#davidboles — Public Fediverse posts

The Retirement Is Always Silent

On a Tuesday in August, at three in the afternoon in Manhattan and two in the valley, a telephone went to speaker and a family in Nebraska began to read a week to me. The call carried a death and a storm in the same breath, which is how the plains have always carried them, the funeral hour and the rain total riding the same wire. Trees down across the county. The town's grain silo wrecked the week before the crop came in. A hundred utility poles down, thirty-four of them consecutive on one county road, snapped at ground level and thrown across into the lines and trees on the other side. Four inches of rain that day at North Loup, and still raining. The festival, Popcorn Days, running since 1901, had gone on among the ruins anyway, because a town that cancels its celebration has lost something the storm cannot carry off. […]

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/08/22/the-retirement-is-always-silent/

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/