#davidboles — Public Fediverse posts

The Necessary Art: Taking the Title Back

Today I am publishing a book about a theft at the center of Western culture, one its victims were trained to take as a compliment:The Necessary Art: Aristotle's Six Elements in the Clinic, the Courtroom, the Proof, the Blueprint, and the Republic. It runs 342 pages in paperback, it exists in a Kindle edition and a free reading edition you can download right now, and the audiobook will follow as soon as the voice is ready. Those are the facts of the launch. What follows is the case for why this book exists, because its central fact has stood in plain sight for two hundred and eighty years while the people it names were trained to take the theft as a compliment: the professions of the working world were robbed of a word, the robbery has a date and a paper trail, and the word can be taken back. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/07/11/the-necessary-art-taking-the-title-back/

The Necessary Art: Taking the Title Back

Today I am publishing a book about a theft at the center of Western culture, one its victims were trained to take as a compliment:The Necessary Art: Aristotle's Six Elements in the Clinic, the Courtroom, the Proof, the Blueprint, and the Republic. It runs 342 pages in paperback, it exists in a Kindle edition and a free reading edition you can download right now, and the audiobook will follow as soon as the voice is ready. Those are the facts of the launch. What follows is the case for why this book exists, because its central fact has stood in plain sight for two hundred and eighty years while the people it names were trained to take the theft as a compliment: the professions of the working world were robbed of a word, the robbery has a date and a paper trail, and the word can be taken back. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/07/11/the-necessary-art-taking-the-title-back/

Two Words, Three Sources, Four Generations: How I Built The Wergild

A novel can be assembled inside the space between two words, provided the words are old enough and the space between them has never closed. The oldest components of The Wergild are a pair of terms from early English and Germanic law. The first is the title itself: the wergild was the man-price, the payment a killer or the killer's kin owed to the family of the killed, scaled to the standing of the dead, the settlement that closed a feud and kept grief from multiplying into graves. Beside it sat morð, the old law's name for a killing done in secret and left unacknowledged, the one category of death the whole system could never settle, since no price can change hands until the killer has a name. Every law that promises repayment carries a shadow clause for the debt it cannot collect. I built the novel inside that shadow, and every other component was chosen for how much load it could carry there. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/07/07/two-words-three-sources-four-generations-how-i-built-the-wergild/

Two Words, Three Sources, Four Generations: How I Built The Wergild

A novel can be assembled inside the space between two words, provided the words are old enough and the space between them has never closed. The oldest components of The Wergild are a pair of terms from early English and Germanic law. The first is the title itself: the wergild was the man-price, the payment a killer or the killer's kin owed to the family of the killed, scaled to the standing of the dead, the settlement that closed a feud and kept grief from multiplying into graves. Beside it sat morð, the old law's name for a killing done in secret and left unacknowledged, the one category of death the whole system could never settle, since no price can change hands until the killer has a name. Every law that promises repayment carries a shadow clause for the debt it cannot collect. I built the novel inside that shadow, and every other component was chosen for how much load it could carry there. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/07/07/two-words-three-sources-four-generations-how-i-built-the-wergild/

Two Words, Three Sources, Four Generations: How I Built The Wergild

A novel can be assembled inside the space between two words, provided the words are old enough and the space between them has never closed. The oldest components of The Wergild are a pair of terms from early English and Germanic law. The first is the title itself: the wergild was the man-price, the payment a killer or the killer's kin owed to the family of the killed, scaled to the standing of the dead, the settlement that closed a feud and kept grief from multiplying into graves. Beside it sat morð, the old law's name for a killing done in secret and left unacknowledged, the one category of death the whole system could never settle, since no price can change hands until the killer has a name. Every law that promises repayment carries a shadow clause for the debt it cannot collect. I built the novel inside that shadow, and every other component was chosen for how much load it could carry there. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/07/07/two-words-three-sources-four-generations-how-i-built-the-wergild/

Two Words, Three Sources, Four Generations: How I Built The Wergild

A novel can be assembled inside the space between two words, provided the words are old enough and the space between them has never closed. The oldest components of The Wergild are a pair of terms from early English and Germanic law. The first is the title itself: the wergild was the man-price, the payment a killer or the killer's kin owed to the family of the killed, scaled to the standing of the dead, the settlement that closed a feud and kept grief from multiplying into graves. Beside it sat morð, the old law's name for a killing done in secret and left unacknowledged, the one category of death the whole system could never settle, since no price can change hands until the killer has a name. Every law that promises repayment carries a shadow clause for the debt it cannot collect. I built the novel inside that shadow, and every other component was chosen for how much load it could carry there. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/07/07/two-words-three-sources-four-generations-how-i-built-the-wergild/

Two Words, Three Sources, Four Generations: How I Built The Wergild

A novel can be assembled inside the space between two words, provided the words are old enough and the space between them has never closed. The oldest components of The Wergild are a pair of terms from early English and Germanic law. The first is the title itself: the wergild was the man-price, the payment a killer or the killer's kin owed to the family of the killed, scaled to the standing of the dead, the settlement that closed a feud and kept grief from multiplying into graves. Beside it sat morð, the old law's name for a killing done in secret and left unacknowledged, the one category of death the whole system could never settle, since no price can change hands until the killer has a name. Every law that promises repayment carries a shadow clause for the debt it cannot collect. I built the novel inside that shadow, and every other component was chosen for how much load it could carry there. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/07/07/two-words-three-sources-four-generations-how-i-built-the-wergild/

The Magnificent Loser: The Book I Wrote to Answer Two Words in Red Ink

Every writer carries a verdict he never agreed to. Mine was two words long, written in red marker across the title page of a play I cared about, by a historian whose judgment I had asked for and could not afford to ignore. BAD DRAMA. No note beneath it, no argument, no second page. I was in my twenties. I put the play in a drawer and told myself I had learned something useful about my own limits. It took me forty years to understand that I had learned the wrong lesson, and that the right one would take an entire book to say. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/06/22/the-magnificent-loser-the-book-i-wrote-to-answer-two-words-in-red-ink/

The Magnificent Loser: The Book I Wrote to Answer Two Words in Red Ink

Every writer carries a verdict he never agreed to. Mine was two words long, written in red marker across the title page of a play I cared about, by a historian whose judgment I had asked for and could not afford to ignore. BAD DRAMA. No note beneath it, no argument, no second page. I was in my twenties. I put the play in a drawer and told myself I had learned something useful about my own limits. It took me forty years to understand that I had learned the wrong lesson, and that the right one would take an entire book to say. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/06/22/the-magnificent-loser-the-book-i-wrote-to-answer-two-words-in-red-ink/

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.

#bolesBooks #book #burning #children #collusion #davidBoles #film #grafttonNunes #hiding #history #ischia #kathrynBigelow #novel #publication #schoolOfTheArts #screenplay #secrecy #theLoveless #thriller #willemDafoe #writing

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.

#bolesBooks #book #burning #children #collusion #davidBoles #film #grafttonNunes #hiding #history #ischia #kathrynBigelow #novel #publication #schoolOfTheArts #screenplay #secrecy #theLoveless #thriller #willemDafoe #writing

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.

#bolesBooks #book #burning #children #collusion #davidBoles #film #grafttonNunes #hiding #history #ischia #kathrynBigelow #novel #publication #schoolOfTheArts #screenplay #secrecy #theLoveless #thriller #willemDafoe #writing

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.

#bolesBooks #book #burning #children #collusion #davidBoles #film #grafttonNunes #hiding #history #ischia #kathrynBigelow #novel #publication #schoolOfTheArts #screenplay #secrecy #theLoveless #thriller #willemDafoe #writing

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.

#bolesBooks #book #burning #children #collusion #davidBoles #film #grafttonNunes #hiding #history #ischia #kathrynBigelow #novel #publication #schoolOfTheArts #screenplay #secrecy #theLoveless #thriller #willemDafoe #writing

The Conditions Were Not the Ones I Would Have Chosen

The cultural and political conditions under which my new book RelationShaping: Field Studies has been published are not the conditions I would have chosen for it. The book is an argument for sustained attention, long apprenticeship, and the slow acquisition of perceptual capacities that operate below the level of declarative description. It enters a culture where the dominant economic logic rewards short attention, fast turnover, and the substitution of automated outputs for the trained reading those outputs are supposed to approximate. I make the case anyway, because the case needs making, and because the people who recognize what the book is describing will recognize it whether the cultural moment is favorable or not.

The book’s central claim is that relational seeing is a competence: a real, trainable capacity to attend to the relations among elements rather than to elements considered separately, acquired the way reading is acquired, operating faster than conscious analysis, producing results the practitioner cannot fully describe in declarative terms. I develop the claim across ten case studies that range from Giorgio Morandi’s still-life shelves to Michael Faraday’s iron-filing diagrams of magnetic field lines, from phyllotactic spirals in plant growth to Renaissance counterpoint, from the human microbiome to Anni Albers’s woven textiles, from mycorrhizal networks beneath forest floors to Charles Sanders Peirce’s three-cornered theory of signs and the classifier predicates of American Sign Language. The case studies share a structure: a trained perceiver attends to relations among elements as the constitutive features of the structure the elements together produce.

The book is the companion volume to The Scientific Aesthetic: An Operating Theory. The Scientific Aesthetic developed the theoretical framework for what I called the originating-act test, distinguishing acts of art and science from the craft activities that follow them. RelationShaping takes the relational dimension of that earlier argument and develops it into a sustained examination of one specific perceptual capacity across a wider range of human practice than the first book could cover. The two volumes can be read independently. They make a single argument together, and the order of publication is the order of the argument’s development.

The argument is not a recent one for me. I started a blog called RelationShaping in the BolesBlogs network in 2007. The blog has been working on the questions this book gathers for almost twenty years, and many of the book’s arguments began as blog posts whose claims I refined, tested against new examples, and pushed further across that span. The new book is the culmination of long work, the gathering of two decades of writing into a single sustained argument that the blog form, by its nature, could not quite hold.

The closing chapters of RelationShaping extend the framework into harder territory. Chapter Eight examines the trained-perception competence in domains where it has not been institutionally named, including the recovery of the Antikythera Mechanism, the decipherment of Linear B, the Hubble Deep Field, and the contested Sappho papyri. The next chapter addresses the methodological problem of attending to relations that have not yet been discovered, drawing on microbiome and connectome research, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time, and the substantial scholarly traditions of Indigenous knowledge integration. The book closes with Chapter Ten, titled “The Severed Field,” which addresses the contemporary cultural and political conditions under which the discipline of attending to the between has come under pressure.

Chapter Ten is the chapter that made the book hard to write, and the chapter that makes the book necessary right now. The trained eye depends on conditions that are political, not merely epistemic. The classroom where a student learns to read counterpoint exists because public funding for music education exists. A museum where a young painter can spend weeks in front of a Morandi exists because the public funding that maintains museum collections exists. The graduate seminar where a future scholar of Indigenous ecological knowledge learns the methodology for ethical engagement exists because public funding for humanities research exists. Forests where botanists learn to read mycorrhizal networks exist because public funding for forest conservation exists. None of those institutional preconditions is independent of the political settlement that funds and protects them. The settlement turns against the institutions; the institutions thin; the conditions for the acquisition of trained perception thin with them; and the next generation of trained perceivers does not appear.

This is what Chapter Ten attempts to articulate. The substantive argument about relational seeing as a trainable competence would have been correct in any historical period. The urgency of articulating it right now belongs specifically to this moment, when the institutional preconditions for the competence are under organized political pressure to dissolve.

The book makes no claim that political pressure is the only force at work, or that institutional contraction has only one cause. The contraction has many causes, including economic restructuring, demographic change, the erosion of forms of community that once supported sustained attention, and the substitution of cheaper automated processes for human practitioners. Political pressure is one cause among several, and it is the cause most directly susceptible to political response.

What the book hopes to offer the reader is a vocabulary. With the vocabulary in hand, a reader may notice the trained eye in the people who still have it, may understand what those people are doing differently, may in some specific case ask to become an apprentice. In other cases, the reader may recognize that the political pressure on the institutions that train such perceivers is not pressure those perceivers can resist alone. They will need allies. The book is one attempt to make the case for being one of those allies.

I want to be honest about the limits of what the book undertakes. The book undertakes a specific task: it names the competence, documents it across a wider range of domains than is usually recognized, and articulates what is being lost when the conditions for its acquisition stop holding. The book makes no proposal for restoring the institutions whose contraction it documents, and no claim that naming the loss is sufficient to reverse it. Naming is the first step the book attempts, on the conviction that a loss without a name cannot be addressed in any organized way. The book gives the loss a name. What follows from the naming is for the reader to decide.

RelationShaping: Field Studies is available now in print, in ebook, and as a free PDF download from BolesBooks.com, along with its companion volume The Scientific Aesthetic: An Operating Theory. The book was difficult to write under the present conditions; it would be dishonest to claim otherwise, and equally dishonest to claim that the difficulty makes the book unnecessary. The argument exists, the case needs making, and the book makes the case.

#amazon #bolesBlogs #book #davidBoles #faraday #fieldStudies #kdp #morandi #philosophy #phyllotactic #politics #relation #relationshaping #scientificAesthetic

The Conditions Were Not the Ones I Would Have Chosen

The cultural and political conditions under which my new book RelationShaping: Field Studies has been published are not the conditions I would have chosen for it. The book is an argument for sustained attention, long apprenticeship, and the slow acquisition of perceptual capacities that operate below the level of declarative description. It enters a culture where the dominant economic logic rewards short attention, fast turnover, and the substitution of automated outputs for the trained reading those outputs are supposed to approximate. I make the case anyway, because the case needs making, and because the people who recognize what the book is describing will recognize it whether the cultural moment is favorable or not.

The book’s central claim is that relational seeing is a competence: a real, trainable capacity to attend to the relations among elements rather than to elements considered separately, acquired the way reading is acquired, operating faster than conscious analysis, producing results the practitioner cannot fully describe in declarative terms. I develop the claim across ten case studies that range from Giorgio Morandi’s still-life shelves to Michael Faraday’s iron-filing diagrams of magnetic field lines, from phyllotactic spirals in plant growth to Renaissance counterpoint, from the human microbiome to Anni Albers’s woven textiles, from mycorrhizal networks beneath forest floors to Charles Sanders Peirce’s three-cornered theory of signs and the classifier predicates of American Sign Language. The case studies share a structure: a trained perceiver attends to relations among elements as the constitutive features of the structure the elements together produce.

The book is the companion volume to The Scientific Aesthetic: An Operating Theory. The Scientific Aesthetic developed the theoretical framework for what I called the originating-act test, distinguishing acts of art and science from the craft activities that follow them. RelationShaping takes the relational dimension of that earlier argument and develops it into a sustained examination of one specific perceptual capacity across a wider range of human practice than the first book could cover. The two volumes can be read independently. They make a single argument together, and the order of publication is the order of the argument’s development.

The argument is not a recent one for me. I started a blog called RelationShaping in the BolesBlogs network in 2007. The blog has been working on the questions this book gathers for almost twenty years, and many of the book’s arguments began as blog posts whose claims I refined, tested against new examples, and pushed further across that span. The new book is the culmination of long work, the gathering of two decades of writing into a single sustained argument that the blog form, by its nature, could not quite hold.

The closing chapters of RelationShaping extend the framework into harder territory. Chapter Eight examines the trained-perception competence in domains where it has not been institutionally named, including the recovery of the Antikythera Mechanism, the decipherment of Linear B, the Hubble Deep Field, and the contested Sappho papyri. The next chapter addresses the methodological problem of attending to relations that have not yet been discovered, drawing on microbiome and connectome research, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time, and the substantial scholarly traditions of Indigenous knowledge integration. The book closes with Chapter Ten, titled “The Severed Field,” which addresses the contemporary cultural and political conditions under which the discipline of attending to the between has come under pressure.

Chapter Ten is the chapter that made the book hard to write, and the chapter that makes the book necessary right now. The trained eye depends on conditions that are political, not merely epistemic. The classroom where a student learns to read counterpoint exists because public funding for music education exists. A museum where a young painter can spend weeks in front of a Morandi exists because the public funding that maintains museum collections exists. The graduate seminar where a future scholar of Indigenous ecological knowledge learns the methodology for ethical engagement exists because public funding for humanities research exists. Forests where botanists learn to read mycorrhizal networks exist because public funding for forest conservation exists. None of those institutional preconditions is independent of the political settlement that funds and protects them. The settlement turns against the institutions; the institutions thin; the conditions for the acquisition of trained perception thin with them; and the next generation of trained perceivers does not appear.

This is what Chapter Ten attempts to articulate. The substantive argument about relational seeing as a trainable competence would have been correct in any historical period. The urgency of articulating it right now belongs specifically to this moment, when the institutional preconditions for the competence are under organized political pressure to dissolve.

The book makes no claim that political pressure is the only force at work, or that institutional contraction has only one cause. The contraction has many causes, including economic restructuring, demographic change, the erosion of forms of community that once supported sustained attention, and the substitution of cheaper automated processes for human practitioners. Political pressure is one cause among several, and it is the cause most directly susceptible to political response.

What the book hopes to offer the reader is a vocabulary. With the vocabulary in hand, a reader may notice the trained eye in the people who still have it, may understand what those people are doing differently, may in some specific case ask to become an apprentice. In other cases, the reader may recognize that the political pressure on the institutions that train such perceivers is not pressure those perceivers can resist alone. They will need allies. The book is one attempt to make the case for being one of those allies.

I want to be honest about the limits of what the book undertakes. The book undertakes a specific task: it names the competence, documents it across a wider range of domains than is usually recognized, and articulates what is being lost when the conditions for its acquisition stop holding. The book makes no proposal for restoring the institutions whose contraction it documents, and no claim that naming the loss is sufficient to reverse it. Naming is the first step the book attempts, on the conviction that a loss without a name cannot be addressed in any organized way. The book gives the loss a name. What follows from the naming is for the reader to decide.

RelationShaping: Field Studies is available now in print, in ebook, and as a free PDF download from BolesBooks.com, along with its companion volume The Scientific Aesthetic: An Operating Theory. The book was difficult to write under the present conditions; it would be dishonest to claim otherwise, and equally dishonest to claim that the difficulty makes the book unnecessary. The argument exists, the case needs making, and the book makes the case.

#amazon #bolesBlogs #book #davidBoles #faraday #fieldStudies #kdp #morandi #philosophy #phyllotactic #politics #relation #relationshaping #scientificAesthetic

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.

#aristotle #art #audiobook #bach #bolesBooks #davidBoles #discovery #eiffelTower #imitation #inspiration #kindle #mozart #music #operatingTheory #paperback #paris #photography #science #scientificAesthetic #scientist

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.

#aristotle #art #audiobook #bach #bolesBooks #davidBoles #discovery #eiffelTower #imitation #inspiration #kindle #mozart #music #operatingTheory #paperback #paris #photography #science #scientificAesthetic #scientist

The Station Across Town: A Lincoln Boyhood, the Federation I Did Not Watch, and the Second Half of a Television Diptych

When I was sixteen, I had a television show called Kidding Around on KOLN/KGIN-TV in Lincoln, Nebraska. It was 1981. I was a teenager hosting a teenager-aimed program on a commercial CBS affiliate, three blocks of which I have no doubt were paid for by advertising for Pepsi and Levi’s and the Lincoln car dealerships that kept American local television alive in the early Reagan years. The format was loose. The show featured kid interviews, viewer letters read on air, and unscripted segments of the kind that the FCC’s mandates for “ascertainment of community needs” were supposed to encourage and that the FCC’s 1981 decision to deregulate radio, followed by the parallel television deregulation of 1984, was designed to kill. Kidding Around did not survive into the late 1980s. It was a casualty of a specific federal policy decision documented in the book I published earlier this year, Selling Saturday Morning.

Selling Saturday Morning came out of the position of a sixteen-year-old who had a television show and then did not have one. That book is the institutional history of the commercial side of American television in the years when its regulatory floor was removed.

Today I am publishing the companion book.

Underwritten: The American Experiment in Public Broadcasting, 1967 to 2026 is the institutional history of the other American television. The non-commercial federation. The system that operated under a different statute, a different funding mechanism, a different mission, and a different relationship to its audience than the commercial system I worked inside as a teenager. Underwritten is the third volume in the Institutional Autopsy sequence after Carceral Nation and The Claimed Body. It is also, taken alongside Selling Saturday Morning, the second half of a diptych on the institutional history of American television in my lifetime.

I want to tell you something about Lincoln.

The Station Across Town

In 1981, while I was hosting Kidding Around at KOLN-TV in Lincoln, Nebraska, the University of Nebraska’s public broadcasting network, Nebraska Educational Television (NETV), was operating less than two miles from the commercial studio where I worked. NETV had been on the air since November 1, 1954, founded by Jack McBride. Under Ron Hull’s longtime production leadership, NETV produced programs that ran nationally on PBS across decades: the poetry anthology series Anyone for Tennyson?, directed by Marshall Jamison and aired in 1976, along with contributions to Great Performances and later to American Experience after that series premiered in 1988. The Nebraska press wrote about NETV regularly. State university officials cited it in legislative testimony. Few state-network production operations in the country were as ambitious.

I did not watch it. At sixteen, with my own commercial show in production, the public station’s programming felt to me, in 1981, like programming for adults who had patience I did not yet have.

I did not understand, at sixteen, what the public station across town actually was. The station was federated to a thousand other stations across the country through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Public Broadcasting Service. That poetry anthology I would have rolled my eyes at if I had bothered to watch it was being shipped from Lincoln to a national distribution network and aired in Boston and Los Angeles and San Antonio. An entire architecture, from my Saturday morning show on the commercial channel to the Anyone for Tennyson? segments at NETV, was built by federal statute. And the architecture was about to be taken apart.

I have been writing my way back to that understanding for forty-five years. Selling Saturday Morning worked one half of the architecture. Underwritten works the other half. Both books are, in different registers, about how American television was a federally structured artifact of the period from the 1934 Communications Act through the deregulation cycles of the 1980s and the federal-funding rescissions of 2025. On the commercial side, the system was deregulated and reshaped around advertising sales to children. On the public side, the system was federated and protected and starved across five political campaigns before the sixth ended it on January 30 of this year, when the Corporation for Public Broadcasting filed its Articles of Dissolution with the District of Columbia.

What Underwritten Documents

The book runs fifteen chapters. It opens with the four-second PBS logo sequence and the sensory event that anchors institutional memory of public broadcasting for everyone who watched it. It traces the November 7, 1967 signing of the Public Broadcasting Act in the East Room of the Johnson White House and the political coalition Lyndon Johnson built to pass it. Middle chapters examine the federation’s architecture across the coastal flagships at WGBH and WNET, the regional and state networks (Nebraska ETV included as a dedicated case-study chapter titled “The Heartland Node”), the independent producers at Florentine Films and ITVS and Sesame Workshop, the canonical programs that defined American cultural memory, and the five political campaigns from Nixon through the second Trump term that tested the federation’s resilience. Later chapters work through the dissolution itself: the Rescissions Act of 2025, the dissolution vote, the post-dissolution landscape of archive preservation at WGBH and the Library of Congress, the rural and tribal communities whose emergency broadcasting went dark with the federation’s coordination, and what survives.

Underwritten is dedicated to my wife, Janna Sweenie, a Deaf ASL performer and educator and my collaborator across the publishing constellation. This book is one of many she has watched come together at our kitchen table in New York.

Where to Read It

Underwritten is available now in Kindle ebook on Amazon, in paperback on Amazon, and as a free PDF download from BolesBooks.com. Kindle edition pricing is $9.99 with the paperback at $19.99 (509 pages, 1.273-inch spine, cream paper). A free web-download PDF carries the same content with full color typography matching the cover.

Underwritten joins Carceral Nation and The Claimed Body in the Institutional Autopsy sequence, and it sits beside Selling Saturday Morning as the second half of the television diptych.

Coda

The federation that produced the four seconds I did not watch when I was sixteen is gone. Across town from KOLN sat a station I could have walked to in twenty minutes, the station that had originated Anyone for Tennyson? for national distribution five years before I arrived at the commercial channel and was still producing for PBS while I was hosting Kidding Around. It is now operating under post-dissolution funding arrangements that may or may not sustain it for another decade. The federation that made the broadcasting possible is not coming back.

The station across town is where the book always lived. I just did not know it.

#anyoneForTennyson #broadcast #davidBoles #geneBunge #kiddingArouind #kuon #lincoln #marshallJamison #nebraska #nebraskaEtv #netv #network #pbs #politics #publicBroadcasting #ronHull #tech #television #theTrialOfStandingBear #williamJenningsBryan

The Station Across Town: A Lincoln Boyhood, the Federation I Did Not Watch, and the Second Half of a Television Diptych

When I was sixteen, I had a television show called Kidding Around on KOLN/KGIN-TV in Lincoln, Nebraska. It was 1981. I was a teenager hosting a teenager-aimed program on a commercial CBS affiliate, three blocks of which I have no doubt were paid for by advertising for Pepsi and Levi’s and the Lincoln car dealerships that kept American local television alive in the early Reagan years. The format was loose. The show featured kid interviews, viewer letters read on air, and unscripted segments of the kind that the FCC’s mandates for “ascertainment of community needs” were supposed to encourage and that the FCC’s 1981 decision to deregulate radio, followed by the parallel television deregulation of 1984, was designed to kill. Kidding Around did not survive into the late 1980s. It was a casualty of a specific federal policy decision documented in the book I published earlier this year, Selling Saturday Morning.

Selling Saturday Morning came out of the position of a sixteen-year-old who had a television show and then did not have one. That book is the institutional history of the commercial side of American television in the years when its regulatory floor was removed.

Today I am publishing the companion book.

Underwritten: The American Experiment in Public Broadcasting, 1967 to 2026 is the institutional history of the other American television. The non-commercial federation. The system that operated under a different statute, a different funding mechanism, a different mission, and a different relationship to its audience than the commercial system I worked inside as a teenager. Underwritten is the third volume in the Institutional Autopsy sequence after Carceral Nation and The Claimed Body. It is also, taken alongside Selling Saturday Morning, the second half of a diptych on the institutional history of American television in my lifetime.

I want to tell you something about Lincoln.

The Station Across Town

In 1981, while I was hosting Kidding Around at KOLN-TV in Lincoln, Nebraska, the University of Nebraska’s public broadcasting network, Nebraska Educational Television (NETV), was operating less than two miles from the commercial studio where I worked. NETV had been on the air since November 1, 1954, founded by Jack McBride. Under Ron Hull’s longtime production leadership, NETV produced programs that ran nationally on PBS across decades: the poetry anthology series Anyone for Tennyson?, directed by Marshall Jamison and aired in 1976, along with contributions to Great Performances and later to American Experience after that series premiered in 1988. The Nebraska press wrote about NETV regularly. State university officials cited it in legislative testimony. Few state-network production operations in the country were as ambitious.

I did not watch it. At sixteen, with my own commercial show in production, the public station’s programming felt to me, in 1981, like programming for adults who had patience I did not yet have.

I did not understand, at sixteen, what the public station across town actually was. The station was federated to a thousand other stations across the country through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Public Broadcasting Service. That poetry anthology I would have rolled my eyes at if I had bothered to watch it was being shipped from Lincoln to a national distribution network and aired in Boston and Los Angeles and San Antonio. An entire architecture, from my Saturday morning show on the commercial channel to the Anyone for Tennyson? segments at NETV, was built by federal statute. And the architecture was about to be taken apart.

I have been writing my way back to that understanding for forty-five years. Selling Saturday Morning worked one half of the architecture. Underwritten works the other half. Both books are, in different registers, about how American television was a federally structured artifact of the period from the 1934 Communications Act through the deregulation cycles of the 1980s and the federal-funding rescissions of 2025. On the commercial side, the system was deregulated and reshaped around advertising sales to children. On the public side, the system was federated and protected and starved across five political campaigns before the sixth ended it on January 30 of this year, when the Corporation for Public Broadcasting filed its Articles of Dissolution with the District of Columbia.

What Underwritten Documents

The book runs fifteen chapters. It opens with the four-second PBS logo sequence and the sensory event that anchors institutional memory of public broadcasting for everyone who watched it. It traces the November 7, 1967 signing of the Public Broadcasting Act in the East Room of the Johnson White House and the political coalition Lyndon Johnson built to pass it. Middle chapters examine the federation’s architecture across the coastal flagships at WGBH and WNET, the regional and state networks (Nebraska ETV included as a dedicated case-study chapter titled “The Heartland Node”), the independent producers at Florentine Films and ITVS and Sesame Workshop, the canonical programs that defined American cultural memory, and the five political campaigns from Nixon through the second Trump term that tested the federation’s resilience. Later chapters work through the dissolution itself: the Rescissions Act of 2025, the dissolution vote, the post-dissolution landscape of archive preservation at WGBH and the Library of Congress, the rural and tribal communities whose emergency broadcasting went dark with the federation’s coordination, and what survives.

Underwritten is dedicated to my wife, Janna Sweenie, a Deaf ASL performer and educator and my collaborator across the publishing constellation. This book is one of many she has watched come together at our kitchen table in New York.

Where to Read It

Underwritten is available now in Kindle ebook on Amazon, in paperback on Amazon, and as a free PDF download from BolesBooks.com. Kindle edition pricing is $9.99 with the paperback at $19.99 (509 pages, 1.273-inch spine, cream paper). A free web-download PDF carries the same content with full color typography matching the cover.

Underwritten joins Carceral Nation and The Claimed Body in the Institutional Autopsy sequence, and it sits beside Selling Saturday Morning as the second half of the television diptych.

Coda

The federation that produced the four seconds I did not watch when I was sixteen is gone. Across town from KOLN sat a station I could have walked to in twenty minutes, the station that had originated Anyone for Tennyson? for national distribution five years before I arrived at the commercial channel and was still producing for PBS while I was hosting Kidding Around. It is now operating under post-dissolution funding arrangements that may or may not sustain it for another decade. The federation that made the broadcasting possible is not coming back.

The station across town is where the book always lived. I just did not know it.

#anyoneForTennyson #broadcast #davidBoles #geneBunge #kiddingArouind #kuon #lincoln #marshallJamison #nebraska #nebraskaEtv #netv #network #pbs #politics #publicBroadcasting #ronHull #tech #television #theTrialOfStandingBear #williamJenningsBryan

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.

#bolesBooks #book #camden #city #cityLife #cobblestones #davidBoles #diagnostic #failedCity #failures #fireDepartment #janeJacobs #jerseyCity #newJersey #photography #technology #university #writing

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.

#bolesBooks #book #camden #city #cityLife #cobblestones #davidBoles #diagnostic #failedCity #failures #fireDepartment #janeJacobs #jerseyCity #newJersey #photography #technology #university #writing

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.

#bolesBooks #book #camden #city #cityLife #cobblestones #davidBoles #diagnostic #failedCity #failures #fireDepartment #janeJacobs #jerseyCity #newJersey #photography #technology #university #writing

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.

#artOwnership #augustWilson #bolesBooks #casting #columbiaUniversity #cuny #davidBoles #dramatistsGuild #nonTraditional #playwright #production #samuelBeckett #television #theatre

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.

#artOwnership #augustWilson #bolesBooks #casting #columbiaUniversity #cuny #davidBoles #dramatistsGuild #nonTraditional #playwright #production #samuelBeckett #television #theatre

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.

#amazon #bolesBooks #book #davidBoles #drama #eugeneOneill #god #paperback #publishing #sociology #technology #wire

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.

#amazon #bolesBooks #book #davidBoles #drama #eugeneOneill #god #paperback #publishing #sociology #technology #wire

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.

#2026 #armAngles #attic #bolesBooks #books #davidBoles #elements #fractionalFiction #public #publishing #revision #writing

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.

#2026 #armAngles #attic #bolesBooks #books #davidBoles #elements #fractionalFiction #public #publishing #revision #writing

The Page Isn’t Dead, Your Attention Is Under Siege

Every few years we are invited to attend the same funeral. Someone declares that nobody reads anymore, that the printed page is finished, that books are an aging technology destined to become a museum object while the living culture migrates to earbuds and short video. It is a tempting story because it flatters our sense that we are witnessing a clean break with the past, a decisive turn of the wheel.

But there is an immediate problem with the obituary. You are reading this right now, right?

That small fact does not prove that reading is thriving, but it does expose the real situation: the page is not dead so much as displaced. Reading has been pushed from the center of ordinary daily life into the margins between pings, feeds, meetings, errands, exhaustion, and the restless need to check what someone else is saying somewhere else.

The more accurate question is not whether books are dead, but what kinds of reading are being replaced, by what, and who benefits from the replacement.

Begin with what refuses to disappear. Print persists, stubbornly, in a market that has had more than enough time to abandon it if abandonment were truly inevitable. In U.S. print tracking that publishers and booksellers use, print book unit sales in 2024 totaled roughly 782.7 million, a slight increase over 2023, and notable precisely because it contradicts the simplistic narrative of collapse.

Now set beside it the other undeniable reality: audio is not a novelty. It is a major growth engine, and it is rapidly becoming the default way many people “read” books in the practical sense of finishing them.

The Audio Publishers Association reported U.S. audiobook sales revenue of $2.22 billion in 2024, up 13 percent over 2023, with digital audiobooks accounting for virtually all revenue. Industry reporting from the Association of American Publishers likewise places digital audio well into the multi-billion-dollar range and growing strongly year over year.

So the honest headline is not that books are dead. The honest headline is that books are mutating into a two-body system: print persists as a durable cultural technology, while audio expands as the most convenient literary delivery system ever built. The question is what this mutation does to attention, comprehension, memory, and the moral habits that a serious reading culture quietly trains.

Here is where the real crisis lives, and it is not a format war.

It is the collapse of leisure reading as a daily practice. A major study published in iScience, drawing on the nationally representative American Time Use Survey from 2003 to 2023, reports a sharp drop in the share of Americans who read for pleasure on an average day, from roughly 28 percent in 2004 to about 16 percent in 2023. The same research emphasizes widening disparities by income, education, race, and geography, which should trouble anyone who still believes reading is part of a democratic baseline rather than a luxury good for the secure.

It is worth saying plainly what is at stake. Reading is not only entertainment. It is one of the few broadly accessible disciplines that trains sustained attention, inference, patience, perspective-taking, and the capacity to follow an argument beyond a slogan. When that habit shrinks, it is not merely culture that changes; it is citizenship that thins.

Why does it feel, in the body, as if nobody reads? Because the default posture of modern media is designed to fracture the mind. The attention economy does not merely offer alternatives to reading; it profits from making deep attention difficult. That is why the battle is less about paper versus headphones and more about whether anyone can still defend unbroken time against systems engineered to interrupt it.

Across the contemporary media landscape, the pattern is visible in sober measurement. Recent national communications data in the United Kingdom reports substantial daily online time for adults and heavy use of platform video, including YouTube, which has become a default entertainment and information channel.

Even if you resist importing one country’s metrics into another’s conclusions, the direction remains unmistakable: devices have shifted the human posture from sit down and attend to carry it with you and sample.

At this point, many people reach for a comforting relativism: perhaps listening is simply the new reading, perhaps it is all the same, perhaps we should stop worrying. I reject the smug sneer that listening is cheating, because it is historically illiterate and culturally vain. For most of human history, literature lived in voice: in recitation, sermon, theater, public reading, storytelling. Audio is not a betrayal of literature. It is one of literature’s native bodies returning with modern convenience.

But the return of voice does not erase the distinct cognitive environment of the page. Listening is not inferior. It is different. Scholarly reviews comparing audiobook listening and print reading emphasize again and again that outcomes depend on context, text type, and learner characteristics, which is another way of saying that the medium shapes the mind in specific, contingent ways.

Listening is temporal and flowing; it can deepen immersion and restore tone, pacing, irony, and emotion through performance. Yet it can also invite passivity when treated as background noise, a productivity hack, a way to consume a book while doing something else. The art of listening, like the art of reading, requires intention, and our era trains intention poorly.

The printed page survives not because it is romantic, but because it performs certain tasks better than anything else. A printed book is finite, quiet, and spatial.

It does not ping.

It offers stable visual architecture, which matters when you are following a complex argument, revisiting earlier claims, tracking structure, or simply trying to remember where an idea lived on the page.

This is not nostalgia; it is cognition. Large-scale research syntheses comparing reading comprehension on paper versus screens have found a modest but consistent comprehension advantage for paper in many settings, with the size of the gap influenced by factors such as time pressure and reading purpose. Screens can host deep reading, yes, but most screens are not designed to protect it. Most screens are designed to keep you moving.

If there is a single sentence that captures the future, it is this: print will increasingly become a premium environment for attention, while audio will increasingly become the most widespread on-ramp to books. Consumer research from the audiobook industry reports that a majority of American adults have listened to an audiobook, which makes audio not an edge case but a normalized channel for literary experience.

There is another force constricting reading that has nothing to do with social video and everything to do with power: restriction. If we speak honestly about the death of reading, we must name the political and institutional assault on access.

PEN America’s reporting on U.S. public school book bans for the 2023 to 2024 school year documents 10,046 instances of bans affecting 4,231 unique titles. The American Library Association’s data for 2024 reports hundreds of censorship attempts across libraries, schools, and universities, involving thousands of titles. A society does not innocently drift away from books while simultaneously organizing to remove books from young readers’ reach. One is a technological pressure; the other is a deliberate project.

So what is the future of the word on the page? It will not die off, but it will change its social role. Reading will become less default and more chosen, more ritualized. People will read the way some people now cook from scratch: as an act that signals values, protects mental health, and asserts autonomy against convenience.

That is a loss, because reading as a democratic baseline is better than reading as a boutique practice, but it is also a realistic description of where our incentives have pushed us.

The book will also become more explicitly multi-modal.

Not in the shallow sense of attaching gimmicks to text, but in the practical sense that many works will live as a set: print for study and annotation, audio for performance and immersion, digital text for portability and search. Industry survey work already suggests emerging tensions about synthetic narration versus human performance, pointing toward a future in which audio splits into low-cost synthetic delivery and premium human interpretation.

And the word will become more contested, not less. As reading time becomes scarcer and access becomes more politicized, books become sharper symbols.

That is exactly why they are targeted. It is also why libraries, schools, and independent bookstores remain civic institutions rather than mere retailers. The future of the page will be decided less by technology than by whether citizens insist that access to ideas is not negotiable.

If you want the historical arc, it is not a clean fall from Eden but a long series of shifts in media attention. Industrial printing expanded mass literacy and mass publishing; television displaced some leisure reading; early digital text and then smartphones turned reading into an always-available screen activity; algorithmic short-form video normalized rapid sampling as a default leisure pattern. By the early 2020s, measurable decline in daily pleasure reading had become stark even as print unit sales remained resilient and audio revenues surged.

The lesson is that forms persist. What changes is the ecology of attention.

My conclusion is simple and unsentimental. Books are not dead. Print is not finished. Audio is not the enemy. The real enemy is the conversion of human attention into a strip-mined resource, and the use of moral panic to restrict access to what remains.

A culture that abandons deep reading does not merely lose a pastime. It loses a mode of thought that underwrites serious self-government.

So yes, the word will transform. It will hybridize. It will travel by paper and by voice and by pixels. But whether it dies off depends on something far more basic than format.

It depends on whether we still believe, stubbornly and publicly, that sustained attention is a virtue, that access to books is a civic right, and that the interior life is not an inconvenience to be optimized away.

And if you are reading this right now, you already know the page is not dead. You are holding it open.

#audiobooks #bolesBooks #davidBoles #digtal #ereader #experience #life #meaning #reading #silo #socialMedia #words

The Page Isn’t Dead, Your Attention Is Under Siege

Every few years we are invited to attend the same funeral. Someone declares that nobody reads anymore, that the printed page is finished, that books are an aging technology destined to become a museum object while the living culture migrates to earbuds and short video. It is a tempting story because it flatters our sense that we are witnessing a clean break with the past, a decisive turn of the wheel.

But there is an immediate problem with the obituary. You are reading this right now, right?

That small fact does not prove that reading is thriving, but it does expose the real situation: the page is not dead so much as displaced. Reading has been pushed from the center of ordinary daily life into the margins between pings, feeds, meetings, errands, exhaustion, and the restless need to check what someone else is saying somewhere else.

The more accurate question is not whether books are dead, but what kinds of reading are being replaced, by what, and who benefits from the replacement.

Begin with what refuses to disappear. Print persists, stubbornly, in a market that has had more than enough time to abandon it if abandonment were truly inevitable. In U.S. print tracking that publishers and booksellers use, print book unit sales in 2024 totaled roughly 782.7 million, a slight increase over 2023, and notable precisely because it contradicts the simplistic narrative of collapse.

Now set beside it the other undeniable reality: audio is not a novelty. It is a major growth engine, and it is rapidly becoming the default way many people “read” books in the practical sense of finishing them.

The Audio Publishers Association reported U.S. audiobook sales revenue of $2.22 billion in 2024, up 13 percent over 2023, with digital audiobooks accounting for virtually all revenue. Industry reporting from the Association of American Publishers likewise places digital audio well into the multi-billion-dollar range and growing strongly year over year.

So the honest headline is not that books are dead. The honest headline is that books are mutating into a two-body system: print persists as a durable cultural technology, while audio expands as the most convenient literary delivery system ever built. The question is what this mutation does to attention, comprehension, memory, and the moral habits that a serious reading culture quietly trains.

Here is where the real crisis lives, and it is not a format war.

It is the collapse of leisure reading as a daily practice. A major study published in iScience, drawing on the nationally representative American Time Use Survey from 2003 to 2023, reports a sharp drop in the share of Americans who read for pleasure on an average day, from roughly 28 percent in 2004 to about 16 percent in 2023. The same research emphasizes widening disparities by income, education, race, and geography, which should trouble anyone who still believes reading is part of a democratic baseline rather than a luxury good for the secure.

It is worth saying plainly what is at stake. Reading is not only entertainment. It is one of the few broadly accessible disciplines that trains sustained attention, inference, patience, perspective-taking, and the capacity to follow an argument beyond a slogan. When that habit shrinks, it is not merely culture that changes; it is citizenship that thins.

Why does it feel, in the body, as if nobody reads? Because the default posture of modern media is designed to fracture the mind. The attention economy does not merely offer alternatives to reading; it profits from making deep attention difficult. That is why the battle is less about paper versus headphones and more about whether anyone can still defend unbroken time against systems engineered to interrupt it.

Across the contemporary media landscape, the pattern is visible in sober measurement. Recent national communications data in the United Kingdom reports substantial daily online time for adults and heavy use of platform video, including YouTube, which has become a default entertainment and information channel.

Even if you resist importing one country’s metrics into another’s conclusions, the direction remains unmistakable: devices have shifted the human posture from sit down and attend to carry it with you and sample.

At this point, many people reach for a comforting relativism: perhaps listening is simply the new reading, perhaps it is all the same, perhaps we should stop worrying. I reject the smug sneer that listening is cheating, because it is historically illiterate and culturally vain. For most of human history, literature lived in voice: in recitation, sermon, theater, public reading, storytelling. Audio is not a betrayal of literature. It is one of literature’s native bodies returning with modern convenience.

But the return of voice does not erase the distinct cognitive environment of the page. Listening is not inferior. It is different. Scholarly reviews comparing audiobook listening and print reading emphasize again and again that outcomes depend on context, text type, and learner characteristics, which is another way of saying that the medium shapes the mind in specific, contingent ways.

Listening is temporal and flowing; it can deepen immersion and restore tone, pacing, irony, and emotion through performance. Yet it can also invite passivity when treated as background noise, a productivity hack, a way to consume a book while doing something else. The art of listening, like the art of reading, requires intention, and our era trains intention poorly.

The printed page survives not because it is romantic, but because it performs certain tasks better than anything else. A printed book is finite, quiet, and spatial.

It does not ping.

It offers stable visual architecture, which matters when you are following a complex argument, revisiting earlier claims, tracking structure, or simply trying to remember where an idea lived on the page.

This is not nostalgia; it is cognition. Large-scale research syntheses comparing reading comprehension on paper versus screens have found a modest but consistent comprehension advantage for paper in many settings, with the size of the gap influenced by factors such as time pressure and reading purpose. Screens can host deep reading, yes, but most screens are not designed to protect it. Most screens are designed to keep you moving.

If there is a single sentence that captures the future, it is this: print will increasingly become a premium environment for attention, while audio will increasingly become the most widespread on-ramp to books. Consumer research from the audiobook industry reports that a majority of American adults have listened to an audiobook, which makes audio not an edge case but a normalized channel for literary experience.

There is another force constricting reading that has nothing to do with social video and everything to do with power: restriction. If we speak honestly about the death of reading, we must name the political and institutional assault on access.

PEN America’s reporting on U.S. public school book bans for the 2023 to 2024 school year documents 10,046 instances of bans affecting 4,231 unique titles. The American Library Association’s data for 2024 reports hundreds of censorship attempts across libraries, schools, and universities, involving thousands of titles. A society does not innocently drift away from books while simultaneously organizing to remove books from young readers’ reach. One is a technological pressure; the other is a deliberate project.

So what is the future of the word on the page? It will not die off, but it will change its social role. Reading will become less default and more chosen, more ritualized. People will read the way some people now cook from scratch: as an act that signals values, protects mental health, and asserts autonomy against convenience.

That is a loss, because reading as a democratic baseline is better than reading as a boutique practice, but it is also a realistic description of where our incentives have pushed us.

The book will also become more explicitly multi-modal.

Not in the shallow sense of attaching gimmicks to text, but in the practical sense that many works will live as a set: print for study and annotation, audio for performance and immersion, digital text for portability and search. Industry survey work already suggests emerging tensions about synthetic narration versus human performance, pointing toward a future in which audio splits into low-cost synthetic delivery and premium human interpretation.

And the word will become more contested, not less. As reading time becomes scarcer and access becomes more politicized, books become sharper symbols.

That is exactly why they are targeted. It is also why libraries, schools, and independent bookstores remain civic institutions rather than mere retailers. The future of the page will be decided less by technology than by whether citizens insist that access to ideas is not negotiable.

If you want the historical arc, it is not a clean fall from Eden but a long series of shifts in media attention. Industrial printing expanded mass literacy and mass publishing; television displaced some leisure reading; early digital text and then smartphones turned reading into an always-available screen activity; algorithmic short-form video normalized rapid sampling as a default leisure pattern. By the early 2020s, measurable decline in daily pleasure reading had become stark even as print unit sales remained resilient and audio revenues surged.

The lesson is that forms persist. What changes is the ecology of attention.

My conclusion is simple and unsentimental. Books are not dead. Print is not finished. Audio is not the enemy. The real enemy is the conversion of human attention into a strip-mined resource, and the use of moral panic to restrict access to what remains.

A culture that abandons deep reading does not merely lose a pastime. It loses a mode of thought that underwrites serious self-government.

So yes, the word will transform. It will hybridize. It will travel by paper and by voice and by pixels. But whether it dies off depends on something far more basic than format.

It depends on whether we still believe, stubbornly and publicly, that sustained attention is a virtue, that access to books is a civic right, and that the interior life is not an inconvenience to be optimized away.

And if you are reading this right now, you already know the page is not dead. You are holding it open.

#audiobooks #bolesBooks #davidBoles #digtal #ereader #experience #life #meaning #reading #silo #socialMedia #words

We’ve discussed AI here several times here on Boles Blogs, and today we’re taking the logical next step into the Uncanny valley by sharing original musical creations and starting our own website radio streaming service using our new songs to accompany our new Boles.radio TLD (Top Level Domain)!

Okay, so now you have your original music published on the major streaming services, like Spotify, but to hear those songs, your listeners need to have an account to access the entire song and not just a 30 second sound snippet.

But what if you want to drill down even more into your songs, and create your own website that will help you stream your music your way?

You have a few choices.

You can go to a website that specializes in helping you create your own radio station where you will have to stream from their proprietary domain. You will have to upload your music, and your storage space is limited. You also will have a limit on how many hours you can stream. The cost for that sort of service is around $150 a month for 10 hours of streaming. Not a great deal, but if you want to do everything live as an old time radio announcer, that’s one way to go.

A second choice you have is to go for an .FM domain name. The “Dot FM” name is popular for some music-related websites, playing off the old “radio” idea of an “FM” radio station. I’m not sure how many folks in the emerging generation even know what “FM” stands for when it comes to terrestrial radio broadcasting (frequency modulation); not that the definition really matters anymore.

An .FM domain will cost you around $100 a year to register. So, for five years, you’re in for $500 in domain registration fees alone. That’s not a terrible deal for a website domain, but knowing that the .FM domain name is really the TLD for the “Federated States of Micronesia” — (not “frequency modulation” at all!) — which is an independent island nation located in the Pacific Ocean — and so you might not really think .FM means really associates “radio” in mind. 

However, if you’re old, like me, and you want to try to be a little more traditional with your non-terrestrial web streaming domain for your music, the “.RADIO” domain might just be what fits best with your interest.

Yes, you can get a “Dot Radio” domain for $25 or so a year — if you are an individual with a want to “stream” radio, music, commentary or a podcast. Companies pay about ten times that amount per year for a .Radio domain.

Compared to the .FM domain — at $500 for five years — you can instead get a .RADIO domain for $250 for a 10 year registration; that’s half the cost for twice the time! I’ll go .RADIO all day.

And so I did!

Boles.radio is now live, and streaming my original music, as well as streaming highlights of my Human Meme podcast, along with other great bits of my ancient radio history to come!

Right now, I have started to curate my original SoundCloud music playlists — with my spoken vocal stingers added to my songs stream — to create “channel streams” on Boles.radio based on musical styles, and spoken topics.

Boles.ai · Boles Radio Dance

Being able to control the flow of the Boles.radio experience was important to me. With easily editable SoundCloud playlist streams, I can better form the proactive listener experience moment-to-moment.

Since all my original songs embed the domain name, or project, they are promoting in the lyrics, I am currently creating all new songs just for the Boles.radio streamcasting experience.

I’m currently able to create a new song a day, so in a month or two, Boles.radio will have a good, and deep, visual playlist available for your listening pleasure — a playlist I can always expand, update, edit, or delete as needed.

Hey, give me a shoutout if you need help, or if you have any ideas to share for the future of AI in our everyday lives!

Share this:

• Click to print (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Telegram (Opens in new window)
• Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Mastodon (Opens in new window)

https://bolesblogs.com/2024/04/04/boles-radio-is-live/

#boles #bolesRadio #cccccc #creative #davidBoles #fm #music #Podcast #production #radio #streaming

We’ve discussed AI here several times here on Boles Blogs, and today we’re taking the logical next step into the Uncanny valley by sharing original musical creations and starting our own website radio streaming service using our new songs to accompany our new Boles.radio TLD (Top Level Domain)!

Okay, so now you have your original music published on the major streaming services, like Spotify, but to hear those songs, your listeners need to have an account to access the entire song and not just a 30 second sound snippet.

But what if you want to drill down even more into your songs, and create your own website that will help you stream your music your way?

You have a few choices.

You can go to a website that specializes in helping you create your own radio station where you will have to stream from their proprietary domain. You will have to upload your music, and your storage space is limited. You also will have a limit on how many hours you can stream. The cost for that sort of service is around $150 a month for 10 hours of streaming. Not a great deal, but if you want to do everything live as an old time radio announcer, that’s one way to go.

A second choice you have is to go for an .FM domain name. The “Dot FM” name is popular for some music-related websites, playing off the old “radio” idea of an “FM” radio station. I’m not sure how many folks in the emerging generation even know what “FM” stands for when it comes to terrestrial radio broadcasting (frequency modulation); not that the definition really matters anymore.

An .FM domain will cost you around $100 a year to register. So, for five years, you’re in for $500 in domain registration fees alone. That’s not a terrible deal for a website domain, but knowing that the .FM domain name is really the TLD for the “Federated States of Micronesia” — (not “frequency modulation” at all!) — which is an independent island nation located in the Pacific Ocean — and so you might not really think .FM means really associates “radio” in mind. 

However, if you’re old, like me, and you want to try to be a little more traditional with your non-terrestrial web streaming domain for your music, the “.RADIO” domain might just be what fits best with your interest.

Yes, you can get a “Dot Radio” domain for $25 or so a year — if you are an individual with a want to “stream” radio, music, commentary or a podcast. Companies pay about ten times that amount per year for a .Radio domain.

Compared to the .FM domain — at $500 for five years — you can instead get a .RADIO domain for $250 for a 10 year registration; that’s half the cost for twice the time! I’ll go .RADIO all day.

And so I did!

Boles.radio is now live, and streaming my original music, as well as streaming highlights of my Human Meme podcast, along with other great bits of my ancient radio history to come!

Right now, I have started to curate my original SoundCloud music playlists — with my spoken vocal stingers added to my songs stream — to create “channel streams” on Boles.radio based on musical styles, and spoken topics.

Boles.ai · Boles Radio Dance

Being able to control the flow of the Boles.radio experience was important to me. With easily editable SoundCloud playlist streams, I can better form the proactive listener experience moment-to-moment.

Since all my original songs embed the domain name, or project, they are promoting in the lyrics, I am currently creating all new songs just for the Boles.radio streamcasting experience.

I’m currently able to create a new song a day, so in a month or two, Boles.radio will have a good, and deep, visual playlist available for your listening pleasure — a playlist I can always expand, update, edit, or delete as needed.

Hey, give me a shoutout if you need help, or if you have any ideas to share for the future of AI in our everyday lives!

https://bolesblogs.com/2024/04/04/boles-radio-is-live/

#boles #bolesRadio #cccccc #creative #davidBoles #fm #music #Podcast #production #radio #streaming