear center, as though the grief for a brother can be mathematically demonstrated to require less processing time than the grief for a child. The taxonomy of bereavement leave is a document written by human resources departments, and it tells the employee, in the plainest possible terms, how long their grief is permitted to inconvenience the organization.

Then there is the clinical manual. In 2022, prolonged grief disorder was added to the DSM-5-TR, giving clinicians a formal diagnostic category for grief that persists at debilitating intensity beyond twelve months. The addition was controversial among grief researchers, and the controversy is worth understanding, because it reveals how the medical establishment processes the same impulse that drives the workplace policy and the childhood command: the impulse to draw a line, to say that grief is acceptable on this side and pathological on the other, and to give the line the authority of science.

The proponents of the diagnosis argued that a subset of bereaved people, estimated at roughly ten percent, experience grief that does not follow the typical trajectory. The pain does not diminish over time. Functioning does not return. The preoccupation with the dead person remains so intense that it dominates waking life months and years after the death. These people need clinical help, and the diagnosis gives clinicians a framework for providing it, including the possibility of insurance reimbursement for treatment.

The opponents argued that pathologizing grief at twelve months imposes an arbitrary timeline on a process that has no natural expiration date. The twelve-month threshold was chosen because the clinical data showed it as a statistically significant inflection point, the point at which the probability of spontaneous recovery drops sharply. But statistical inflection points are not the same as biological boundaries. The griever at month thirteen is not clinically different from the griever at month eleven. The line exists because the diagnostic system requires lines, and the existence of the line communicates something to the broader culture: that grief beyond a year is officially a mental illness. The employer who was already impatient at three days now has clinical validation for the suspicion that the employee who is still struggling at fourteen months has something wrong with them.

The book argues that this entire apparatus, the childhood commands, the workplace policies, the diagnostic thresholds, is part of a single cultural project: the management of grief for the convenience of everyone except the griever. The child is told to stop because the adults are uncomfortable. The employee is expected back at the desk because the organization needs the labor. The patient receives a diagnosis because the clinical system requires categories. None of these interventions exists primarily to serve the person who is grieving. They exist to contain the grief, to keep it within boundaries that allow the surrounding systems to continue operating without interruption.

Meanwhile, the culture has produced a substitute for communal grief that is worse than the absence of communal grief. Social media has made performative mourning the default public response to death. When a public figure dies, the speed with which users post their condolences has become a measure of social attentiveness. The posts follow a formula: a photograph of the deceased, a statement of shock, a brief personal connection however thin, and a closing declaration of love and loss. The formula is so consistent it has been parodied, and the parodies have not slowed it down, because the function of the post is to perform belonging, to demonstrate that you are the kind of person who feels things, who notices when important people die, who participates in the rituals of the digital public square.

Some of the grief is sincere. The rest is performance, and the performance crowds out the reality. When the feeds are flooded with grief posts after a celebrity death, the person who is actually devastated, the person who had a real connection to the deceased and is not performing but drowning, finds their grief indistinguishable from the display. Their signal disappears into the noise. The communal mourning that is supposed to support the bereaved instead competes with them, reducing a specific and irreplaceable loss to one post among thousands, all using the same photographs, the same phrases, the same hashtags.

This is the inversion of what the mother in the Newark cafe was describing. She said you go to the funeral. You show up. You put your name in the book. You sit in the pew. You bring food to the house afterward. The obligation is physical: you move your body to the place where the grief is, and your presence there is the message. Social media offers the simulation of this presence without the physical fact of it. You post. You perform the gesture. You do not move your body anywhere. You do not sit in an uncomfortable chair in a room that smells like flowers and floor polish. You do not look at the face of the bereaved and allow them to see that you came. You post, and the post is seen or not seen, liked or not liked, and it scrolls away, and the next post is about something else, and the grief has been acknowledged in the same medium and at the same depth as a restaurant recommendation.

Kenneth Doka coined the term “disenfranchised grief” to describe losses the culture refuses to recognize. The death of an ex-spouse. The death of a pet. The death of a patient if you are a nurse. The death of a public figure you never met but whose work was woven into the structure of your daily life. These are real losses producing real grief, and the culture’s refusal to recognize them does not dissolve the grief. It isolates the griever, who cannot bring their loss into the social spaces where grief is processed because the spaces will not admit it. The colleague who lost a dog cannot mention it at work. The fan grieving a musician cannot break down at dinner. A nurse whose patient died that morning cannot ask for a day off. The grief has no approved venue, no sanctioned expression, no communal witness. It persists alone.

What the book asks, across all six of its parts and all seventeen of its chapters, is what happens when you add all of this up. The suppression that begins in childhood and hardens along gendered lines. The workplace that contains it in three days. The diagnostic manual that pathologizes it at twelve months. The industry that monetizes it. The digital platform that simulates it. The disenfranchisement of entire categories of loss. What you get is a culture in which millions of people grieve alone, in private, without the communal infrastructure that every human society in history built to distribute the weight of death across many shoulders. The weight did not get lighter because the infrastructure was removed. The shoulders carrying it just got fewer.

The mother in the cafe knew this. She did not use these words. She did not cite the neuroscience or the sociology or the economics. She tapped the table and told her daughter to go to every funeral, and the instruction contained everything: that grief is communal, that the community is constituted by the people who show up, that presence is the oldest technology of mourning and still the most effective, and that the dead have no needs left, and the living have every need there is.

Go to every funeral. The book is available at BolesBooks.com as a free download, and on Amazon in Kindle ($9.99) and paperback ($15.99) editions.

Cry Later: The Culture That Taught You Not to Grieve

The commands arrive early. They arrive in childhood, in the voices of parents and teachers and coaches and older relatives, and they are delivered with the same authority as instructions about traffic and hot stoves. Cry later. Hold it in. Do not show your emotions. Do not embarrass us. Be strong. Be brave. Be a man. There will be time for that later. Not here. Not now. Not in front of people.

These are grief suppressors. They are issued so routinely and across so many contexts that they have acquired the appearance of common sense. They are not common sense. They are commands to override a biological response that the body is producing for a reason. When a child is told not to cry at a funeral, the child is being told to suppress a neurochemical cascade that is already in progress. The cortisol is elevated, the amygdala has fired, and the body is doing what millions of years of evolution designed it to do when it registers the absence of an attachment figure. The command does not eliminate the response. It drives it underground, where it persists in forms the child cannot name and the adults will not recognize as grief when it resurfaces months or years later as insomnia, stomach pain, an inability to concentrate, a persistent anxiety with no identifiable source.

I have written a book about this. It is called “Go to Every Funeral: How Grief Defines the Living,” and it is published by David Boles Books Writing and Publishing, and the title comes from something I overheard in a cafe in Newark, New Jersey, about twenty-five years ago. A mother told her college-age daughter to go to every funeral, even if she did not want to, even if she did not know the dead person, because funerals are for the living and absence is remembered. I carried those six words for a quarter of a century, through the deaths of my grandmother, my grandfather, my mother, my mentor, two friends, and a cat who sat on my desk for fifteen years, and the book is the result of trying to understand why those words were true and why nobody else had ever said them to me.

The book covers a lot of ground: the neuroscience of grief, the mourning practices of elephants and crows, the history of funerals from the domestic parlor to the corporate funeral home, the economics of death as a market, the global range of mourning from the Torajan highlands to the jazz funerals of New Orleans. But the section I want to talk about here is Part Five, which is about permission. Specifically, about who gets to grieve and who gets told to stop.

The suppression commands are not distributed equally. They fall with particular weight on men, on children, on employees, and on anyone whose grief is judged to be inconvenient by the people around them. Boys are told not to cry with a frequency and an intensity that girls are not, and the instruction begins early enough that by adolescence many boys have internalized it so completely that they experience the suppression as personality rather than training. They do not cry because they are “not the kind of person who cries.” The self-description obscures the years of conditioning that produced it.

The consequences are visible in the data. Men die by suicide at rates roughly four times higher than women in the United States. They are less likely to seek mental health treatment, more likely to self-medicate with alcohol, more likely to convert emotional distress into physical aggression. These are not biological inevitabilities. They are the downstream effects of a culture that tells half its population to suppress the emotional responses the other half is permitted to express. The man who cannot cry at his father’s funeral because he was told, at age six, that men do not cry is not displaying strength. He is displaying the result of a training program that disconnected him from his own grief response, and the disconnection does not eliminate the grief. It makes the grief dangerous, because grief that cannot be expressed as grief will be expressed as something else.

The workplace runs on the same logic. The standard bereavement leave in the United States is three days for the death of an immediate family member. Three days. The body has not even begun to metabolize the cortisol surge in three days. The cognitive map has not begun to update. The neurological process of revising the brain’s internal model of the world, recognizing at the cellular level that the dead person is absent from every context in which they were expected, has barely started. And the employer expects you back at your desk, functioning, participating in meetings about quarterly targets while the fact that your mother is dead has not yet reached the parts of your brain that govern concentration.

Some companies offer five days. Some offer none. Some distinguish between the death of a spouse and the death of a parent and the death of a sibling, granting fewer days as the relationship moves outward from the nuclear center, as though the grief for a brother can be mathematically demonstrated to require less processing time than the grief for a child. The taxonomy of bereavement leave is a document written by human resources departments, and it tells the employee, in the plainest possible terms, how long their grief is permitted to inconvenience the organization.

Then there is the clinical manual. In 2022, prolonged grief disorder was added to the DSM-5-TR, giving clinicians a formal diagnostic category for grief that persists at debilitating intensity beyond twelve months. The addition was controversial among grief researchers, and the controversy is worth understanding, because it reveals how the medical establishment processes the same impulse that drives the workplace policy and the childhood command: the impulse to draw a line, to say that grief is acceptable on this side and pathological on the other, and to give the line the authority of science.

The proponents of the diagnosis argued that a subset of bereaved people, estimated at roughly ten percent, experience grief that does not follow the typical trajectory. The pain does not diminish over time. Functioning does not return. The preoccupation with the dead person remains so intense that it dominates waking life months and years after the death. These people need clinical help, and the diagnosis gives clinicians a framework for providing it, including the possibility of insurance reimbursement for treatment.

The opponents argued that pathologizing grief at twelve months imposes an arbitrary timeline on a process that has no natural expiration date. The twelve-month threshold was chosen because the clinical data showed it as a statistically significant inflection point, the point at which the probability of spontaneous recovery drops sharply. But statistical inflection points are not the same as biological boundaries. The griever at month thirteen is not clinically different from the griever at month eleven. The line exists because the diagnostic system requires lines, and the existence of the line communicates something to the broader culture: that grief beyond a year is officially a mental illness. The employer who was already impatient at three days now has clinical validation for the suspicion that the employee who is still struggling at fourteen months has something wrong with them.

The book argues that this entire apparatus, the childhood commands, the workplace policies, the diagnostic thresholds, is part of a single cultural project: the management of grief for the convenience of everyone except the griever. The child is told to stop because the adults are uncomfortable. The employee is expected back at the desk because the organization needs the labor. The patient receives a diagnosis because the clinical system requires categories. None of these interventions exists primarily to serve the person who is grieving. They exist to contain the grief, to keep it within boundaries that allow the surrounding systems to continue operating without interruption.

Meanwhile, the culture has produced a substitute for communal grief that is worse than the absence of communal grief. Social media has made performative mourning the default public response to death. When a public figure dies, the speed with which users post their condolences has become a measure of social attentiveness. The posts follow a formula: a photograph of the deceased, a statement of shock, a brief personal connection however thin, and a closing declaration of love and loss. The formula is so consistent it has been parodied, and the parodies have not slowed it down, because the function of the post is to perform belonging, to demonstrate that you are the kind of person who feels things, who notices when important people die, who participates in the rituals of the digital public square.

Some of the grief is sincere. The rest is performance, and the performance crowds out the reality. When the feeds are flooded with grief posts after a celebrity death, the person who is actually devastated, the person who had a real connection to the deceased and is not performing but drowning, finds their grief indistinguishable from the display. Their signal disappears into the noise. The communal mourning that is supposed to support the bereaved instead competes with them, reducing a specific and irreplaceable loss to one post among thousands, all using the same photographs, the same phrases, the same hashtags.

This is the inversion of what the mother in the Newark cafe was describing. She said you go to the funeral. You show up. You put your name in the book. You sit in the pew. You bring food to the house afterward. The obligation is physical: you move your body to the place where the grief is, and your presence there is the message. Social media offers the simulation of this presence without the physical fact of it. You post. You perform the gesture. You do not move your body anywhere. You do not sit in an uncomfortable chair in a room that smells like flowers and floor polish. You do not look at the face of the bereaved and allow them to see that you came. You post, and the post is seen or not seen, liked or not liked, and it scrolls away, and the next post is about something else, and the grief has been acknowledged in the same medium and at the same depth as a restaurant recommendation.

Kenneth Doka coined the term “disenfranchised grief” to describe losses the culture refuses to recognize. The death of an ex-spouse. The death of a pet. The death of a patient if you are a nurse. The death of a public figure you never met but whose work was woven into the structure of your daily life. These are real losses producing real grief, and the culture’s refusal to recognize them does not dissolve the grief. It isolates the griever, who cannot bring their loss into the social spaces where grief is processed because the spaces will not admit it. The colleague who lost a dog cannot mention it at work. The fan grieving a musician cannot break down at dinner. A nurse whose patient died that morning cannot ask for a day off. The grief has no approved venue, no sanctioned expression, no communal witness. It persists alone.

What the book asks, across all six of its parts and all seventeen of its chapters, is what happens when you add all of this up. The suppression that begins in childhood and hardens along gendered lines. The workplace that contains it in three days. The diagnostic manual that pathologizes it at twelve months. The industry that monetizes it. The digital platform that simulates it. The disenfranchisement of entire categories of loss. What you get is a culture in which millions of people grieve alone, in private, without the communal infrastructure that every human society in history built to distribute the weight of death across many shoulders. The weight did not get lighter because the infrastructure was removed. The shoulders carrying it just got fewer.

The mother in the cafe knew this. She did not use these words. She did not cite the neuroscience or the sociology or the economics. She tapped the table and told her daughter to go to every funeral, and the instruction contained everything: that grief is communal, that the community is constituted by the people who show up, that presence is the oldest technology of mourning and still the most effective, and that the dead have no needs left, and the living have every need there is.

Go to every funeral. The book is available at BolesBooks.com as a free download, and on Amazon in Kindle ($9.99) and paperback ($15.99) editions.

I Wrote the Book I Was Born to Write

Fifty years is a long time to prepare for a single sentence. I did not know I was preparing. I thought I was living, which I was, and writing, which I was, and teaching, which I was, and publishing, which I was. I thought the Fractional Fiction novels and the EleMenTs trilogy and the Prairie Voice reporting and the Human Meme episodes and the dramatic literature and the ASL linguistics and the cultural criticism were separate projects, separate impulses, separate rooms in the interior country I have been building since I was old enough to read. They were not separate. They were all rehearsals for this.

Abandoned in Place is out. It is the first book-length work of nonfiction cultural criticism I have published under my own name, and it is the book that every other book I have written was circling without my knowing it.

The book began with a number. Five. The number of days a judge ordered my father to remain in the home after my birth before he could return to the woman he had chosen over my mother and me. On the sixth day, he left. I have carried that number for more than five decades, not as a wound on display but as a lens ground by the wound, and the lens has shown me things about the world that I do not believe I would have seen without it. The book is what the lens reveals.

I am not going to summarize twelve chapters here. The book does its own work, and it does not need me standing outside it waving my arms. What I want to do instead is tell you what it felt like to write it, because the writing was unlike anything I have done before, and the difference matters, and the difference is the reason I am calling this a celebration rather than an announcement.

Every book I have written has been, at some level, a performance. The novels perform narrative. The plays perform conflict. The criticism performs analysis. The podcast performs inquiry. Performance is what I do. It is what I was trained to do at Columbia University. It is what Mike Nichols, in a conversation I recount in the book, told me all theatre people do: we arrive on stage not hoping to heal what is broken but to get the approval of our parents. I have been performing for approval since I walked through my first stage door as a teenager escaping a home that was not safe, and the performing has produced a body of work I am proud of, and the pride is real, and the pride is also, I now understand, a form of the avoidant attachment style described in Chapter 2: the construction of an interior country so richly furnished that the absence of the thing the country was built to replace becomes, if not invisible, then at least manageable.

This book is not a performance. This book is the thing the performances were built to manage. It is the direct statement, in the active voice, of what happened and who did it and how the grammar of every institution I have encountered since birth was designed to ensure that the statement would never be made. The statement is: I was abandoned. The abandonment was not my fault. The people who administered it had names. The institutions that administered it had addresses. The narrative that explained it as inevitable was a lie. And I am still here.

That is what the book says. It says it across twelve chapters, through four parts, using attachment theory and social contract philosophy and the specific histories of churches and schools and factories and governments that walked out of the room while leaving the building standing. It says it with cold, precise anger, because cold precision is what I have and hot outrage is what the grammar wants, and I will not give the grammar what it wants.

The cover is an erasure. The word “ABANDONED” sits in heavy black type, fully present and immovable. The words “IN PLACE” dissolve from left to right, the letters breaking apart into scattered particles, as if the grammar of leaving is operating on the cover in real time. My last name dissolves too, because the name on the cover is not the name I was born with. It is the name of a man from a marriage that lasted eighteen months and ended badly, assigned to me by small-town convention and carried forward by bureaucratic inertia for half a century. The brand is real. The identity behind it is the nothing in-between. The cover says so.

I have published more than thirty books through David Boles Books. Novels, short fiction, tragedy, nonfiction, ASL linguistics, the Fractional Fiction series that maps the territory between the novella and the novel. Each one took something from me and gave something back. This one took everything. It took the protected mother and made me tell the truth about her. It took the shielded childhood and made me describe the car wash in church clothes and the Saturday gifts I remember when I cannot remember the man who gave them and the phone call at 4:31 in the afternoon from a father I had not spoken to in thirty years who could not answer the one question I asked him. It took the interior country I have spent fifty years fortifying and opened the gates and let the reader walk in and see the architecture for what it is: a survival strategy that works, and that costs, and that the book refuses to pretend is anything other than both.

What it gave back is the sentence. The book arrives, in its final chapter, at a single sentence that I believe is true and that I believe I have earned the right to say, and the earning took twelve chapters and seventy thousand words and five decades of preparation that I did not know was preparation. I will not put the sentence here. The sentence needs the book to land. But I will tell you that the sentence is about seeing clearly, and refusing to pretend, and the specific form of honesty available to a person who was abandoned by every institution that was supposed to hold him together and who is still standing in the place where the function departed.

The book is available now. The Kindle edition and the paperback are at Amazon. The complete PDF is available as a free download at BolesBooks.com, because this book was written to be read, not to be sold, and the people who need it most are the people the grammar has spent the longest time ensuring would never find it.

I wrote this book for the people who were left and who stayed and who were told to move on and who did not move on and who were told the leaving was nobody’s fault and who knew, from the first day, that it was somebody’s fault, and who have been waiting, perhaps without knowing they were waiting, for someone to say so in the active voice with the actor restored to the sentence.

Here it is. The actor is restored. The sentence is rebuilt. The ground holds.

Abandoned in Place is published by David Boles Books Writing & Publishing, New York City. Available at Amazon (Kindle and paperback) and as a free PDF at BolesBooks.com.

BolesBooks.com | BolesBlogs.com | HumanMeme.com | PrairieVoice.com | (212) 982-7700

I Wrote the Book I Was Born to Write

Fifty years is a long time to prepare for a single sentence. I did not know I was preparing. I thought I was living, which I was, and writing, which I was, and teaching, which I was, and publishing, which I was. I thought the Fractional Fiction novels and the EleMenTs trilogy and the Prairie Voice reporting and the Human Meme episodes and the dramatic literature and the ASL linguistics and the cultural criticism were separate projects, separate impulses, separate rooms in the interior country I have been building since I was old enough to read. They were not separate. They were all rehearsals for this.

Abandoned in Place is out. It is the first book-length work of nonfiction cultural criticism I have published under my own name, and it is the book that every other book I have written was circling without my knowing it.

The book began with a number. Five. The number of days a judge ordered my father to remain in the home after my birth before he could return to the woman he had chosen over my mother and me. On the sixth day, he left. I have carried that number for more than five decades, not as a wound on display but as a lens ground by the wound, and the lens has shown me things about the world that I do not believe I would have seen without it. The book is what the lens reveals.

I am not going to summarize twelve chapters here. The book does its own work, and it does not need me standing outside it waving my arms. What I want to do instead is tell you what it felt like to write it, because the writing was unlike anything I have done before, and the difference matters, and the difference is the reason I am calling this a celebration rather than an announcement.

Every book I have written has been, at some level, a performance. The novels perform narrative. The plays perform conflict. The criticism performs analysis. The podcast performs inquiry. Performance is what I do. It is what I was trained to do at Columbia University. It is what Mike Nichols, in a conversation I recount in the book, told me all theatre people do: we arrive on stage not hoping to heal what is broken but to get the approval of our parents. I have been performing for approval since I walked through my first stage door as a teenager escaping a home that was not safe, and the performing has produced a body of work I am proud of, and the pride is real, and the pride is also, I now understand, a form of the avoidant attachment style described in Chapter 2: the construction of an interior country so richly furnished that the absence of the thing the country was built to replace becomes, if not invisible, then at least manageable.

This book is not a performance. This book is the thing the performances were built to manage. It is the direct statement, in the active voice, of what happened and who did it and how the grammar of every institution I have encountered since birth was designed to ensure that the statement would never be made. The statement is: I was abandoned. The abandonment was not my fault. The people who administered it had names. The institutions that administered it had addresses. The narrative that explained it as inevitable was a lie. And I am still here.

That is what the book says. It says it across twelve chapters, through four parts, using attachment theory and social contract philosophy and the specific histories of churches and schools and factories and governments that walked out of the room while leaving the building standing. It says it with cold, precise anger, because cold precision is what I have and hot outrage is what the grammar wants, and I will not give the grammar what it wants.

The cover is an erasure. The word “ABANDONED” sits in heavy black type, fully present and immovable. The words “IN PLACE” dissolve from left to right, the letters breaking apart into scattered particles, as if the grammar of leaving is operating on the cover in real time. My last name dissolves too, because the name on the cover is not the name I was born with. It is the name of a man from a marriage that lasted eighteen months and ended badly, assigned to me by small-town convention and carried forward by bureaucratic inertia for half a century. The brand is real. The identity behind it is the nothing in-between. The cover says so.

I have published more than thirty books through David Boles Books. Novels, short fiction, tragedy, nonfiction, ASL linguistics, the Fractional Fiction series that maps the territory between the novella and the novel. Each one took something from me and gave something back. This one took everything. It took the protected mother and made me tell the truth about her. It took the shielded childhood and made me describe the car wash in church clothes and the Saturday gifts I remember when I cannot remember the man who gave them and the phone call at 4:31 in the afternoon from a father I had not spoken to in thirty years who could not answer the one question I asked him. It took the interior country I have spent fifty years fortifying and opened the gates and let the reader walk in and see the architecture for what it is: a survival strategy that works, and that costs, and that the book refuses to pretend is anything other than both.

What it gave back is the sentence. The book arrives, in its final chapter, at a single sentence that I believe is true and that I believe I have earned the right to say, and the earning took twelve chapters and seventy thousand words and five decades of preparation that I did not know was preparation. I will not put the sentence here. The sentence needs the book to land. But I will tell you that the sentence is about seeing clearly, and refusing to pretend, and the specific form of honesty available to a person who was abandoned by every institution that was supposed to hold him together and who is still standing in the place where the function departed.

The book is available now. The Kindle edition and the paperback are at Amazon. The complete PDF is available as a free download at BolesBooks.com, because this book was written to be read, not to be sold, and the people who need it most are the people the grammar has spent the longest time ensuring would never find it.

I wrote this book for the people who were left and who stayed and who were told to move on and who did not move on and who were told the leaving was nobody’s fault and who knew, from the first day, that it was somebody’s fault, and who have been waiting, perhaps without knowing they were waiting, for someone to say so in the active voice with the actor restored to the sentence.

Here it is. The actor is restored. The sentence is rebuilt. The ground holds.

Abandoned in Place is published by David Boles Books Writing & Publishing, New York City. Available at Amazon (Kindle and paperback) and as a free PDF at BolesBooks.com.

BolesBooks.com | BolesBlogs.com | HumanMeme.com | PrairieVoice.com | (212) 982-7700

Miscast: The Playwright Decides, and No One Else Gets a Vote

There is a moment in the life of every playwright when someone walks into a rehearsal room and announces that the character you wrote is not, in fact, the character you wrote. The director has a vision. The institution has a policy. The casting committee has decided that your Irish Catholic mother from the Southside of Chicago would be better served by an actress who has no connection to the world you built because connection, in the current theatrical climate, is less important than representation, and representation is whatever the people who control the stage say it is. You sit there. You watch your play become someone else’s argument. And you have two choices: you can let it happen, or you can pull the production.

I pulled the production.

That story appears in Chapter 11 of Miscast: Who Owns the Story on Stage?, my new book, now available in eBook, paperback, and PDF from David Boles Books. The anecdote is from Columbia University, where I was earning my MFA, and where a director proposed splitting a single character in my play into bipolar twins under the banner of non-traditional casting. I said no. I cancelled the production. I lost the showcase. I kept the play. That was more than thirty years ago, and I have spent the time since thinking about what that moment meant, not just for me but for every playwright who has watched the American theatre transform casting from an artistic decision made by the author into an institutional mandate imposed over the author’s objection.

Miscast is the book that thinking produced.

The argument is simple. The playwright creates the characters. The playwright determines what the characters are. No institution has the right to override that determination. When Lin-Manuel Miranda casts actors of color as the Founding Fathers in Hamilton, that is authorial choice, and it is art. When an institution imposes non-traditional casting on a playwright’s work without the playwright’s knowledge or against the playwright’s wishes, that is something else entirely. It is expropriation. It is the seizure of creative authority from the person who did the creating. And it is now standard practice in the American theatre, codified in equity agreements, hiring mandates, and the Dramatists Guild’s own 2021 Inclusion Rider, the first contract addendum in theatre history that asks playwrights to redirect their copyright authority toward institutional demographic objectives.

That is a sentence worth reading twice.

The book traces the full arc. It begins with the all-male stages of fifth-century Athens, where Medea and Clytemnestra were performed by masked men in a civic festival that excluded women not because they lacked talent but because the stage was a function of democratic citizenship and women were not citizens. It moves through the Restoration revolution of 1660, when Charles II returned from French exile and issued a royal warrant requiring female roles to be performed by women, ending two thousand years of all-male convention in England overnight. It examines the blackface minstrelsy of the nineteenth century, which I argue is not the opposite of non-traditional casting but its structural cousin: both treat the actor’s body as raw material on which someone else’s vision is painted, the one through burnt cork, the other through institutional policy, with the same underlying assumption that the controlling authority, not the playwright, decides what the body on stage means.

That claim will make people uncomfortable. It is meant to. The surface justifications of blackface and non-traditional casting are opposite, one rooted in white supremacy, the other in racial justice, but the structural relationship between the performer’s body and the institution that governs the stage is identical. The body is canvas. The institution holds the brush. The playwright, in both systems, is irrelevant.

The book then turns to case studies that give the argument flesh. Samuel Beckett’s refusal to allow the American Repertory Theatre to cast women in Endgame in 1984, which established that a playwright’s stage directions are not suggestions but legally enforceable elements of the work. August Wilson’s 1996 address at the Theatre Communications Group conference, “The Ground on Which I Stand,” which declared that Black plays require Black directors and Black actors, and which remains the most important speech about race and the American stage delivered in the last half century. The casting of Hamilton and the 2022 revival of 1776, where color-conscious casting was deployed to reimagine the founding mythology of white America through non-white bodies, with radically different results. The removal of a white ASL interpreter from a performance of The Lion King because the actors on stage were Black, which raises a question the theatre has not answered: is an interpreter a performer or a conduit? Ali Stroker’s Tony-winning performance in Oklahoma!, which asks whether a wheelchair in a scene that depends on physical running is an artistic disruption or an artistic contribution, and who gets to decide. Eugene O’Neill’s Irish families, in which the ethnicity is not decoration but architecture, load-bearing walls that collapse if you remove them.

Each of these cases is examined at length, with sources documented and arguments presented with as much candor as I can bring to the page. I have tried to be fair. I have also tried to be honest. Where those two imperatives conflict, I chose honesty. That choice runs through the entire book, and it is the choice I have made in every professional decision since I founded The United Stage on the principle that the playwright has the right to direct the first public performance of the playwright’s own play.

I have been a dues-paying member of the Dramatists Guild of America since July 2, 1984, member number 45010, enrolled on the advice of a freshman playwriting teacher at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who read the first one-act play I ever wrote and told me to join immediately. I did not understand at eighteen what that membership meant. I understand it now. The Guild was built to protect the playwright. Its Bill of Rights, maintained since the first Minimum Basic Agreement of 1926, affirms the playwright’s right to approve casting, the creative team, and production elements, to be present at rehearsals, to own the copyright, and to protect the integrity of the text. This book criticizes the Guild’s Inclusion Rider, and I want to be clear that the criticism is offered from within the Guild, by a member who has been paying dues without interruption for more than forty years, who believes in the Guild’s foundational mission, and who writes this book in its defense.

The book also benefits from the expertise of Janna Sweenie, my collaborator on American Sign Language educational materials, who contributed her knowledge of Deaf culture, interpreter ethics, and the NAD-RID Code of Professional Conduct to the chapter on the Lion King interpreter incident. The precision in that analysis is hers. The errors in the book are mine.

Miscast is not a book about inclusion. It is a book about authorship. The distinction matters more than any other distinction in the American theatre today, because every institution that promotes non-traditional casting claims to be expanding inclusion, and some of them are, but the mechanism by which they do it requires seizing creative authority from the person who created the work. That seizure is the subject of this book. That seizure is what I spent thirty years watching. That seizure is what I said no to in a rehearsal room at Columbia, and what I am saying no to now, in print, at full length, with documentation.

The playwright decides. That is the ground on which this book stands.

Miscast: Who Owns the Story on Stage? is available now from David Boles Books in Kindle eBook ($9.99), paperback ($16.99), and free PDF download. David Boles is a member of the Dramatists Guild, the Authors Guild, and PEN America. He holds an MFA from Columbia University and has been writing for the stage, for television, and for publication for more than four decades.

Miscast: The Playwright Decides, and No One Else Gets a Vote

There is a moment in the life of every playwright when someone walks into a rehearsal room and announces that the character you wrote is not, in fact, the character you wrote. The director has a vision. The institution has a policy. The casting committee has decided that your Irish Catholic mother from the Southside of Chicago would be better served by an actress who has no connection to the world you built because connection, in the current theatrical climate, is less important than representation, and representation is whatever the people who control the stage say it is. You sit there. You watch your play become someone else’s argument. And you have two choices: you can let it happen, or you can pull the production.

I pulled the production.

That story appears in Chapter 11 of Miscast: Who Owns the Story on Stage?, my new book, now available in eBook, paperback, and PDF from David Boles Books. The anecdote is from Columbia University, where I was earning my MFA, and where a director proposed splitting a single character in my play into bipolar twins under the banner of non-traditional casting. I said no. I cancelled the production. I lost the showcase. I kept the play. That was more than thirty years ago, and I have spent the time since thinking about what that moment meant, not just for me but for every playwright who has watched the American theatre transform casting from an artistic decision made by the author into an institutional mandate imposed over the author’s objection.

Miscast is the book that thinking produced.

The argument is simple. The playwright creates the characters. The playwright determines what the characters are. No institution has the right to override that determination. When Lin-Manuel Miranda casts actors of color as the Founding Fathers in Hamilton, that is authorial choice, and it is art. When an institution imposes non-traditional casting on a playwright’s work without the playwright’s knowledge or against the playwright’s wishes, that is something else entirely. It is expropriation. It is the seizure of creative authority from the person who did the creating. And it is now standard practice in the American theatre, codified in equity agreements, hiring mandates, and the Dramatists Guild’s own 2021 Inclusion Rider, the first contract addendum in theatre history that asks playwrights to redirect their copyright authority toward institutional demographic objectives.

That is a sentence worth reading twice.

The book traces the full arc. It begins with the all-male stages of fifth-century Athens, where Medea and Clytemnestra were performed by masked men in a civic festival that excluded women not because they lacked talent but because the stage was a function of democratic citizenship and women were not citizens. It moves through the Restoration revolution of 1660, when Charles II returned from French exile and issued a royal warrant requiring female roles to be performed by women, ending two thousand years of all-male convention in England overnight. It examines the blackface minstrelsy of the nineteenth century, which I argue is not the opposite of non-traditional casting but its structural cousin: both treat the actor’s body as raw material on which someone else’s vision is painted, the one through burnt cork, the other through institutional policy, with the same underlying assumption that the controlling authority, not the playwright, decides what the body on stage means.

That claim will make people uncomfortable. It is meant to. The surface justifications of blackface and non-traditional casting are opposite, one rooted in white supremacy, the other in racial justice, but the structural relationship between the performer’s body and the institution that governs the stage is identical. The body is canvas. The institution holds the brush. The playwright, in both systems, is irrelevant.

The book then turns to case studies that give the argument flesh. Samuel Beckett’s refusal to allow the American Repertory Theatre to cast women in Endgame in 1984, which established that a playwright’s stage directions are not suggestions but legally enforceable elements of the work. August Wilson’s 1996 address at the Theatre Communications Group conference, “The Ground on Which I Stand,” which declared that Black plays require Black directors and Black actors, and which remains the most important speech about race and the American stage delivered in the last half century. The casting of Hamilton and the 2022 revival of 1776, where color-conscious casting was deployed to reimagine the founding mythology of white America through non-white bodies, with radically different results. The removal of a white ASL interpreter from a performance of The Lion King because the actors on stage were Black, which raises a question the theatre has not answered: is an interpreter a performer or a conduit? Ali Stroker’s Tony-winning performance in Oklahoma!, which asks whether a wheelchair in a scene that depends on physical running is an artistic disruption or an artistic contribution, and who gets to decide. Eugene O’Neill’s Irish families, in which the ethnicity is not decoration but architecture, load-bearing walls that collapse if you remove them.

Each of these cases is examined at length, with sources documented and arguments presented with as much candor as I can bring to the page. I have tried to be fair. I have also tried to be honest. Where those two imperatives conflict, I chose honesty. That choice runs through the entire book, and it is the choice I have made in every professional decision since I founded The United Stage on the principle that the playwright has the right to direct the first public performance of the playwright’s own play.

I have been a dues-paying member of the Dramatists Guild of America since July 2, 1984, member number 45010, enrolled on the advice of a freshman playwriting teacher at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who read the first one-act play I ever wrote and told me to join immediately. I did not understand at eighteen what that membership meant. I understand it now. The Guild was built to protect the playwright. Its Bill of Rights, maintained since the first Minimum Basic Agreement of 1926, affirms the playwright’s right to approve casting, the creative team, and production elements, to be present at rehearsals, to own the copyright, and to protect the integrity of the text. This book criticizes the Guild’s Inclusion Rider, and I want to be clear that the criticism is offered from within the Guild, by a member who has been paying dues without interruption for more than forty years, who believes in the Guild’s foundational mission, and who writes this book in its defense.

The book also benefits from the expertise of Janna Sweenie, my collaborator on American Sign Language educational materials, who contributed her knowledge of Deaf culture, interpreter ethics, and the NAD-RID Code of Professional Conduct to the chapter on the Lion King interpreter incident. The precision in that analysis is hers. The errors in the book are mine.

Miscast is not a book about inclusion. It is a book about authorship. The distinction matters more than any other distinction in the American theatre today, because every institution that promotes non-traditional casting claims to be expanding inclusion, and some of them are, but the mechanism by which they do it requires seizing creative authority from the person who created the work. That seizure is the subject of this book. That seizure is what I spent thirty years watching. That seizure is what I said no to in a rehearsal room at Columbia, and what I am saying no to now, in print, at full length, with documentation.

The playwright decides. That is the ground on which this book stands.

Miscast: Who Owns the Story on Stage? is available now from David Boles Books in Kindle eBook ($9.99), paperback ($16.99), and free PDF download. David Boles is a member of the Dramatists Guild, the Authors Guild, and PEN America. He holds an MFA from Columbia University and has been writing for the stage, for television, and for publication for more than four decades.

Miscast: The Playwright Decides, and No One Else Gets a Vote

There is a moment in the life of every playwright when someone walks into a rehearsal room and announces that the character you wrote is not, in fact, the character you wrote. The director has a vision. The institution has a policy. The casting committee has decided that your Irish Catholic mother from the Southside of Chicago would be better served by an actress who has no connection to the world you built because connection, in the current theatrical climate, is less important than representation, and representation is whatever the people who control the stage say it is. You sit there. You watch your play become someone else’s argument. And you have two choices: you can let it happen, or you can pull the production.

I pulled the production.

That story appears in Chapter 11 of Miscast: Who Owns the Story on Stage?, my new book, now available in eBook, paperback, and PDF from David Boles Books. The anecdote is from Columbia University, where I was earning my MFA, and where a director proposed splitting a single character in my play into bipolar twins under the banner of non-traditional casting. I said no. I cancelled the production. I lost the showcase. I kept the play. That was more than thirty years ago, and I have spent the time since thinking about what that moment meant, not just for me but for every playwright who has watched the American theatre transform casting from an artistic decision made by the author into an institutional mandate imposed over the author’s objection.

Miscast is the book that thinking produced.

The argument is simple. The playwright creates the characters. The playwright determines what the characters are. No institution has the right to override that determination. When Lin-Manuel Miranda casts actors of color as the Founding Fathers in Hamilton, that is authorial choice, and it is art. When an institution imposes non-traditional casting on a playwright’s work without the playwright’s knowledge or against the playwright’s wishes, that is something else entirely. It is expropriation. It is the seizure of creative authority from the person who did the creating. And it is now standard practice in the American theatre, codified in equity agreements, hiring mandates, and the Dramatists Guild’s own 2021 Inclusion Rider, the first contract addendum in theatre history that asks playwrights to redirect their copyright authority toward institutional demographic objectives.

That is a sentence worth reading twice.

The book traces the full arc. It begins with the all-male stages of fifth-century Athens, where Medea and Clytemnestra were performed by masked men in a civic festival that excluded women not because they lacked talent but because the stage was a function of democratic citizenship and women were not citizens. It moves through the Restoration revolution of 1660, when Charles II returned from French exile and issued a royal warrant requiring female roles to be performed by women, ending two thousand years of all-male convention in England overnight. It examines the blackface minstrelsy of the nineteenth century, which I argue is not the opposite of non-traditional casting but its structural cousin: both treat the actor’s body as raw material on which someone else’s vision is painted, the one through burnt cork, the other through institutional policy, with the same underlying assumption that the controlling authority, not the playwright, decides what the body on stage means.

That claim will make people uncomfortable. It is meant to. The surface justifications of blackface and non-traditional casting are opposite, one rooted in white supremacy, the other in racial justice, but the structural relationship between the performer’s body and the institution that governs the stage is identical. The body is canvas. The institution holds the brush. The playwright, in both systems, is irrelevant.

The book then turns to case studies that give the argument flesh. Samuel Beckett’s refusal to allow the American Repertory Theatre to cast women in Endgame in 1984, which established that a playwright’s stage directions are not suggestions but legally enforceable elements of the work. August Wilson’s 1996 address at the Theatre Communications Group conference, “The Ground on Which I Stand,” which declared that Black plays require Black directors and Black actors, and which remains the most important speech about race and the American stage delivered in the last half century. The casting of Hamilton and the 2022 revival of 1776, where color-conscious casting was deployed to reimagine the founding mythology of white America through non-white bodies, with radically different results. The removal of a white ASL interpreter from a performance of The Lion King because the actors on stage were Black, which raises a question the theatre has not answered: is an interpreter a performer or a conduit? Ali Stroker’s Tony-winning performance in Oklahoma!, which asks whether a wheelchair in a scene that depends on physical running is an artistic disruption or an artistic contribution, and who gets to decide. Eugene O’Neill’s Irish families, in which the ethnicity is not decoration but architecture, load-bearing walls that collapse if you remove them.

Each of these cases is examined at length, with sources documented and arguments presented with as much candor as I can bring to the page. I have tried to be fair. I have also tried to be honest. Where those two imperatives conflict, I chose honesty. That choice runs through the entire book, and it is the choice I have made in every professional decision since I founded The United Stage on the principle that the playwright has the right to direct the first public performance of the playwright’s own play.

I have been a dues-paying member of the Dramatists Guild of America since July 2, 1984, member number 45010, enrolled on the advice of a freshman playwriting teacher at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who read the first one-act play I ever wrote and told me to join immediately. I did not understand at eighteen what that membership meant. I understand it now. The Guild was built to protect the playwright. Its Bill of Rights, maintained since the first Minimum Basic Agreement of 1926, affirms the playwright’s right to approve casting, the creative team, and production elements, to be present at rehearsals, to own the copyright, and to protect the integrity of the text. This book criticizes the Guild’s Inclusion Rider, and I want to be clear that the criticism is offered from within the Guild, by a member who has been paying dues without interruption for more than forty years, who believes in the Guild’s foundational mission, and who writes this book in its defense.

The book also benefits from the expertise of Janna Sweenie, my collaborator on American Sign Language educational materials, who contributed her knowledge of Deaf culture, interpreter ethics, and the NAD-RID Code of Professional Conduct to the chapter on the Lion King interpreter incident. The precision in that analysis is hers. The errors in the book are mine.

Miscast is not a book about inclusion. It is a book about authorship. The distinction matters more than any other distinction in the American theatre today, because every institution that promotes non-traditional casting claims to be expanding inclusion, and some of them are, but the mechanism by which they do it requires seizing creative authority from the person who created the work. That seizure is the subject of this book. That seizure is what I spent thirty years watching. That seizure is what I said no to in a rehearsal room at Columbia, and what I am saying no to now, in print, at full length, with documentation.

The playwright decides. That is the ground on which this book stands.

Miscast: Who Owns the Story on Stage? is available now from David Boles Books in Kindle eBook ($9.99), paperback ($16.99), and free PDF download. David Boles is a member of the Dramatists Guild, the Authors Guild, and PEN America. He holds an MFA from Columbia University and has been writing for the stage, for television, and for publication for more than four decades.

Miscast: The Playwright Decides, and No One Else Gets a Vote

There is a moment in the life of every playwright when someone walks into a rehearsal room and announces that the character you wrote is not, in fact, the character you wrote. The director has a vision. The institution has a policy. The casting committee has decided that your Irish Catholic mother from the Southside of Chicago would be better served by an actress who has no connection to the world you built because connection, in the current theatrical climate, is less important than representation, and representation is whatever the people who control the stage say it is. You sit there. You watch your play become someone else’s argument. And you have two choices: you can let it happen, or you can pull the production.

I pulled the production.

That story appears in Chapter 11 of Miscast: Who Owns the Story on Stage?, my new book, now available in eBook, paperback, and PDF from David Boles Books. The anecdote is from Columbia University, where I was earning my MFA, and where a director proposed splitting a single character in my play into bipolar twins under the banner of non-traditional casting. I said no. I cancelled the production. I lost the showcase. I kept the play. That was more than thirty years ago, and I have spent the time since thinking about what that moment meant, not just for me but for every playwright who has watched the American theatre transform casting from an artistic decision made by the author into an institutional mandate imposed over the author’s objection.

Miscast is the book that thinking produced.

The argument is simple. The playwright creates the characters. The playwright determines what the characters are. No institution has the right to override that determination. When Lin-Manuel Miranda casts actors of color as the Founding Fathers in Hamilton, that is authorial choice, and it is art. When an institution imposes non-traditional casting on a playwright’s work without the playwright’s knowledge or against the playwright’s wishes, that is something else entirely. It is expropriation. It is the seizure of creative authority from the person who did the creating. And it is now standard practice in the American theatre, codified in equity agreements, hiring mandates, and the Dramatists Guild’s own 2021 Inclusion Rider, the first contract addendum in theatre history that asks playwrights to redirect their copyright authority toward institutional demographic objectives.

That is a sentence worth reading twice.

The book traces the full arc. It begins with the all-male stages of fifth-century Athens, where Medea and Clytemnestra were performed by masked men in a civic festival that excluded women not because they lacked talent but because the stage was a function of democratic citizenship and women were not citizens. It moves through the Restoration revolution of 1660, when Charles II returned from French exile and issued a royal warrant requiring female roles to be performed by women, ending two thousand years of all-male convention in England overnight. It examines the blackface minstrelsy of the nineteenth century, which I argue is not the opposite of non-traditional casting but its structural cousin: both treat the actor’s body as raw material on which someone else’s vision is painted, the one through burnt cork, the other through institutional policy, with the same underlying assumption that the controlling authority, not the playwright, decides what the body on stage means.

That claim will make people uncomfortable. It is meant to. The surface justifications of blackface and non-traditional casting are opposite, one rooted in white supremacy, the other in racial justice, but the structural relationship between the performer’s body and the institution that governs the stage is identical. The body is canvas. The institution holds the brush. The playwright, in both systems, is irrelevant.

The book then turns to case studies that give the argument flesh. Samuel Beckett’s refusal to allow the American Repertory Theatre to cast women in Endgame in 1984, which established that a playwright’s stage directions are not suggestions but legally enforceable elements of the work. August Wilson’s 1996 address at the Theatre Communications Group conference, “The Ground on Which I Stand,” which declared that Black plays require Black directors and Black actors, and which remains the most important speech about race and the American stage delivered in the last half century. The casting of Hamilton and the 2022 revival of 1776, where color-conscious casting was deployed to reimagine the founding mythology of white America through non-white bodies, with radically different results. The removal of a white ASL interpreter from a performance of The Lion King because the actors on stage were Black, which raises a question the theatre has not answered: is an interpreter a performer or a conduit? Ali Stroker’s Tony-winning performance in Oklahoma!, which asks whether a wheelchair in a scene that depends on physical running is an artistic disruption or an artistic contribution, and who gets to decide. Eugene O’Neill’s Irish families, in which the ethnicity is not decoration but architecture, load-bearing walls that collapse if you remove them.

Each of these cases is examined at length, with sources documented and arguments presented with as much candor as I can bring to the page. I have tried to be fair. I have also tried to be honest. Where those two imperatives conflict, I chose honesty. That choice runs through the entire book, and it is the choice I have made in every professional decision since I founded The United Stage on the principle that the playwright has the right to direct the first public performance of the playwright’s own play.

I have been a dues-paying member of the Dramatists Guild of America since July 2, 1984, member number 45010, enrolled on the advice of a freshman playwriting teacher at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who read the first one-act play I ever wrote and told me to join immediately. I did not understand at eighteen what that membership meant. I understand it now. The Guild was built to protect the playwright. Its Bill of Rights, maintained since the first Minimum Basic Agreement of 1926, affirms the playwright’s right to approve casting, the creative team, and production elements, to be present at rehearsals, to own the copyright, and to protect the integrity of the text. This book criticizes the Guild’s Inclusion Rider, and I want to be clear that the criticism is offered from within the Guild, by a member who has been paying dues without interruption for more than forty years, who believes in the Guild’s foundational mission, and who writes this book in its defense.

The book also benefits from the expertise of Janna Sweenie, my collaborator on American Sign Language educational materials, who contributed her knowledge of Deaf culture, interpreter ethics, and the NAD-RID Code of Professional Conduct to the chapter on the Lion King interpreter incident. The precision in that analysis is hers. The errors in the book are mine.

Miscast is not a book about inclusion. It is a book about authorship. The distinction matters more than any other distinction in the American theatre today, because every institution that promotes non-traditional casting claims to be expanding inclusion, and some of them are, but the mechanism by which they do it requires seizing creative authority from the person who created the work. That seizure is the subject of this book. That seizure is what I spent thirty years watching. That seizure is what I said no to in a rehearsal room at Columbia, and what I am saying no to now, in print, at full length, with documentation.

The playwright decides. That is the ground on which this book stands.

Miscast: Who Owns the Story on Stage? is available now from David Boles Books in Kindle eBook ($9.99), paperback ($16.99), and free PDF download. David Boles is a member of the Dramatists Guild, the Authors Guild, and PEN America. He holds an MFA from Columbia University and has been writing for the stage, for television, and for publication for more than four decades.

Miscast: The Playwright Decides, and No One Else Gets a Vote

There is a moment in the life of every playwright when someone walks into a rehearsal room and announces that the character you wrote is not, in fact, the character you wrote. The director has a vision. The institution has a policy. The casting committee has decided that your Irish Catholic mother from the Southside of Chicago would be better served by an actress who has no connection to the world you built because connection, in the current theatrical climate, is less important than representation, and representation is whatever the people who control the stage say it is. You sit there. You watch your play become someone else’s argument. And you have two choices: you can let it happen, or you can pull the production.

I pulled the production.

That story appears in Chapter 11 of Miscast: Who Owns the Story on Stage?, my new book, now available in eBook, paperback, and PDF from David Boles Books. The anecdote is from Columbia University, where I was earning my MFA, and where a director proposed splitting a single character in my play into bipolar twins under the banner of non-traditional casting. I said no. I cancelled the production. I lost the showcase. I kept the play. That was more than thirty years ago, and I have spent the time since thinking about what that moment meant, not just for me but for every playwright who has watched the American theatre transform casting from an artistic decision made by the author into an institutional mandate imposed over the author’s objection.

Miscast is the book that thinking produced.

The argument is simple. The playwright creates the characters. The playwright determines what the characters are. No institution has the right to override that determination. When Lin-Manuel Miranda casts actors of color as the Founding Fathers in Hamilton, that is authorial choice, and it is art. When an institution imposes non-traditional casting on a playwright’s work without the playwright’s knowledge or against the playwright’s wishes, that is something else entirely. It is expropriation. It is the seizure of creative authority from the person who did the creating. And it is now standard practice in the American theatre, codified in equity agreements, hiring mandates, and the Dramatists Guild’s own 2021 Inclusion Rider, the first contract addendum in theatre history that asks playwrights to redirect their copyright authority toward institutional demographic objectives.

That is a sentence worth reading twice.

The book traces the full arc. It begins with the all-male stages of fifth-century Athens, where Medea and Clytemnestra were performed by masked men in a civic festival that excluded women not because they lacked talent but because the stage was a function of democratic citizenship and women were not citizens. It moves through the Restoration revolution of 1660, when Charles II returned from French exile and issued a royal warrant requiring female roles to be performed by women, ending two thousand years of all-male convention in England overnight. It examines the blackface minstrelsy of the nineteenth century, which I argue is not the opposite of non-traditional casting but its structural cousin: both treat the actor’s body as raw material on which someone else’s vision is painted, the one through burnt cork, the other through institutional policy, with the same underlying assumption that the controlling authority, not the playwright, decides what the body on stage means.

That claim will make people uncomfortable. It is meant to. The surface justifications of blackface and non-traditional casting are opposite, one rooted in white supremacy, the other in racial justice, but the structural relationship between the performer’s body and the institution that governs the stage is identical. The body is canvas. The institution holds the brush. The playwright, in both systems, is irrelevant.

The book then turns to case studies that give the argument flesh. Samuel Beckett’s refusal to allow the American Repertory Theatre to cast women in Endgame in 1984, which established that a playwright’s stage directions are not suggestions but legally enforceable elements of the work. August Wilson’s 1996 address at the Theatre Communications Group conference, “The Ground on Which I Stand,” which declared that Black plays require Black directors and Black actors, and which remains the most important speech about race and the American stage delivered in the last half century. The casting of Hamilton and the 2022 revival of 1776, where color-conscious casting was deployed to reimagine the founding mythology of white America through non-white bodies, with radically different results. The removal of a white ASL interpreter from a performance of The Lion King because the actors on stage were Black, which raises a question the theatre has not answered: is an interpreter a performer or a conduit? Ali Stroker’s Tony-winning performance in Oklahoma!, which asks whether a wheelchair in a scene that depends on physical running is an artistic disruption or an artistic contribution, and who gets to decide. Eugene O’Neill’s Irish families, in which the ethnicity is not decoration but architecture, load-bearing walls that collapse if you remove them.

Each of these cases is examined at length, with sources documented and arguments presented with as much candor as I can bring to the page. I have tried to be fair. I have also tried to be honest. Where those two imperatives conflict, I chose honesty. That choice runs through the entire book, and it is the choice I have made in every professional decision since I founded The United Stage on the principle that the playwright has the right to direct the first public performance of the playwright’s own play.

I have been a dues-paying member of the Dramatists Guild of America since July 2, 1984, member number 45010, enrolled on the advice of a freshman playwriting teacher at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who read the first one-act play I ever wrote and told me to join immediately. I did not understand at eighteen what that membership meant. I understand it now. The Guild was built to protect the playwright. Its Bill of Rights, maintained since the first Minimum Basic Agreement of 1926, affirms the playwright’s right to approve casting, the creative team, and production elements, to be present at rehearsals, to own the copyright, and to protect the integrity of the text. This book criticizes the Guild’s Inclusion Rider, and I want to be clear that the criticism is offered from within the Guild, by a member who has been paying dues without interruption for more than forty years, who believes in the Guild’s foundational mission, and who writes this book in its defense.

The book also benefits from the expertise of Janna Sweenie, my collaborator on American Sign Language educational materials, who contributed her knowledge of Deaf culture, interpreter ethics, and the NAD-RID Code of Professional Conduct to the chapter on the Lion King interpreter incident. The precision in that analysis is hers. The errors in the book are mine.

Miscast is not a book about inclusion. It is a book about authorship. The distinction matters more than any other distinction in the American theatre today, because every institution that promotes non-traditional casting claims to be expanding inclusion, and some of them are, but the mechanism by which they do it requires seizing creative authority from the person who created the work. That seizure is the subject of this book. That seizure is what I spent thirty years watching. That seizure is what I said no to in a rehearsal room at Columbia, and what I am saying no to now, in print, at full length, with documentation.

The playwright decides. That is the ground on which this book stands.

Miscast: Who Owns the Story on Stage? is available now from David Boles Books in Kindle eBook ($9.99), paperback ($16.99), and free PDF download. David Boles is a member of the Dramatists Guild, the Authors Guild, and PEN America. He holds an MFA from Columbia University and has been writing for the stage, for television, and for publication for more than four decades.

The God in the Wire: The Book That Began with an Empty Shelf

I did not set out to write a book about technology. I set out to understand an empty shelf. The shelf is at LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City, Queens, mounted on a corridor wall beneath a sign bearing the universal symbol for Deaf access. The shelf once held a TTY, one of those text telephones that gave Deaf people their first access to instantaneous distance communication. The TTY is gone. The smartphone replaced it. The sign is still there, pointing to something that no longer exists. I saw it during a workshop break, in a hallway I had no reason to be in, and for the next several years I could not stop thinking about it.

The God in the Wire: Technology, Meaning, and the Empty Shrine is now available from David Boles Books as a Kindle ebook, a trade paperback, and a free PDF download. It is a work of cultural criticism, twelve chapters, an introduction, a coda, and a full scholarly apparatus including endnotes, a glossary of analytical terms, and a reader’s guide to the Eugene O’Neill plays that give the book its governing argument. It is the book I have been circling for a decade without knowing it, and it is the book I am proudest to have written.

The Question O’Neill Could Not Close

The book’s thesis comes from a playwright, not a technologist. In 1929, Eugene O’Neill described a trilogy of plays he intended to write about “the death of the old God and the failure of Science and Materialism to give any satisfying new one.” He wrote one of those plays, Dynamo, about a young man who loses his religious faith and transfers his worship to a hydroelectric generator. The play failed. The trilogy was never completed. But the question O’Neill was asking turned out to be the defining question of the century that followed: what happens when a civilization replaces its gods with its machines, and the machines turn out to be structurally incapable of doing what the gods once did?

That question drove Dynamo in 1929. It drives every chapter of The God in the Wire in 2026. The difference is that we now have a century of evidence to examine. O’Neill was diagnosing a crisis in its earliest stages. We are living inside the crisis at full maturity, surrounded by machines of extraordinary power that deliver everything except the one thing we keep asking them to provide: meaning.

The Five Threads

The book weaves five threads through its twelve chapters.

The first is the Deaf experience of communication technology. My wife is Deaf. Her fifty-year relationship with the tools of distance communication, from the TTY through the pager, the video phone, the smartphone, and the video relay service, runs through the book as testimony. Her words appear as direct quotation. Her perspective is not a case study or a sidebar. It is the book’s emotional center, because when you examine the history of communication technology through the experience of someone who was excluded from its founding medium, the telephone, you see things that hearing people cannot see. You see what the technology actually did, stripped of the mythology that the hearing world built around it.

The second thread is my own fifty-year relationship with the tools of composition: the manual typewriter, the electric Selectric, the Kaypro word processor, the networked computer, and the large language model. Every writer who has lived through this transition has a version of this story, but I wanted to tell it with the specificity it deserves, because the details matter. The resistance of the manual typewriter key is not the same as the frictionless completion of the language model, and the difference is not nostalgia. It is a structural change in the relationship between the writer’s body and the act of thinking on the page.

The third thread traces the transformation of American teaching from chalkboard to cloud. The fourth follows the democratization and fragmentation of public expression from the mimeograph to social media. The fifth examines medicine and environmental crisis, the domains where technology most directly confronts death and the limits of the material world. The cardiac catheter. The mRNA vaccine. The ozone layer. The climate. The places where the machine genuinely saves and the places where saving the body does not answer the question of what the body is for.

The Analytical Machinery

Every chapter applies what the book calls the Substitution Test. Three questions. What human good was this technology supposed to serve? What did it actually deliver instead? Who profited from the substitution? Those questions are not rhetorical. They have specific, documented answers in every case, and the answers follow a pattern that is the book’s central argument.

A technology arrives with a promise. It achieves dominance. During that dominance, it substitutes a lesser good for a greater one: efficiency for understanding, connectivity for communion, information for wisdom, engagement metrics for attention, fluency for thought. The substitution is profitable for someone, usually the platform or the manufacturer, and the profit motive ensures that the substitution is never publicly identified as a substitution. It is marketed as progress.

This is what I call the Arrival-Dominance-Disappearance triad, and it governs the structure of every chapter. The technology arrives. The technology dominates. The technology disappears or transforms, and the meaning it was supposedly carrying disappears with it, because the meaning was never in the machine. It was in us.

What This Book Is Not

The God in the Wire is not a Luddite tract. I use technology constantly. I am typing these words on a computer. The book was typeset in LaTeX, built as an ePub, and formatted for print-on-demand. I am not arguing against technology. I am arguing against the worship of technology, and there is a difference so fundamental that collapsing it is itself a species of the category error the book diagnoses.

There is a chapter called “Moments of Grace” that identifies the times technology got it right. The TTY is one. The early internet, before the advertising model consumed it, is another. The mRNA vaccine, developed in under a year against a novel pathogen, is a third. In each case, the technology remained instrumental, it preserved the human grammar of the act it mediated, and it did not demand worship. The moments of grace are real. The problem is that they are moments, not the default condition, and the structural incentives of the technology industry push relentlessly against their repetition.

The Company It Keeps

This book enters a conversation with predecessors I admire and from whom I have learned enormously. Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows. Sven Birkerts’s The Gutenberg Elegies. Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing. These are important books about technology and human meaning. What none of them does, and what The God in the Wire does, is place Deaf experience at the center of the argument. That is not a criticism of their work. It is a description of a gap this book attempts to fill, because the gap matters, and the perspective it opens changes the argument in ways I did not anticipate when I began writing.

The book also draws heavily on Henry Adams’s The Education of Henry Adams, particularly the “Dynamo and the Virgin” chapter that recounts Adams’s confrontation with the dynamo at the 1900 Paris Exposition. Adams felt a moral force radiating from the machine, the modern equivalent of the force that had built Chartres. He was right about the power. He was wrong about the meaning. That gap, between power and meaning, is the empty shrine.

The Scholarly Apparatus

I built the back matter to be genuinely useful, not decorative. The endnotes provide full citations to the clinical, historical, and sociological literature: the Surgeon General’s advisory on loneliness, the Case and Deaton research on deaths of despair, the Twenge data on adolescent mental health, the Molina and Rowland ozone research, the IPCC assessments, the Gruentzig cardiac catheterization, the Palella antiretroviral data. Every empirical claim in the book is sourced. Every statistic is documented.

The glossary defines the analytical terms the book develops: the Arrival-Dominance-Disappearance Triad, the Category Error, the Substitution Test, the Moments of Grace. These are the book’s constructions, and I wanted readers to have a reference that collects them in one place.

The reader’s guide to the O’Neill plays walks through every work referenced in the text, from Beyond the Horizon through Long Day’s Journey into Night, because I am asking readers to engage with a playwright many of them may not have read since college, and I owe them the context to make that engagement meaningful.

The Sign Above the Shelf

I went back to LaGuardia. The sign was still there. The shelf was still empty. And standing in that corridor for the second time, I understood something I had not understood the first time: the sign was never pointing to the machine. The sign was pointing to the need. The need that existed before the TTY arrived and that persisted after the TTY was gone. The need to reach another human being across distance. The need that no technology has ever created and no technology has ever satisfied and no technology ever will, because the need is not technological. It is the most human thing about us, and the machines, for all their power, can only carry it. They cannot create it. They cannot sustain it. They cannot replace it.

That is the argument. That is the book.

The God in the Wire: The Book That Began with an Empty Shelf

I did not set out to write a book about technology. I set out to understand an empty shelf. The shelf is at LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City, Queens, mounted on a corridor wall beneath a sign bearing the universal symbol for Deaf access. The shelf once held a TTY, one of those text telephones that gave Deaf people their first access to instantaneous distance communication. The TTY is gone. The smartphone replaced it. The sign is still there, pointing to something that no longer exists. I saw it during a workshop break, in a hallway I had no reason to be in, and for the next several years I could not stop thinking about it.

The God in the Wire: Technology, Meaning, and the Empty Shrine is now available from David Boles Books as a Kindle ebook, a trade paperback, and a free PDF download. It is a work of cultural criticism, twelve chapters, an introduction, a coda, and a full scholarly apparatus including endnotes, a glossary of analytical terms, and a reader’s guide to the Eugene O’Neill plays that give the book its governing argument. It is the book I have been circling for a decade without knowing it, and it is the book I am proudest to have written.

The Question O’Neill Could Not Close

The book’s thesis comes from a playwright, not a technologist. In 1929, Eugene O’Neill described a trilogy of plays he intended to write about “the death of the old God and the failure of Science and Materialism to give any satisfying new one.” He wrote one of those plays, Dynamo, about a young man who loses his religious faith and transfers his worship to a hydroelectric generator. The play failed. The trilogy was never completed. But the question O’Neill was asking turned out to be the defining question of the century that followed: what happens when a civilization replaces its gods with its machines, and the machines turn out to be structurally incapable of doing what the gods once did?

That question drove Dynamo in 1929. It drives every chapter of The God in the Wire in 2026. The difference is that we now have a century of evidence to examine. O’Neill was diagnosing a crisis in its earliest stages. We are living inside the crisis at full maturity, surrounded by machines of extraordinary power that deliver everything except the one thing we keep asking them to provide: meaning.

The Five Threads

The book weaves five threads through its twelve chapters.

The first is the Deaf experience of communication technology. My wife is Deaf. Her fifty-year relationship with the tools of distance communication, from the TTY through the pager, the video phone, the smartphone, and the video relay service, runs through the book as testimony. Her words appear as direct quotation. Her perspective is not a case study or a sidebar. It is the book’s emotional center, because when you examine the history of communication technology through the experience of someone who was excluded from its founding medium, the telephone, you see things that hearing people cannot see. You see what the technology actually did, stripped of the mythology that the hearing world built around it.

The second thread is my own fifty-year relationship with the tools of composition: the manual typewriter, the electric Selectric, the Kaypro word processor, the networked computer, and the large language model. Every writer who has lived through this transition has a version of this story, but I wanted to tell it with the specificity it deserves, because the details matter. The resistance of the manual typewriter key is not the same as the frictionless completion of the language model, and the difference is not nostalgia. It is a structural change in the relationship between the writer’s body and the act of thinking on the page.

The third thread traces the transformation of American teaching from chalkboard to cloud. The fourth follows the democratization and fragmentation of public expression from the mimeograph to social media. The fifth examines medicine and environmental crisis, the domains where technology most directly confronts death and the limits of the material world. The cardiac catheter. The mRNA vaccine. The ozone layer. The climate. The places where the machine genuinely saves and the places where saving the body does not answer the question of what the body is for.

The Analytical Machinery

Every chapter applies what the book calls the Substitution Test. Three questions. What human good was this technology supposed to serve? What did it actually deliver instead? Who profited from the substitution? Those questions are not rhetorical. They have specific, documented answers in every case, and the answers follow a pattern that is the book’s central argument.

A technology arrives with a promise. It achieves dominance. During that dominance, it substitutes a lesser good for a greater one: efficiency for understanding, connectivity for communion, information for wisdom, engagement metrics for attention, fluency for thought. The substitution is profitable for someone, usually the platform or the manufacturer, and the profit motive ensures that the substitution is never publicly identified as a substitution. It is marketed as progress.

This is what I call the Arrival-Dominance-Disappearance triad, and it governs the structure of every chapter. The technology arrives. The technology dominates. The technology disappears or transforms, and the meaning it was supposedly carrying disappears with it, because the meaning was never in the machine. It was in us.

What This Book Is Not

The God in the Wire is not a Luddite tract. I use technology constantly. I am typing these words on a computer. The book was typeset in LaTeX, built as an ePub, and formatted for print-on-demand. I am not arguing against technology. I am arguing against the worship of technology, and there is a difference so fundamental that collapsing it is itself a species of the category error the book diagnoses.

There is a chapter called “Moments of Grace” that identifies the times technology got it right. The TTY is one. The early internet, before the advertising model consumed it, is another. The mRNA vaccine, developed in under a year against a novel pathogen, is a third. In each case, the technology remained instrumental, it preserved the human grammar of the act it mediated, and it did not demand worship. The moments of grace are real. The problem is that they are moments, not the default condition, and the structural incentives of the technology industry push relentlessly against their repetition.

The Company It Keeps

This book enters a conversation with predecessors I admire and from whom I have learned enormously. Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows. Sven Birkerts’s The Gutenberg Elegies. Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing. These are important books about technology and human meaning. What none of them does, and what The God in the Wire does, is place Deaf experience at the center of the argument. That is not a criticism of their work. It is a description of a gap this book attempts to fill, because the gap matters, and the perspective it opens changes the argument in ways I did not anticipate when I began writing.

The book also draws heavily on Henry Adams’s The Education of Henry Adams, particularly the “Dynamo and the Virgin” chapter that recounts Adams’s confrontation with the dynamo at the 1900 Paris Exposition. Adams felt a moral force radiating from the machine, the modern equivalent of the force that had built Chartres. He was right about the power. He was wrong about the meaning. That gap, between power and meaning, is the empty shrine.

The Scholarly Apparatus

I built the back matter to be genuinely useful, not decorative. The endnotes provide full citations to the clinical, historical, and sociological literature: the Surgeon General’s advisory on loneliness, the Case and Deaton research on deaths of despair, the Twenge data on adolescent mental health, the Molina and Rowland ozone research, the IPCC assessments, the Gruentzig cardiac catheterization, the Palella antiretroviral data. Every empirical claim in the book is sourced. Every statistic is documented.

The glossary defines the analytical terms the book develops: the Arrival-Dominance-Disappearance Triad, the Category Error, the Substitution Test, the Moments of Grace. These are the book’s constructions, and I wanted readers to have a reference that collects them in one place.

The reader’s guide to the O’Neill plays walks through every work referenced in the text, from Beyond the Horizon through Long Day’s Journey into Night, because I am asking readers to engage with a playwright many of them may not have read since college, and I owe them the context to make that engagement meaningful.

The Sign Above the Shelf

I went back to LaGuardia. The sign was still there. The shelf was still empty. And standing in that corridor for the second time, I understood something I had not understood the first time: the sign was never pointing to the machine. The sign was pointing to the need. The need that existed before the TTY arrived and that persisted after the TTY was gone. The need to reach another human being across distance. The need that no technology has ever created and no technology has ever satisfied and no technology ever will, because the need is not technological. It is the most human thing about us, and the machines, for all their power, can only carry it. They cannot create it. They cannot sustain it. They cannot replace it.

That is the argument. That is the book.

The God in the Wire: The Book That Began with an Empty Shelf

I did not set out to write a book about technology. I set out to understand an empty shelf. The shelf is at LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City, Queens, mounted on a corridor wall beneath a sign bearing the universal symbol for Deaf access. The shelf once held a TTY, one of those text telephones that gave Deaf people their first access to instantaneous distance communication. The TTY is gone. The smartphone replaced it. The sign is still there, pointing to something that no longer exists. I saw it during a workshop break, in a hallway I had no reason to be in, and for the next several years I could not stop thinking about it.

The God in the Wire: Technology, Meaning, and the Empty Shrine is now available from David Boles Books as a Kindle ebook, a trade paperback, and a free PDF download. It is a work of cultural criticism, twelve chapters, an introduction, a coda, and a full scholarly apparatus including endnotes, a glossary of analytical terms, and a reader’s guide to the Eugene O’Neill plays that give the book its governing argument. It is the book I have been circling for a decade without knowing it, and it is the book I am proudest to have written.

The Question O’Neill Could Not Close

The book’s thesis comes from a playwright, not a technologist. In 1929, Eugene O’Neill described a trilogy of plays he intended to write about “the death of the old God and the failure of Science and Materialism to give any satisfying new one.” He wrote one of those plays, Dynamo, about a young man who loses his religious faith and transfers his worship to a hydroelectric generator. The play failed. The trilogy was never completed. But the question O’Neill was asking turned out to be the defining question of the century that followed: what happens when a civilization replaces its gods with its machines, and the machines turn out to be structurally incapable of doing what the gods once did?

That question drove Dynamo in 1929. It drives every chapter of The God in the Wire in 2026. The difference is that we now have a century of evidence to examine. O’Neill was diagnosing a crisis in its earliest stages. We are living inside the crisis at full maturity, surrounded by machines of extraordinary power that deliver everything except the one thing we keep asking them to provide: meaning.

The Five Threads

The book weaves five threads through its twelve chapters.

The first is the Deaf experience of communication technology. My wife is Deaf. Her fifty-year relationship with the tools of distance communication, from the TTY through the pager, the video phone, the smartphone, and the video relay service, runs through the book as testimony. Her words appear as direct quotation. Her perspective is not a case study or a sidebar. It is the book’s emotional center, because when you examine the history of communication technology through the experience of someone who was excluded from its founding medium, the telephone, you see things that hearing people cannot see. You see what the technology actually did, stripped of the mythology that the hearing world built around it.

The second thread is my own fifty-year relationship with the tools of composition: the manual typewriter, the electric Selectric, the Kaypro word processor, the networked computer, and the large language model. Every writer who has lived through this transition has a version of this story, but I wanted to tell it with the specificity it deserves, because the details matter. The resistance of the manual typewriter key is not the same as the frictionless completion of the language model, and the difference is not nostalgia. It is a structural change in the relationship between the writer’s body and the act of thinking on the page.

The third thread traces the transformation of American teaching from chalkboard to cloud. The fourth follows the democratization and fragmentation of public expression from the mimeograph to social media. The fifth examines medicine and environmental crisis, the domains where technology most directly confronts death and the limits of the material world. The cardiac catheter. The mRNA vaccine. The ozone layer. The climate. The places where the machine genuinely saves and the places where saving the body does not answer the question of what the body is for.

The Analytical Machinery

Every chapter applies what the book calls the Substitution Test. Three questions. What human good was this technology supposed to serve? What did it actually deliver instead? Who profited from the substitution? Those questions are not rhetorical. They have specific, documented answers in every case, and the answers follow a pattern that is the book’s central argument.

A technology arrives with a promise. It achieves dominance. During that dominance, it substitutes a lesser good for a greater one: efficiency for understanding, connectivity for communion, information for wisdom, engagement metrics for attention, fluency for thought. The substitution is profitable for someone, usually the platform or the manufacturer, and the profit motive ensures that the substitution is never publicly identified as a substitution. It is marketed as progress.

This is what I call the Arrival-Dominance-Disappearance triad, and it governs the structure of every chapter. The technology arrives. The technology dominates. The technology disappears or transforms, and the meaning it was supposedly carrying disappears with it, because the meaning was never in the machine. It was in us.

What This Book Is Not

The God in the Wire is not a Luddite tract. I use technology constantly. I am typing these words on a computer. The book was typeset in LaTeX, built as an ePub, and formatted for print-on-demand. I am not arguing against technology. I am arguing against the worship of technology, and there is a difference so fundamental that collapsing it is itself a species of the category error the book diagnoses.

There is a chapter called “Moments of Grace” that identifies the times technology got it right. The TTY is one. The early internet, before the advertising model consumed it, is another. The mRNA vaccine, developed in under a year against a novel pathogen, is a third. In each case, the technology remained instrumental, it preserved the human grammar of the act it mediated, and it did not demand worship. The moments of grace are real. The problem is that they are moments, not the default condition, and the structural incentives of the technology industry push relentlessly against their repetition.

The Company It Keeps

This book enters a conversation with predecessors I admire and from whom I have learned enormously. Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows. Sven Birkerts’s The Gutenberg Elegies. Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing. These are important books about technology and human meaning. What none of them does, and what The God in the Wire does, is place Deaf experience at the center of the argument. That is not a criticism of their work. It is a description of a gap this book attempts to fill, because the gap matters, and the perspective it opens changes the argument in ways I did not anticipate when I began writing.

The book also draws heavily on Henry Adams’s The Education of Henry Adams, particularly the “Dynamo and the Virgin” chapter that recounts Adams’s confrontation with the dynamo at the 1900 Paris Exposition. Adams felt a moral force radiating from the machine, the modern equivalent of the force that had built Chartres. He was right about the power. He was wrong about the meaning. That gap, between power and meaning, is the empty shrine.

The Scholarly Apparatus

I built the back matter to be genuinely useful, not decorative. The endnotes provide full citations to the clinical, historical, and sociological literature: the Surgeon General’s advisory on loneliness, the Case and Deaton research on deaths of despair, the Twenge data on adolescent mental health, the Molina and Rowland ozone research, the IPCC assessments, the Gruentzig cardiac catheterization, the Palella antiretroviral data. Every empirical claim in the book is sourced. Every statistic is documented.

The glossary defines the analytical terms the book develops: the Arrival-Dominance-Disappearance Triad, the Category Error, the Substitution Test, the Moments of Grace. These are the book’s constructions, and I wanted readers to have a reference that collects them in one place.

The reader’s guide to the O’Neill plays walks through every work referenced in the text, from Beyond the Horizon through Long Day’s Journey into Night, because I am asking readers to engage with a playwright many of them may not have read since college, and I owe them the context to make that engagement meaningful.

The Sign Above the Shelf

I went back to LaGuardia. The sign was still there. The shelf was still empty. And standing in that corridor for the second time, I understood something I had not understood the first time: the sign was never pointing to the machine. The sign was pointing to the need. The need that existed before the TTY arrived and that persisted after the TTY was gone. The need to reach another human being across distance. The need that no technology has ever created and no technology has ever satisfied and no technology ever will, because the need is not technological. It is the most human thing about us, and the machines, for all their power, can only carry it. They cannot create it. They cannot sustain it. They cannot replace it.

That is the argument. That is the book.

The God in the Wire: The Book That Began with an Empty Shelf

I did not set out to write a book about technology. I set out to understand an empty shelf. The shelf is at LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City, Queens, mounted on a corridor wall beneath a sign bearing the universal symbol for Deaf access. The shelf once held a TTY, one of those text telephones that gave Deaf people their first access to instantaneous distance communication. The TTY is gone. The smartphone replaced it. The sign is still there, pointing to something that no longer exists. I saw it during a workshop break, in a hallway I had no reason to be in, and for the next several years I could not stop thinking about it.

The God in the Wire: Technology, Meaning, and the Empty Shrine is now available from David Boles Books as a Kindle ebook, a trade paperback, and a free PDF download. It is a work of cultural criticism, twelve chapters, an introduction, a coda, and a full scholarly apparatus including endnotes, a glossary of analytical terms, and a reader’s guide to the Eugene O’Neill plays that give the book its governing argument. It is the book I have been circling for a decade without knowing it, and it is the book I am proudest to have written.

The Question O’Neill Could Not Close

The book’s thesis comes from a playwright, not a technologist. In 1929, Eugene O’Neill described a trilogy of plays he intended to write about “the death of the old God and the failure of Science and Materialism to give any satisfying new one.” He wrote one of those plays, Dynamo, about a young man who loses his religious faith and transfers his worship to a hydroelectric generator. The play failed. The trilogy was never completed. But the question O’Neill was asking turned out to be the defining question of the century that followed: what happens when a civilization replaces its gods with its machines, and the machines turn out to be structurally incapable of doing what the gods once did?

That question drove Dynamo in 1929. It drives every chapter of The God in the Wire in 2026. The difference is that we now have a century of evidence to examine. O’Neill was diagnosing a crisis in its earliest stages. We are living inside the crisis at full maturity, surrounded by machines of extraordinary power that deliver everything except the one thing we keep asking them to provide: meaning.

The Five Threads

The book weaves five threads through its twelve chapters.

The first is the Deaf experience of communication technology. My wife is Deaf. Her fifty-year relationship with the tools of distance communication, from the TTY through the pager, the video phone, the smartphone, and the video relay service, runs through the book as testimony. Her words appear as direct quotation. Her perspective is not a case study or a sidebar. It is the book’s emotional center, because when you examine the history of communication technology through the experience of someone who was excluded from its founding medium, the telephone, you see things that hearing people cannot see. You see what the technology actually did, stripped of the mythology that the hearing world built around it.

The second thread is my own fifty-year relationship with the tools of composition: the manual typewriter, the electric Selectric, the Kaypro word processor, the networked computer, and the large language model. Every writer who has lived through this transition has a version of this story, but I wanted to tell it with the specificity it deserves, because the details matter. The resistance of the manual typewriter key is not the same as the frictionless completion of the language model, and the difference is not nostalgia. It is a structural change in the relationship between the writer’s body and the act of thinking on the page.

The third thread traces the transformation of American teaching from chalkboard to cloud. The fourth follows the democratization and fragmentation of public expression from the mimeograph to social media. The fifth examines medicine and environmental crisis, the domains where technology most directly confronts death and the limits of the material world. The cardiac catheter. The mRNA vaccine. The ozone layer. The climate. The places where the machine genuinely saves and the places where saving the body does not answer the question of what the body is for.

The Analytical Machinery

Every chapter applies what the book calls the Substitution Test. Three questions. What human good was this technology supposed to serve? What did it actually deliver instead? Who profited from the substitution? Those questions are not rhetorical. They have specific, documented answers in every case, and the answers follow a pattern that is the book’s central argument.

A technology arrives with a promise. It achieves dominance. During that dominance, it substitutes a lesser good for a greater one: efficiency for understanding, connectivity for communion, information for wisdom, engagement metrics for attention, fluency for thought. The substitution is profitable for someone, usually the platform or the manufacturer, and the profit motive ensures that the substitution is never publicly identified as a substitution. It is marketed as progress.

This is what I call the Arrival-Dominance-Disappearance triad, and it governs the structure of every chapter. The technology arrives. The technology dominates. The technology disappears or transforms, and the meaning it was supposedly carrying disappears with it, because the meaning was never in the machine. It was in us.

What This Book Is Not

The God in the Wire is not a Luddite tract. I use technology constantly. I am typing these words on a computer. The book was typeset in LaTeX, built as an ePub, and formatted for print-on-demand. I am not arguing against technology. I am arguing against the worship of technology, and there is a difference so fundamental that collapsing it is itself a species of the category error the book diagnoses.

There is a chapter called “Moments of Grace” that identifies the times technology got it right. The TTY is one. The early internet, before the advertising model consumed it, is another. The mRNA vaccine, developed in under a year against a novel pathogen, is a third. In each case, the technology remained instrumental, it preserved the human grammar of the act it mediated, and it did not demand worship. The moments of grace are real. The problem is that they are moments, not the default condition, and the structural incentives of the technology industry push relentlessly against their repetition.

The Company It Keeps

This book enters a conversation with predecessors I admire and from whom I have learned enormously. Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows. Sven Birkerts’s The Gutenberg Elegies. Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing. These are important books about technology and human meaning. What none of them does, and what The God in the Wire does, is place Deaf experience at the center of the argument. That is not a criticism of their work. It is a description of a gap this book attempts to fill, because the gap matters, and the perspective it opens changes the argument in ways I did not anticipate when I began writing.

The book also draws heavily on Henry Adams’s The Education of Henry Adams, particularly the “Dynamo and the Virgin” chapter that recounts Adams’s confrontation with the dynamo at the 1900 Paris Exposition. Adams felt a moral force radiating from the machine, the modern equivalent of the force that had built Chartres. He was right about the power. He was wrong about the meaning. That gap, between power and meaning, is the empty shrine.

The Scholarly Apparatus

I built the back matter to be genuinely useful, not decorative. The endnotes provide full citations to the clinical, historical, and sociological literature: the Surgeon General’s advisory on loneliness, the Case and Deaton research on deaths of despair, the Twenge data on adolescent mental health, the Molina and Rowland ozone research, the IPCC assessments, the Gruentzig cardiac catheterization, the Palella antiretroviral data. Every empirical claim in the book is sourced. Every statistic is documented.

The glossary defines the analytical terms the book develops: the Arrival-Dominance-Disappearance Triad, the Category Error, the Substitution Test, the Moments of Grace. These are the book’s constructions, and I wanted readers to have a reference that collects them in one place.

The reader’s guide to the O’Neill plays walks through every work referenced in the text, from Beyond the Horizon through Long Day’s Journey into Night, because I am asking readers to engage with a playwright many of them may not have read since college, and I owe them the context to make that engagement meaningful.

The Sign Above the Shelf

I went back to LaGuardia. The sign was still there. The shelf was still empty. And standing in that corridor for the second time, I understood something I had not understood the first time: the sign was never pointing to the machine. The sign was pointing to the need. The need that existed before the TTY arrived and that persisted after the TTY was gone. The need to reach another human being across distance. The need that no technology has ever created and no technology has ever satisfied and no technology ever will, because the need is not technological. It is the most human thing about us, and the machines, for all their power, can only carry it. They cannot create it. They cannot sustain it. They cannot replace it.

That is the argument. That is the book.

The God in the Wire: The Book That Began with an Empty Shelf

I did not set out to write a book about technology. I set out to understand an empty shelf. The shelf is at LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City, Queens, mounted on a corridor wall beneath a sign bearing the universal symbol for Deaf access. The shelf once held a TTY, one of those text telephones that gave Deaf people their first access to instantaneous distance communication. The TTY is gone. The smartphone replaced it. The sign is still there, pointing to something that no longer exists. I saw it during a workshop break, in a hallway I had no reason to be in, and for the next several years I could not stop thinking about it.

The God in the Wire: Technology, Meaning, and the Empty Shrine is now available from David Boles Books as a Kindle ebook, a trade paperback, and a free PDF download. It is a work of cultural criticism, twelve chapters, an introduction, a coda, and a full scholarly apparatus including endnotes, a glossary of analytical terms, and a reader’s guide to the Eugene O’Neill plays that give the book its governing argument. It is the book I have been circling for a decade without knowing it, and it is the book I am proudest to have written.

The Question O’Neill Could Not Close

The book’s thesis comes from a playwright, not a technologist. In 1929, Eugene O’Neill described a trilogy of plays he intended to write about “the death of the old God and the failure of Science and Materialism to give any satisfying new one.” He wrote one of those plays, Dynamo, about a young man who loses his religious faith and transfers his worship to a hydroelectric generator. The play failed. The trilogy was never completed. But the question O’Neill was asking turned out to be the defining question of the century that followed: what happens when a civilization replaces its gods with its machines, and the machines turn out to be structurally incapable of doing what the gods once did?

That question drove Dynamo in 1929. It drives every chapter of The God in the Wire in 2026. The difference is that we now have a century of evidence to examine. O’Neill was diagnosing a crisis in its earliest stages. We are living inside the crisis at full maturity, surrounded by machines of extraordinary power that deliver everything except the one thing we keep asking them to provide: meaning.

The Five Threads

The book weaves five threads through its twelve chapters.

The first is the Deaf experience of communication technology. My wife is Deaf. Her fifty-year relationship with the tools of distance communication, from the TTY through the pager, the video phone, the smartphone, and the video relay service, runs through the book as testimony. Her words appear as direct quotation. Her perspective is not a case study or a sidebar. It is the book’s emotional center, because when you examine the history of communication technology through the experience of someone who was excluded from its founding medium, the telephone, you see things that hearing people cannot see. You see what the technology actually did, stripped of the mythology that the hearing world built around it.

The second thread is my own fifty-year relationship with the tools of composition: the manual typewriter, the electric Selectric, the Kaypro word processor, the networked computer, and the large language model. Every writer who has lived through this transition has a version of this story, but I wanted to tell it with the specificity it deserves, because the details matter. The resistance of the manual typewriter key is not the same as the frictionless completion of the language model, and the difference is not nostalgia. It is a structural change in the relationship between the writer’s body and the act of thinking on the page.

The third thread traces the transformation of American teaching from chalkboard to cloud. The fourth follows the democratization and fragmentation of public expression from the mimeograph to social media. The fifth examines medicine and environmental crisis, the domains where technology most directly confronts death and the limits of the material world. The cardiac catheter. The mRNA vaccine. The ozone layer. The climate. The places where the machine genuinely saves and the places where saving the body does not answer the question of what the body is for.

The Analytical Machinery

Every chapter applies what the book calls the Substitution Test. Three questions. What human good was this technology supposed to serve? What did it actually deliver instead? Who profited from the substitution? Those questions are not rhetorical. They have specific, documented answers in every case, and the answers follow a pattern that is the book’s central argument.

A technology arrives with a promise. It achieves dominance. During that dominance, it substitutes a lesser good for a greater one: efficiency for understanding, connectivity for communion, information for wisdom, engagement metrics for attention, fluency for thought. The substitution is profitable for someone, usually the platform or the manufacturer, and the profit motive ensures that the substitution is never publicly identified as a substitution. It is marketed as progress.

This is what I call the Arrival-Dominance-Disappearance triad, and it governs the structure of every chapter. The technology arrives. The technology dominates. The technology disappears or transforms, and the meaning it was supposedly carrying disappears with it, because the meaning was never in the machine. It was in us.

What This Book Is Not

The God in the Wire is not a Luddite tract. I use technology constantly. I am typing these words on a computer. The book was typeset in LaTeX, built as an ePub, and formatted for print-on-demand. I am not arguing against technology. I am arguing against the worship of technology, and there is a difference so fundamental that collapsing it is itself a species of the category error the book diagnoses.

There is a chapter called “Moments of Grace” that identifies the times technology got it right. The TTY is one. The early internet, before the advertising model consumed it, is another. The mRNA vaccine, developed in under a year against a novel pathogen, is a third. In each case, the technology remained instrumental, it preserved the human grammar of the act it mediated, and it did not demand worship. The moments of grace are real. The problem is that they are moments, not the default condition, and the structural incentives of the technology industry push relentlessly against their repetition.

The Company It Keeps

This book enters a conversation with predecessors I admire and from whom I have learned enormously. Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows. Sven Birkerts’s The Gutenberg Elegies. Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing. These are important books about technology and human meaning. What none of them does, and what The God in the Wire does, is place Deaf experience at the center of the argument. That is not a criticism of their work. It is a description of a gap this book attempts to fill, because the gap matters, and the perspective it opens changes the argument in ways I did not anticipate when I began writing.

The book also draws heavily on Henry Adams’s The Education of Henry Adams, particularly the “Dynamo and the Virgin” chapter that recounts Adams’s confrontation with the dynamo at the 1900 Paris Exposition. Adams felt a moral force radiating from the machine, the modern equivalent of the force that had built Chartres. He was right about the power. He was wrong about the meaning. That gap, between power and meaning, is the empty shrine.

The Scholarly Apparatus

I built the back matter to be genuinely useful, not decorative. The endnotes provide full citations to the clinical, historical, and sociological literature: the Surgeon General’s advisory on loneliness, the Case and Deaton research on deaths of despair, the Twenge data on adolescent mental health, the Molina and Rowland ozone research, the IPCC assessments, the Gruentzig cardiac catheterization, the Palella antiretroviral data. Every empirical claim in the book is sourced. Every statistic is documented.

The glossary defines the analytical terms the book develops: the Arrival-Dominance-Disappearance Triad, the Category Error, the Substitution Test, the Moments of Grace. These are the book’s constructions, and I wanted readers to have a reference that collects them in one place.

The reader’s guide to the O’Neill plays walks through every work referenced in the text, from Beyond the Horizon through Long Day’s Journey into Night, because I am asking readers to engage with a playwright many of them may not have read since college, and I owe them the context to make that engagement meaningful.

The Sign Above the Shelf

I went back to LaGuardia. The sign was still there. The shelf was still empty. And standing in that corridor for the second time, I understood something I had not understood the first time: the sign was never pointing to the machine. The sign was pointing to the need. The need that existed before the TTY arrived and that persisted after the TTY was gone. The need to reach another human being across distance. The need that no technology has ever created and no technology has ever satisfied and no technology ever will, because the need is not technological. It is the most human thing about us, and the machines, for all their power, can only carry it. They cannot create it. They cannot sustain it. They cannot replace it.

That is the argument. That is the book.

Cat Heads in Space: The Novel That Grew a Body

Some books begin as sentences. Others begin as outlines or fragments scrawled on napkins at two in the morning. This one began as a sound. Specifically, it began as the sound of my own voice reading a line about a cat head floating through space in a Life Helmet, arguing with another cat head about whether their ship had a name, and realizing that the argument was funnier and sadder and more philosophically loaded than anything I had planned for it to be. That was twenty-eight episodes ago. The episodes lived on the Human Meme podcast as a serialized audio drama called Cat Heads in Space, and for years, that was where the story existed: in the air, in the performance, in the space between my microphone and the listener’s ear. Today, the story has a body. Cat Heads in Space: The Body Problem is now available from David Boles Books as a novel.

I need to explain how and why this happened, because the how and the why are part of the argument the book is making, and because the decision to write a novel rather than adapt existing scripts is the kind of creative choice that carries consequences for every page that follows it.

Twenty-Eight Episodes and a Series Bible

The Cat Heads in Space episodes ran on Human Meme beginning in 2024, occupying the same podcast feed that has carried philosophical explorations of consciousness, language, memory, and embodiment since 2016. The premise is disarmingly simple: four cat heads, separated from their bodies by a procedure they cannot remember, float through the universe in Life Helmets that provide oxygen and treats while they search for the bodies they have lost. Captain Whiskerfluff is gray-furred and philosophically overwound. Lieutenant Mittens is ginger and tells jokes the way other creatures metabolize oxygen. Cookie Kitty is calico and has opinions about soup that she expresses at volumes capable of restructuring molecular bonds. And Skeedootle is not a cat at all but a puppy, floppy-eared and enormous-eyed, adopted into the crew because no one could justify leaving a creature alone in the dark.

Over twenty-eight episodes, I built a world. I built it the way a dramatist builds a world, which is to say I built a series bible: the rules of the Life Helmets, the mechanics of the treat dispensers, the morale algorithm that reads emotional states and adjusts flavor accordingly, the Treat Ration Protocol that eventually replaces the algorithm with total neutrality. I built the ship, which has no name because the crew argued about it so long that the argument became the identity. I built the quest, which is for bodies, and which carries a philosophical weight that I did not initially intend and could not subsequently avoid, because a story about creatures searching for the physical means of contact with the world is inevitably a story about what it means to be alive in a body, and what it costs to lose one, and whether the losing can ever be undone.

The episodes were performed. They were voiced. They were sound, and sound has qualities that text does not: timing, inflection, volume, the pause before a punchline that makes the punchline land. Sound also has limitations that text does not. You cannot get inside a character’s head in an audio drama the way you can on the page. You cannot describe the specific quality of silence aboard a ship drifting between stars. You cannot build a narrator who watches these creatures with equal measures of tenderness and precision, who loves them enough to tell the truth about them, which is that they are broken, and brave, and exactly as confused as the rest of us.

The Decision to Start From Cat Scratch

When I decided to write the novel, the first question was obvious: do I adapt the existing twenty-eight episodes, or do I start fresh?

I have spent decades at Columbia and NYU and Rutgers teaching dramatic literature and the mechanics of adaptation. I have watched what happens when a script becomes a film, when a novel becomes a play, when a stage production becomes a screenplay. The ones that work are the ones that recognize the new medium as a new instrument and play it accordingly. The ones that fail are the ones that try to reproduce the experience of the original in a format that was not designed to deliver it. Audio drama is not prose fiction wearing a microphone. They are different technologies for different purposes, and the honest thing to do was to respect both by letting each exist on its own terms.

So I started from scratch. I kept the characters, the world, the tone, the fundamental question, and the series bible. I discarded every episode script. The novel was written for the page, sentence by sentence, with the full knowledge that the people who had listened to all twenty-eight episodes would arrive at this book expecting something they recognized but had not heard before. The podcast listeners earned new material. New readers earned a complete, self-contained experience. Nobody earned a transcription.

What the Page Could Do

Prose gave me interiority. It gave me the ability to describe what it feels like, from the inside, to remember warmth when you have no skin to feel it. It gave me Merleau-Ponty as an epigraph: “The body is our general medium for having a world.” It gave me the Narrator, a presence who does not exist in the podcast episodes, who watches these creatures with the specific attention of someone who understands that comedy and tragedy are the same story told at different speeds.

Prose gave me three Movements. The Drift, in which the crew loses everything except each other. The Signal, in which the universe offers substitutes for what they have lost, and every substitute is a different kind of trap. The Threshold, in which the bodies arrive from the other direction, having crossed the dark independently, having refused to wait.

Prose gave me eighteen chapters. A Warmth Fog that nearly stops the quest. A sentient moon made of compacted cat hair that collects stories and rejects the hollow ones. A bureaucratic asteroid that requires forms requiring bodies to complete. An alien who considers doors philosophically restrictive. A colony of disembodied ears that takes Skeedootle’s bark and keeps it, leaving the puppy to cross most of the novel in silence, so that the first bark from a whole body in the final chapter arrives with a weight the reader has been carrying for three hundred pages.

And prose gave me Chapter 16: “The Separation Record.” I will not reveal what happens in this chapter. I will tell you that the word “quest” means something different after you read it, and that the word “voluntary” becomes the heaviest word in the book, and that the implications restructure every chapter that preceded it. I wrote this chapter knowing it would change the entire novel retroactively. It did. It was supposed to.

A Comedy About the Hardest Question

The Body Problem is a comedy. I want that stated plainly because the novel’s philosophical architecture might suggest otherwise, and because the comedy is not incidental decoration applied to a serious inquiry. The comedy is the inquiry. Cookie Kitty’s volume is how she survives. Mittens’ jokes are how he breathes. Whiskerfluff’s monologues are how he processes the unbearable. Skeedootle’s earnestness is how she holds the crew together when the holding together seems impossible. These are not characters who happen to be funny. These are characters whose humor is a survival mechanism so deeply integrated into their identities that removing it would kill them faster than removing their bodies did.

The question the book asks is whether having a body is worth the cost of having a body. The cost is vulnerability. The cost is sensation, which means pleasure and pain simultaneously, which means the sunbeam on the floor and the sharp thing you step on, which means the warm hold and the cold absence of the warm hold. The Cat Heads say yes. They say yes loudly, with a great deal of soup involved, and with the understanding that what they are becoming when they find their bodies is not what they were before they lost them. The novel calls this the Doctrine of Irrevocable Change: no action can be undone, no loss restored, and the creatures who emerge from reunion are not the creatures who entered separation but something new, something none of them have met yet.

That felt true to me. It felt true in the way that the Fractional Fiction series feels true when a public domain text collides with contemporary research and produces a story that belongs to neither tradition but could not exist without both. Cat Heads in Space is not Fractional Fiction. It is not an adaptation of a classic text. It is an original novel that grew from an original podcast that grew from a question I could not stop asking: what remains of you when the thing you thought defined you is removed?

The question applies to more than cat heads in helmets. It applies to anyone who has lost a capability, a role, an identity, a physical function they had taken for granted. It applies to communities that retain their names and their memories but have lost the economic and institutional body that once allowed them to act in the world. It applies, and I say this with the full absurdity of saying it about a book involving cat heads and soup, to the human condition, which is the condition of being located in a body you did not choose, in a world that can reach you because you have skin, and which you would not trade for anything because the alternative is a helmet and a treat and the sound of your own thinking and nothing else.

The Catalog Grows

Cat Heads in Space: The Body Problem joins a David Boles Books catalog that now includes the Fractional Fiction series (The Dying Grove, The Inheritance, The Kinship of Strangers, The Wound Remains Faithful, The Corollary, Civility Certified), the EleMenTs series (Tin, Aluminium), the ASL education library with Janna Sweenie, and recent novels including The Last Living American White Male and Beautiful Numbness. Each book asks a different question. This one asks whether wholeness is worth the cost of being whole.

The twenty-eight original podcast episodes remain archived at HumanMeme.com for anyone who wants to hear the voices before reading the prose. I recommend both, in either order. They are two doors into the same universe, not two versions of the same hallway.

Percy and Lotty, who are British Shorthairs and who are whole, watched me write this book from the other side of my desk with the expression they reserve for activities they find mildly interesting and fundamentally unnecessary. They have never been separated from their bodies. They have never searched for anything except the treat bag, which they find every time, because their noses work, because their noses are attached to their faces, because their faces are attached to their bodies, because they are whole and have always been whole and have no idea how lucky that makes them.

The soup, as of the final chapter, goes clockwise.

Available Now

Cat Heads in Space: The Body Problem by David Boles. Published by David Boles Books Writing & Publishing, New York City. 2026.

Kindle ebook: Amazon Paperback: Amazon Book Page: BolesBooks.com Original Podcast Episodes: HumanMeme.com Prairie Voice Article: The Disembodied Town

Collecting the Shards

Over the past few weeks, I have published several new books. From the outside, that can look like some kind of creative superpower. Like I locked myself in a room, drank a heroic amount of coffee, and sprinted through a stack of fresh manuscripts until the world blurred and the covers appeared. That is not what happened.

What happened is quieter, slower, and a lot more like cleaning out an attic with a flashlight in your mouth.

The truth is I did not “suddenly become prolific.” I have always been prolific! It’s just that now I became willing to collect what I had already made; to re-examine what once was.

For years, my writing has lived in pieces. Some of it was unpublished, sitting in folders with names like “Draft,” “Later,” and “Fix This Someday.” Some of it was partly published, a chapter here, an essay there, a blog post that carried a whole book inside it but never got the chance to become one. Some of it was wholly, but incompletely published, meaning the words were technically out in the world, but they were not standing on their own. They were missing the surrounding structure that makes a piece feel finished, coherent, and alive.

They were shards. Living proof of the personal condemnation. “Not now, but soon.”

A shard is a funny thing. It is proof something existed, and proof something broke. It can be beautiful, but it is sharp. It does not always make sense in your hand. On its own, it is easy to dismiss. A fragment. A failed start. A leftover.

But collect enough shards and you stop holding broken glass. You start holding raw material. You start seeing a mosaic.

The container mattered

The real catalyst for this run of publishing was the new design of BolesBooks.com.

I have learned something about my own work over time. I do not just need ideas. I need a place for those ideas to live. A structure that can hold them without crushing them. A home that makes the work feel like it belongs to a larger body, not a loose pile of pages.

The new architecture of BolesBooks.com gave me that. It gave me the gravity I was missing. Suddenly, all those scattered fragments had somewhere to go. Not as orphans, not as “someday,” not as half-finished gestures, but as complete literary works that could stand on their own.

Once that clicked, the project stopped being abstract. It became practical.

Find the pieces.
Gather them.
Read them honestly.
Decide what they are.
Then do the real work.

Excavation, not invention

The last few weeks have been an excavation. I have been digging through decades of writing, not with nostalgia, but with a kind of stubborn care.

It starts with scavenging. Old files. Old backups. Half-abandoned series. Notes that only made sense to the version of me who wrote them. Drafts that I avoided for years because I remembered how unfinished they felt.

Then comes sorting, which sounds simple until you try it. You discover that a “random blog post” is actually the missing middle of an argument you never completed. You find three separate essays written ten years apart that are clearly talking about the same thing, just in different moods. You find an idea that was ahead of its time for you, and another that was a dead end you kept trying to resurrect out of sheer loyalty.

This is where the illusion breaks. Publishing a lot of books quickly does not always mean you produced a lot quickly. Sometimes it means you finally stopped leaving your work scattered.

The hardest part is meeting your past self

Revisiting writing from ten or twenty years ago requires a specific kind of nerve.

You have to sit across the table from the person you used to be. Not the romantic version, the fearless younger artist, but the real one. The one with blind spots. The one who tried too hard. The one who hedged and apologized. The one who sometimes confused intensity with insight. The one who occasionally hit the nail dead-on and did not even realize it.

I found drafts where the central idea was strong, but the execution was clumsy. I found pieces where the prose had energy, but the argument underneath it was thin. I found “misplaced intentions,” moments where I was reaching for the right truth but grabbing it by the wrong handle.

That is not fun to admit. It is also unbelievably useful.

Because once you can see what is wrong, you can save what is right.

Salvage, redaction, adaptation

This is not copy and paste. It is not dumping old work into new covers.

It is salvage.

Sometimes the salvage looks like redaction. Cutting the parts that were only there to sound smart. Removing references that dated the work without adding anything. Trimming the throat-clearing and the wandering preamble. Sanding down the rough edges of insecurity and arrogance, both of which age badly.

Sometimes it looks like adaptation. A blog post becomes a chapter once it has neighbors. A short essay becomes the spine of a larger piece once it has room to breathe. A half-finished series finally gets an ending, not because the ending suddenly appears, but because I am older now and I can see what the ending was always asking for.

And sometimes it looks like rewriting from the ground up while keeping the original spark. That is the part people do not see. A “new book” can contain old bones, but the muscle is built now. The connective tissue is built now. The voice is steadier now.

This is the work of bringing shards into relationship with each other until they stop being fragments and start becoming structure.

Time is passing. Publication is now.

For a long time, I treated publication like a finish line you cross only when everything is perfect.

But perfection is a mirage that gets more expensive every year. Files decay. Links break. Formats change. Memory gets slippery. The context you were writing inside of fades. The work does not sit still while you wait. It quietly disappears.

So I have shifted my thinking.

Publication is not a victory lap. It is preservation. It is how you stop the slow rot. It is how you give your work the chance to outlive your hesitation.

With BolesBooks.com rebuilt, I finally have a place where these ideas and passions can be gathered under one umbrella and released as books that do not need apologies or footnotes to explain why they exist. They can stand on their own now. Not as pieces of something that might have been, but as a new whole thing that actually is.

What looks sudden is usually a long return

If it seems like I published a lot in a short time, that is because I did.

But the real timeline stretches back decades.

This is what it looks like when you stop abandoning your own work. When you stop leaving your best ideas trapped in bad drafts. When you take the fragments seriously enough to assemble them into something that holds.

There will be more books to come. The excavation is not finished. There are still shards out there, waiting in old folders and forgotten posts and half-written arguments that deserve to be completed.

And now, finally, they have somewhere to go.

Collecting the Shards

Over the past few weeks, I have published several new books. From the outside, that can look like some kind of creative superpower. Like I locked myself in a room, drank a heroic amount of coffee, and sprinted through a stack of fresh manuscripts until the world blurred and the covers appeared. That is not what happened.

What happened is quieter, slower, and a lot more like cleaning out an attic with a flashlight in your mouth.

The truth is I did not “suddenly become prolific.” I have always been prolific! It’s just that now I became willing to collect what I had already made; to re-examine what once was.

For years, my writing has lived in pieces. Some of it was unpublished, sitting in folders with names like “Draft,” “Later,” and “Fix This Someday.” Some of it was partly published, a chapter here, an essay there, a blog post that carried a whole book inside it but never got the chance to become one. Some of it was wholly, but incompletely published, meaning the words were technically out in the world, but they were not standing on their own. They were missing the surrounding structure that makes a piece feel finished, coherent, and alive.

They were shards. Living proof of the personal condemnation. “Not now, but soon.”

A shard is a funny thing. It is proof something existed, and proof something broke. It can be beautiful, but it is sharp. It does not always make sense in your hand. On its own, it is easy to dismiss. A fragment. A failed start. A leftover.

But collect enough shards and you stop holding broken glass. You start holding raw material. You start seeing a mosaic.

The container mattered

The real catalyst for this run of publishing was the new design of BolesBooks.com.

I have learned something about my own work over time. I do not just need ideas. I need a place for those ideas to live. A structure that can hold them without crushing them. A home that makes the work feel like it belongs to a larger body, not a loose pile of pages.

The new architecture of BolesBooks.com gave me that. It gave me the gravity I was missing. Suddenly, all those scattered fragments had somewhere to go. Not as orphans, not as “someday,” not as half-finished gestures, but as complete literary works that could stand on their own.

Once that clicked, the project stopped being abstract. It became practical.

Find the pieces.
Gather them.
Read them honestly.
Decide what they are.
Then do the real work.

Excavation, not invention

The last few weeks have been an excavation. I have been digging through decades of writing, not with nostalgia, but with a kind of stubborn care.

It starts with scavenging. Old files. Old backups. Half-abandoned series. Notes that only made sense to the version of me who wrote them. Drafts that I avoided for years because I remembered how unfinished they felt.

Then comes sorting, which sounds simple until you try it. You discover that a “random blog post” is actually the missing middle of an argument you never completed. You find three separate essays written ten years apart that are clearly talking about the same thing, just in different moods. You find an idea that was ahead of its time for you, and another that was a dead end you kept trying to resurrect out of sheer loyalty.

This is where the illusion breaks. Publishing a lot of books quickly does not always mean you produced a lot quickly. Sometimes it means you finally stopped leaving your work scattered.

The hardest part is meeting your past self

Revisiting writing from ten or twenty years ago requires a specific kind of nerve.

You have to sit across the table from the person you used to be. Not the romantic version, the fearless younger artist, but the real one. The one with blind spots. The one who tried too hard. The one who hedged and apologized. The one who sometimes confused intensity with insight. The one who occasionally hit the nail dead-on and did not even realize it.

I found drafts where the central idea was strong, but the execution was clumsy. I found pieces where the prose had energy, but the argument underneath it was thin. I found “misplaced intentions,” moments where I was reaching for the right truth but grabbing it by the wrong handle.

That is not fun to admit. It is also unbelievably useful.

Because once you can see what is wrong, you can save what is right.

Salvage, redaction, adaptation

This is not copy and paste. It is not dumping old work into new covers.

It is salvage.

Sometimes the salvage looks like redaction. Cutting the parts that were only there to sound smart. Removing references that dated the work without adding anything. Trimming the throat-clearing and the wandering preamble. Sanding down the rough edges of insecurity and arrogance, both of which age badly.

Sometimes it looks like adaptation. A blog post becomes a chapter once it has neighbors. A short essay becomes the spine of a larger piece once it has room to breathe. A half-finished series finally gets an ending, not because the ending suddenly appears, but because I am older now and I can see what the ending was always asking for.

And sometimes it looks like rewriting from the ground up while keeping the original spark. That is the part people do not see. A “new book” can contain old bones, but the muscle is built now. The connective tissue is built now. The voice is steadier now.

This is the work of bringing shards into relationship with each other until they stop being fragments and start becoming structure.

Time is passing. Publication is now.

For a long time, I treated publication like a finish line you cross only when everything is perfect.

But perfection is a mirage that gets more expensive every year. Files decay. Links break. Formats change. Memory gets slippery. The context you were writing inside of fades. The work does not sit still while you wait. It quietly disappears.

So I have shifted my thinking.

Publication is not a victory lap. It is preservation. It is how you stop the slow rot. It is how you give your work the chance to outlive your hesitation.

With BolesBooks.com rebuilt, I finally have a place where these ideas and passions can be gathered under one umbrella and released as books that do not need apologies or footnotes to explain why they exist. They can stand on their own now. Not as pieces of something that might have been, but as a new whole thing that actually is.

What looks sudden is usually a long return

If it seems like I published a lot in a short time, that is because I did.

But the real timeline stretches back decades.

This is what it looks like when you stop abandoning your own work. When you stop leaving your best ideas trapped in bad drafts. When you take the fragments seriously enough to assemble them into something that holds.

There will be more books to come. The excavation is not finished. There are still shards out there, waiting in old folders and forgotten posts and half-written arguments that deserve to be completed.

And now, finally, they have somewhere to go.

Collecting the Shards

Over the past few weeks, I have published several new books. From the outside, that can look like some kind of creative superpower. Like I locked myself in a room, drank a heroic amount of coffee, and sprinted through a stack of fresh manuscripts until the world blurred and the covers appeared. That is not what happened.

What happened is quieter, slower, and a lot more like cleaning out an attic with a flashlight in your mouth.

The truth is I did not “suddenly become prolific.” I have always been prolific! It’s just that now I became willing to collect what I had already made; to re-examine what once was.

For years, my writing has lived in pieces. Some of it was unpublished, sitting in folders with names like “Draft,” “Later,” and “Fix This Someday.” Some of it was partly published, a chapter here, an essay there, a blog post that carried a whole book inside it but never got the chance to become one. Some of it was wholly, but incompletely published, meaning the words were technically out in the world, but they were not standing on their own. They were missing the surrounding structure that makes a piece feel finished, coherent, and alive.

They were shards. Living proof of the personal condemnation. “Not now, but soon.”

A shard is a funny thing. It is proof something existed, and proof something broke. It can be beautiful, but it is sharp. It does not always make sense in your hand. On its own, it is easy to dismiss. A fragment. A failed start. A leftover.

But collect enough shards and you stop holding broken glass. You start holding raw material. You start seeing a mosaic.

The container mattered

The real catalyst for this run of publishing was the new design of BolesBooks.com.

I have learned something about my own work over time. I do not just need ideas. I need a place for those ideas to live. A structure that can hold them without crushing them. A home that makes the work feel like it belongs to a larger body, not a loose pile of pages.

The new architecture of BolesBooks.com gave me that. It gave me the gravity I was missing. Suddenly, all those scattered fragments had somewhere to go. Not as orphans, not as “someday,” not as half-finished gestures, but as complete literary works that could stand on their own.

Once that clicked, the project stopped being abstract. It became practical.

Find the pieces.
Gather them.
Read them honestly.
Decide what they are.
Then do the real work.

Excavation, not invention

The last few weeks have been an excavation. I have been digging through decades of writing, not with nostalgia, but with a kind of stubborn care.

It starts with scavenging. Old files. Old backups. Half-abandoned series. Notes that only made sense to the version of me who wrote them. Drafts that I avoided for years because I remembered how unfinished they felt.

Then comes sorting, which sounds simple until you try it. You discover that a “random blog post” is actually the missing middle of an argument you never completed. You find three separate essays written ten years apart that are clearly talking about the same thing, just in different moods. You find an idea that was ahead of its time for you, and another that was a dead end you kept trying to resurrect out of sheer loyalty.

This is where the illusion breaks. Publishing a lot of books quickly does not always mean you produced a lot quickly. Sometimes it means you finally stopped leaving your work scattered.

The hardest part is meeting your past self

Revisiting writing from ten or twenty years ago requires a specific kind of nerve.

You have to sit across the table from the person you used to be. Not the romantic version, the fearless younger artist, but the real one. The one with blind spots. The one who tried too hard. The one who hedged and apologized. The one who sometimes confused intensity with insight. The one who occasionally hit the nail dead-on and did not even realize it.

I found drafts where the central idea was strong, but the execution was clumsy. I found pieces where the prose had energy, but the argument underneath it was thin. I found “misplaced intentions,” moments where I was reaching for the right truth but grabbing it by the wrong handle.

That is not fun to admit. It is also unbelievably useful.

Because once you can see what is wrong, you can save what is right.

Salvage, redaction, adaptation

This is not copy and paste. It is not dumping old work into new covers.

It is salvage.

Sometimes the salvage looks like redaction. Cutting the parts that were only there to sound smart. Removing references that dated the work without adding anything. Trimming the throat-clearing and the wandering preamble. Sanding down the rough edges of insecurity and arrogance, both of which age badly.

Sometimes it looks like adaptation. A blog post becomes a chapter once it has neighbors. A short essay becomes the spine of a larger piece once it has room to breathe. A half-finished series finally gets an ending, not because the ending suddenly appears, but because I am older now and I can see what the ending was always asking for.

And sometimes it looks like rewriting from the ground up while keeping the original spark. That is the part people do not see. A “new book” can contain old bones, but the muscle is built now. The connective tissue is built now. The voice is steadier now.

This is the work of bringing shards into relationship with each other until they stop being fragments and start becoming structure.

Time is passing. Publication is now.

For a long time, I treated publication like a finish line you cross only when everything is perfect.

But perfection is a mirage that gets more expensive every year. Files decay. Links break. Formats change. Memory gets slippery. The context you were writing inside of fades. The work does not sit still while you wait. It quietly disappears.

So I have shifted my thinking.

Publication is not a victory lap. It is preservation. It is how you stop the slow rot. It is how you give your work the chance to outlive your hesitation.

With BolesBooks.com rebuilt, I finally have a place where these ideas and passions can be gathered under one umbrella and released as books that do not need apologies or footnotes to explain why they exist. They can stand on their own now. Not as pieces of something that might have been, but as a new whole thing that actually is.

What looks sudden is usually a long return

If it seems like I published a lot in a short time, that is because I did.

But the real timeline stretches back decades.

This is what it looks like when you stop abandoning your own work. When you stop leaving your best ideas trapped in bad drafts. When you take the fragments seriously enough to assemble them into something that holds.

There will be more books to come. The excavation is not finished. There are still shards out there, waiting in old folders and forgotten posts and half-written arguments that deserve to be completed.

And now, finally, they have somewhere to go.

Collecting the Shards

Over the past few weeks, I have published several new books. From the outside, that can look like some kind of creative superpower. Like I locked myself in a room, drank a heroic amount of coffee, and sprinted through a stack of fresh manuscripts until the world blurred and the covers appeared. That is not what happened.

What happened is quieter, slower, and a lot more like cleaning out an attic with a flashlight in your mouth.

The truth is I did not “suddenly become prolific.” I have always been prolific! It’s just that now I became willing to collect what I had already made; to re-examine what once was.

For years, my writing has lived in pieces. Some of it was unpublished, sitting in folders with names like “Draft,” “Later,” and “Fix This Someday.” Some of it was partly published, a chapter here, an essay there, a blog post that carried a whole book inside it but never got the chance to become one. Some of it was wholly, but incompletely published, meaning the words were technically out in the world, but they were not standing on their own. They were missing the surrounding structure that makes a piece feel finished, coherent, and alive.

They were shards. Living proof of the personal condemnation. “Not now, but soon.”

A shard is a funny thing. It is proof something existed, and proof something broke. It can be beautiful, but it is sharp. It does not always make sense in your hand. On its own, it is easy to dismiss. A fragment. A failed start. A leftover.

But collect enough shards and you stop holding broken glass. You start holding raw material. You start seeing a mosaic.

The container mattered

The real catalyst for this run of publishing was the new design of BolesBooks.com.

I have learned something about my own work over time. I do not just need ideas. I need a place for those ideas to live. A structure that can hold them without crushing them. A home that makes the work feel like it belongs to a larger body, not a loose pile of pages.

The new architecture of BolesBooks.com gave me that. It gave me the gravity I was missing. Suddenly, all those scattered fragments had somewhere to go. Not as orphans, not as “someday,” not as half-finished gestures, but as complete literary works that could stand on their own.

Once that clicked, the project stopped being abstract. It became practical.

Find the pieces.
Gather them.
Read them honestly.
Decide what they are.
Then do the real work.

Excavation, not invention

The last few weeks have been an excavation. I have been digging through decades of writing, not with nostalgia, but with a kind of stubborn care.

It starts with scavenging. Old files. Old backups. Half-abandoned series. Notes that only made sense to the version of me who wrote them. Drafts that I avoided for years because I remembered how unfinished they felt.

Then comes sorting, which sounds simple until you try it. You discover that a “random blog post” is actually the missing middle of an argument you never completed. You find three separate essays written ten years apart that are clearly talking about the same thing, just in different moods. You find an idea that was ahead of its time for you, and another that was a dead end you kept trying to resurrect out of sheer loyalty.

This is where the illusion breaks. Publishing a lot of books quickly does not always mean you produced a lot quickly. Sometimes it means you finally stopped leaving your work scattered.

The hardest part is meeting your past self

Revisiting writing from ten or twenty years ago requires a specific kind of nerve.

You have to sit across the table from the person you used to be. Not the romantic version, the fearless younger artist, but the real one. The one with blind spots. The one who tried too hard. The one who hedged and apologized. The one who sometimes confused intensity with insight. The one who occasionally hit the nail dead-on and did not even realize it.

I found drafts where the central idea was strong, but the execution was clumsy. I found pieces where the prose had energy, but the argument underneath it was thin. I found “misplaced intentions,” moments where I was reaching for the right truth but grabbing it by the wrong handle.

That is not fun to admit. It is also unbelievably useful.

Because once you can see what is wrong, you can save what is right.

Salvage, redaction, adaptation

This is not copy and paste. It is not dumping old work into new covers.

It is salvage.

Sometimes the salvage looks like redaction. Cutting the parts that were only there to sound smart. Removing references that dated the work without adding anything. Trimming the throat-clearing and the wandering preamble. Sanding down the rough edges of insecurity and arrogance, both of which age badly.

Sometimes it looks like adaptation. A blog post becomes a chapter once it has neighbors. A short essay becomes the spine of a larger piece once it has room to breathe. A half-finished series finally gets an ending, not because the ending suddenly appears, but because I am older now and I can see what the ending was always asking for.

And sometimes it looks like rewriting from the ground up while keeping the original spark. That is the part people do not see. A “new book” can contain old bones, but the muscle is built now. The connective tissue is built now. The voice is steadier now.

This is the work of bringing shards into relationship with each other until they stop being fragments and start becoming structure.

Time is passing. Publication is now.

For a long time, I treated publication like a finish line you cross only when everything is perfect.

But perfection is a mirage that gets more expensive every year. Files decay. Links break. Formats change. Memory gets slippery. The context you were writing inside of fades. The work does not sit still while you wait. It quietly disappears.

So I have shifted my thinking.

Publication is not a victory lap. It is preservation. It is how you stop the slow rot. It is how you give your work the chance to outlive your hesitation.

With BolesBooks.com rebuilt, I finally have a place where these ideas and passions can be gathered under one umbrella and released as books that do not need apologies or footnotes to explain why they exist. They can stand on their own now. Not as pieces of something that might have been, but as a new whole thing that actually is.

What looks sudden is usually a long return

If it seems like I published a lot in a short time, that is because I did.

But the real timeline stretches back decades.

This is what it looks like when you stop abandoning your own work. When you stop leaving your best ideas trapped in bad drafts. When you take the fragments seriously enough to assemble them into something that holds.

There will be more books to come. The excavation is not finished. There are still shards out there, waiting in old folders and forgotten posts and half-written arguments that deserve to be completed.

And now, finally, they have somewhere to go.

Collecting the Shards

Over the past few weeks, I have published several new books. From the outside, that can look like some kind of creative superpower. Like I locked myself in a room, drank a heroic amount of coffee, and sprinted through a stack of fresh manuscripts until the world blurred and the covers appeared. That is not what happened.

What happened is quieter, slower, and a lot more like cleaning out an attic with a flashlight in your mouth.

The truth is I did not “suddenly become prolific.” I have always been prolific! It’s just that now I became willing to collect what I had already made; to re-examine what once was.

For years, my writing has lived in pieces. Some of it was unpublished, sitting in folders with names like “Draft,” “Later,” and “Fix This Someday.” Some of it was partly published, a chapter here, an essay there, a blog post that carried a whole book inside it but never got the chance to become one. Some of it was wholly, but incompletely published, meaning the words were technically out in the world, but they were not standing on their own. They were missing the surrounding structure that makes a piece feel finished, coherent, and alive.

They were shards. Living proof of the personal condemnation. “Not now, but soon.”

A shard is a funny thing. It is proof something existed, and proof something broke. It can be beautiful, but it is sharp. It does not always make sense in your hand. On its own, it is easy to dismiss. A fragment. A failed start. A leftover.

But collect enough shards and you stop holding broken glass. You start holding raw material. You start seeing a mosaic.

The container mattered

The real catalyst for this run of publishing was the new design of BolesBooks.com.

I have learned something about my own work over time. I do not just need ideas. I need a place for those ideas to live. A structure that can hold them without crushing them. A home that makes the work feel like it belongs to a larger body, not a loose pile of pages.

The new architecture of BolesBooks.com gave me that. It gave me the gravity I was missing. Suddenly, all those scattered fragments had somewhere to go. Not as orphans, not as “someday,” not as half-finished gestures, but as complete literary works that could stand on their own.

Once that clicked, the project stopped being abstract. It became practical.

Find the pieces.
Gather them.
Read them honestly.
Decide what they are.
Then do the real work.

Excavation, not invention

The last few weeks have been an excavation. I have been digging through decades of writing, not with nostalgia, but with a kind of stubborn care.

It starts with scavenging. Old files. Old backups. Half-abandoned series. Notes that only made sense to the version of me who wrote them. Drafts that I avoided for years because I remembered how unfinished they felt.

Then comes sorting, which sounds simple until you try it. You discover that a “random blog post” is actually the missing middle of an argument you never completed. You find three separate essays written ten years apart that are clearly talking about the same thing, just in different moods. You find an idea that was ahead of its time for you, and another that was a dead end you kept trying to resurrect out of sheer loyalty.

This is where the illusion breaks. Publishing a lot of books quickly does not always mean you produced a lot quickly. Sometimes it means you finally stopped leaving your work scattered.

The hardest part is meeting your past self

Revisiting writing from ten or twenty years ago requires a specific kind of nerve.

You have to sit across the table from the person you used to be. Not the romantic version, the fearless younger artist, but the real one. The one with blind spots. The one who tried too hard. The one who hedged and apologized. The one who sometimes confused intensity with insight. The one who occasionally hit the nail dead-on and did not even realize it.

I found drafts where the central idea was strong, but the execution was clumsy. I found pieces where the prose had energy, but the argument underneath it was thin. I found “misplaced intentions,” moments where I was reaching for the right truth but grabbing it by the wrong handle.

That is not fun to admit. It is also unbelievably useful.

Because once you can see what is wrong, you can save what is right.

Salvage, redaction, adaptation

This is not copy and paste. It is not dumping old work into new covers.

It is salvage.

Sometimes the salvage looks like redaction. Cutting the parts that were only there to sound smart. Removing references that dated the work without adding anything. Trimming the throat-clearing and the wandering preamble. Sanding down the rough edges of insecurity and arrogance, both of which age badly.

Sometimes it looks like adaptation. A blog post becomes a chapter once it has neighbors. A short essay becomes the spine of a larger piece once it has room to breathe. A half-finished series finally gets an ending, not because the ending suddenly appears, but because I am older now and I can see what the ending was always asking for.

And sometimes it looks like rewriting from the ground up while keeping the original spark. That is the part people do not see. A “new book” can contain old bones, but the muscle is built now. The connective tissue is built now. The voice is steadier now.

This is the work of bringing shards into relationship with each other until they stop being fragments and start becoming structure.

Time is passing. Publication is now.

For a long time, I treated publication like a finish line you cross only when everything is perfect.

But perfection is a mirage that gets more expensive every year. Files decay. Links break. Formats change. Memory gets slippery. The context you were writing inside of fades. The work does not sit still while you wait. It quietly disappears.

So I have shifted my thinking.

Publication is not a victory lap. It is preservation. It is how you stop the slow rot. It is how you give your work the chance to outlive your hesitation.

With BolesBooks.com rebuilt, I finally have a place where these ideas and passions can be gathered under one umbrella and released as books that do not need apologies or footnotes to explain why they exist. They can stand on their own now. Not as pieces of something that might have been, but as a new whole thing that actually is.

What looks sudden is usually a long return

If it seems like I published a lot in a short time, that is because I did.

But the real timeline stretches back decades.

This is what it looks like when you stop abandoning your own work. When you stop leaving your best ideas trapped in bad drafts. When you take the fragments seriously enough to assemble them into something that holds.

There will be more books to come. The excavation is not finished. There are still shards out there, waiting in old folders and forgotten posts and half-written arguments that deserve to be completed.

And now, finally, they have somewhere to go.

The EleMenTs Series Is Complete: A Young Adult Fantasy Trilogy

Twenty years ago, I began imagining a story about three disabled teenage girls who discover they possess elemental powers. The idea stayed with me, growing and changing as I grew and changed, waiting for the right moment to be told. That moment has arrived. The EleMenTs Series is complete, and all three novels are now available.

Elle is Deaf. Meen is blind. Teena has cerebral palsy. Thrown together in a New York City group home as wards of the state, these three young women share something beyond their circumstances: the ability to command the elements themselves. Elle bends the wind through the same hands that shape American Sign Language. Meen controls fire and temperature, her blindness becoming a tactical advantage when she can feel heat signatures others cannot see. Teena moves the earth, feeling through stone and concrete the way she learned to feel every obstacle the world placed in her path.

Their names encode their identity. Take the right letters from Eleanor, Mingzhu, and Christina Sarah, and you spell EleMenTs. They are wind, fire, and earth. In the second book, Tal arrives to complete the quartet, a girl with autism who counts everything and trusts no one, until she discovers she can feel water the way the others feel their elements. Four girls. Four elements. And an organization called Prometheus Applied Sciences that will stop at nothing to acquire them.

Book One: Beneath the City

Beneath the City introduces the three protagonists as they meet in the group home and discover what they can do. In the tunnels beneath New York, they learn to trust each other and to understand that their disabilities were never weaknesses. The foster care system sees them as problems to be managed. Society sees their disabilities before their humanity. But something is watching them, and the tunnels hold secrets that will change everything.

Available now: Kindle Edition $3.99 | Paperback $14.99 | Free PDF

Book Two: The Invisible Hand

The Invisible Hand picks up three months after the tunnel. The girls have been practicing in secret, but they know they’re being watched. When a new volunteer named Sarah arrives at the group home asking too many questions, they realize Prometheus Applied Sciences has found them. Tal’s arrival changes the dynamics, completing the elemental set and forcing the girls to choose between hiding and fighting. When Prometheus springs its trap, staying hidden is no longer an option.

Available now: Kindle Edition $4.99 | Paperback $14.99 | Free PDF

Book Three: The Reckoning

The Reckoning takes the fight to Washington. One year later, the girls travel to the capital for a Senate hearing on a registration bill that would force everyone with abilities to identify themselves to the government. Vance, the agent who once hunted them, returns with evidence that exposes Verdant Agricultural Holdings as the shadow corporation behind Prometheus. Hundreds of people with abilities come forward publicly, refusing to hide any longer. Senator Morrison, who championed the registration bill, faces a choice between persecution and protection. The conclusion of the trilogy asks what it means to be seen, and whether visibility is liberation or the final vulnerability.

Available now: Kindle Edition $4.99 | Paperback $14.99 | Free PDF

Why This Story Matters

This is not a story about overcoming disability. I have no patience for narratives that treat disability as an obstacle to be conquered or a lesson for the able-bodied to learn from. The EleMenTs Series is about power that exists because of disability, not despite it. Elle’s Deafness shaped how she perceives vibration and movement; when wind became her element, she already knew how to feel the world in ways hearing people do not. Meen’s blindness gave her decades of practice reading her environment through non-visual means; fire and heat were extensions of senses she had already developed. Teena’s cerebral palsy taught her that the body does not always cooperate with intention; when earth became hers to command, she finally had a domain that responded to her will.

The villains in this story are not monsters or aliens. They are corporations and committees, systems and structures, the ordinary machinery of power that decides who counts as human and who counts as resource. Prometheus Applied Sciences wants to study and control people with abilities. The Senate wants to register and track them. The foster care system wants to manage them until they age out and become someone else’s problem. These are the antagonists because these are the forces that disabled people actually face. I wanted to write a fantasy that felt true.

The trilogy runs approximately 72,000 words across its three volumes. It is written for young adult readers but contains nothing that would embarrass an adult picking it up. The prose is direct, the action is consequential, and the characters are allowed to be angry, afraid, and occasionally wrong. I did not soften the story for a presumed audience. Young readers deserve the same respect as any other audience.

Read the Complete Series

All three books are available now in Kindle, paperback, and free PDF editions. You can explore the complete series at the EleMenTs Series page on BolesBooks.com, or begin with Beneath the City and follow the girls from the tunnels of New York to the halls of the Senate.

The EleMenTs have arrived. The world will have to deal with them.

The EleMenTs Series Is Complete: A Young Adult Fantasy Trilogy

Twenty years ago, I began imagining a story about three disabled teenage girls who discover they possess elemental powers. The idea stayed with me, growing and changing as I grew and changed, waiting for the right moment to be told. That moment has arrived. The EleMenTs Series is complete, and all three novels are now available.

Elle is Deaf. Meen is blind. Teena has cerebral palsy. Thrown together in a New York City group home as wards of the state, these three young women share something beyond their circumstances: the ability to command the elements themselves. Elle bends the wind through the same hands that shape American Sign Language. Meen controls fire and temperature, her blindness becoming a tactical advantage when she can feel heat signatures others cannot see. Teena moves the earth, feeling through stone and concrete the way she learned to feel every obstacle the world placed in her path.

Their names encode their identity. Take the right letters from Eleanor, Mingzhu, and Christina Sarah, and you spell EleMenTs. They are wind, fire, and earth. In the second book, Tal arrives to complete the quartet, a girl with autism who counts everything and trusts no one, until she discovers she can feel water the way the others feel their elements. Four girls. Four elements. And an organization called Prometheus Applied Sciences that will stop at nothing to acquire them.

Book One: Beneath the City

Beneath the City introduces the three protagonists as they meet in the group home and discover what they can do. In the tunnels beneath New York, they learn to trust each other and to understand that their disabilities were never weaknesses. The foster care system sees them as problems to be managed. Society sees their disabilities before their humanity. But something is watching them, and the tunnels hold secrets that will change everything.

Available now: Kindle Edition $3.99 | Paperback $14.99 | Free PDF

Book Two: The Invisible Hand

The Invisible Hand picks up three months after the tunnel. The girls have been practicing in secret, but they know they’re being watched. When a new volunteer named Sarah arrives at the group home asking too many questions, they realize Prometheus Applied Sciences has found them. Tal’s arrival changes the dynamics, completing the elemental set and forcing the girls to choose between hiding and fighting. When Prometheus springs its trap, staying hidden is no longer an option.

Available now: Kindle Edition $4.99 | Paperback $14.99 | Free PDF

Book Three: The Reckoning

The Reckoning takes the fight to Washington. One year later, the girls travel to the capital for a Senate hearing on a registration bill that would force everyone with abilities to identify themselves to the government. Vance, the agent who once hunted them, returns with evidence that exposes Verdant Agricultural Holdings as the shadow corporation behind Prometheus. Hundreds of people with abilities come forward publicly, refusing to hide any longer. Senator Morrison, who championed the registration bill, faces a choice between persecution and protection. The conclusion of the trilogy asks what it means to be seen, and whether visibility is liberation or the final vulnerability.

Available now: Kindle Edition $4.99 | Paperback $14.99 | Free PDF

Why This Story Matters

This is not a story about overcoming disability. I have no patience for narratives that treat disability as an obstacle to be conquered or a lesson for the able-bodied to learn from. The EleMenTs Series is about power that exists because of disability, not despite it. Elle’s Deafness shaped how she perceives vibration and movement; when wind became her element, she already knew how to feel the world in ways hearing people do not. Meen’s blindness gave her decades of practice reading her environment through non-visual means; fire and heat were extensions of senses she had already developed. Teena’s cerebral palsy taught her that the body does not always cooperate with intention; when earth became hers to command, she finally had a domain that responded to her will.

The villains in this story are not monsters or aliens. They are corporations and committees, systems and structures, the ordinary machinery of power that decides who counts as human and who counts as resource. Prometheus Applied Sciences wants to study and control people with abilities. The Senate wants to register and track them. The foster care system wants to manage them until they age out and become someone else’s problem. These are the antagonists because these are the forces that disabled people actually face. I wanted to write a fantasy that felt true.

The trilogy runs approximately 72,000 words across its three volumes. It is written for young adult readers but contains nothing that would embarrass an adult picking it up. The prose is direct, the action is consequential, and the characters are allowed to be angry, afraid, and occasionally wrong. I did not soften the story for a presumed audience. Young readers deserve the same respect as any other audience.

Read the Complete Series

All three books are available now in Kindle, paperback, and free PDF editions. You can explore the complete series at the EleMenTs Series page on BolesBooks.com, or begin with Beneath the City and follow the girls from the tunnels of New York to the halls of the Senate.

The EleMenTs have arrived. The world will have to deal with them.

The EleMenTs Series Is Complete: A Young Adult Fantasy Trilogy

Twenty years ago, I began imagining a story about three disabled teenage girls who discover they possess elemental powers. The idea stayed with me, growing and changing as I grew and changed, waiting for the right moment to be told. That moment has arrived. The EleMenTs Series is complete, and all three novels are now available.

Elle is Deaf. Meen is blind. Teena has cerebral palsy. Thrown together in a New York City group home as wards of the state, these three young women share something beyond their circumstances: the ability to command the elements themselves. Elle bends the wind through the same hands that shape American Sign Language. Meen controls fire and temperature, her blindness becoming a tactical advantage when she can feel heat signatures others cannot see. Teena moves the earth, feeling through stone and concrete the way she learned to feel every obstacle the world placed in her path.

Their names encode their identity. Take the right letters from Eleanor, Mingzhu, and Christina Sarah, and you spell EleMenTs. They are wind, fire, and earth. In the second book, Tal arrives to complete the quartet, a girl with autism who counts everything and trusts no one, until she discovers she can feel water the way the others feel their elements. Four girls. Four elements. And an organization called Prometheus Applied Sciences that will stop at nothing to acquire them.

Book One: Beneath the City

Beneath the City introduces the three protagonists as they meet in the group home and discover what they can do. In the tunnels beneath New York, they learn to trust each other and to understand that their disabilities were never weaknesses. The foster care system sees them as problems to be managed. Society sees their disabilities before their humanity. But something is watching them, and the tunnels hold secrets that will change everything.

Available now: Kindle Edition $3.99 | Paperback $14.99 | Free PDF

Book Two: The Invisible Hand

The Invisible Hand picks up three months after the tunnel. The girls have been practicing in secret, but they know they’re being watched. When a new volunteer named Sarah arrives at the group home asking too many questions, they realize Prometheus Applied Sciences has found them. Tal’s arrival changes the dynamics, completing the elemental set and forcing the girls to choose between hiding and fighting. When Prometheus springs its trap, staying hidden is no longer an option.

Available now: Kindle Edition $4.99 | Paperback $14.99 | Free PDF

Book Three: The Reckoning

The Reckoning takes the fight to Washington. One year later, the girls travel to the capital for a Senate hearing on a registration bill that would force everyone with abilities to identify themselves to the government. Vance, the agent who once hunted them, returns with evidence that exposes Verdant Agricultural Holdings as the shadow corporation behind Prometheus. Hundreds of people with abilities come forward publicly, refusing to hide any longer. Senator Morrison, who championed the registration bill, faces a choice between persecution and protection. The conclusion of the trilogy asks what it means to be seen, and whether visibility is liberation or the final vulnerability.

Available now: Kindle Edition $4.99 | Paperback $14.99 | Free PDF

Why This Story Matters

This is not a story about overcoming disability. I have no patience for narratives that treat disability as an obstacle to be conquered or a lesson for the able-bodied to learn from. The EleMenTs Series is about power that exists because of disability, not despite it. Elle’s Deafness shaped how she perceives vibration and movement; when wind became her element, she already knew how to feel the world in ways hearing people do not. Meen’s blindness gave her decades of practice reading her environment through non-visual means; fire and heat were extensions of senses she had already developed. Teena’s cerebral palsy taught her that the body does not always cooperate with intention; when earth became hers to command, she finally had a domain that responded to her will.

The villains in this story are not monsters or aliens. They are corporations and committees, systems and structures, the ordinary machinery of power that decides who counts as human and who counts as resource. Prometheus Applied Sciences wants to study and control people with abilities. The Senate wants to register and track them. The foster care system wants to manage them until they age out and become someone else’s problem. These are the antagonists because these are the forces that disabled people actually face. I wanted to write a fantasy that felt true.

The trilogy runs approximately 72,000 words across its three volumes. It is written for young adult readers but contains nothing that would embarrass an adult picking it up. The prose is direct, the action is consequential, and the characters are allowed to be angry, afraid, and occasionally wrong. I did not soften the story for a presumed audience. Young readers deserve the same respect as any other audience.

Read the Complete Series

All three books are available now in Kindle, paperback, and free PDF editions. You can explore the complete series at the EleMenTs Series page on BolesBooks.com, or begin with Beneath the City and follow the girls from the tunnels of New York to the halls of the Senate.

The EleMenTs have arrived. The world will have to deal with them.