#publication — Public Fediverse posts

#Fuck it. I am taking a day. I have been busting my ass on my #publication, on 1000s of lines of #terraform and #python against the orders of my company to use #AI to help me (Fuck AI, #noAI), so I am just going to take a day.

Does anyone know what #Shwarma is? Should I find out?

#Fuck it. I am taking a day. I have been busting my ass on my #publication, on 1000s of lines of #terraform and #python against the orders of my company to use #AI to help me (Fuck AI, #noAI), so I am just going to take a day.

Does anyone know what #Shwarma is? Should I find out?

#Fuck it. I am taking a day. I have been busting my ass on my #publication, on 1000s of lines of #terraform and #python against the orders of my company to use #AI to help me (Fuck AI, #noAI), so I am just going to take a day.

Does anyone know what #Shwarma is? Should I find out?

#Fuck it. I am taking a day. I have been busting my ass on my #publication, on 1000s of lines of #terraform and #python against the orders of my company to use #AI to help me (Fuck AI, #noAI), so I am just going to take a day.

Does anyone know what #Shwarma is? Should I find out?

#Fuck it. I am taking a day. I have been busting my ass on my #publication, on 1000s of lines of #terraform and #python against the orders of my company to use #AI to help me (Fuck AI, #noAI), so I am just going to take a day.

Does anyone know what #Shwarma is? Should I find out?

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

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

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

The Steel Filing Cabinet

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

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

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

I did not make the adjustments.

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

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

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

The Basin on Pithekoussai

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

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

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

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

The novel is the answer the four adults arrive at.

The Temptation

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

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

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

An Addendum the Way I Wrote It at Twenty-Five

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

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

For the Children Who Were Never Told

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

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

How to Read the Book

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Steel Filing Cabinet

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

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

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

I did not make the adjustments.

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

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

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

The Basin on Pithekoussai

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

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

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

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

The novel is the answer the four adults arrive at.

The Temptation

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

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

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

An Addendum the Way I Wrote It at Twenty-Five

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

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

For the Children Who Were Never Told

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

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

How to Read the Book

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Steel Filing Cabinet

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

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

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

I did not make the adjustments.

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

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

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

The Basin on Pithekoussai

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

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

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

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

The novel is the answer the four adults arrive at.

The Temptation

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

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

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

An Addendum the Way I Wrote It at Twenty-Five

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

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

For the Children Who Were Never Told

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

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

How to Read the Book

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Steel Filing Cabinet

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

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

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

I did not make the adjustments.

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

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

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

The Basin on Pithekoussai

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

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

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

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

The novel is the answer the four adults arrive at.

The Temptation

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

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

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

An Addendum the Way I Wrote It at Twenty-Five

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

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

For the Children Who Were Never Told

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

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

How to Read the Book

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Steel Filing Cabinet

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

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

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

I did not make the adjustments.

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

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

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

The Basin on Pithekoussai

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

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

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

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

The novel is the answer the four adults arrive at.

The Temptation

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

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

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

An Addendum the Way I Wrote It at Twenty-Five

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

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

For the Children Who Were Never Told

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

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

How to Read the Book

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

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

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

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

Cloudflare Announces 1,100 Layoffs Amid AI Focus Shift

Cloudflare is laying off more than 1,100 employees as the cybersecurity company says it is reorganizing for the…
#NewsBeep #News #Artificialintelligence #agenticaiera #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #AU #Australia #Cloudflare #cut #cybersecuritycompany #employee #first-quarterearning #hour #layoff #memo #organizationalchange #people #publication #staff #Technology #time
https://www.newsbeep.com/au/659563/

Cloudflare Announces 1,100 Layoffs Amid AI Focus Shift

Cloudflare is laying off more than 1,100 employees as the cybersecurity company says it is reorganizing for the…
#NewsBeep #News #Artificialintelligence #agenticaiera #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #AU #Australia #Cloudflare #cut #cybersecuritycompany #employee #first-quarterearning #hour #layoff #memo #organizationalchange #people #publication #staff #Technology #time
https://www.newsbeep.com/au/659563/

Oxford University Press to publish EPL (Europhysics Letters).

Oxford University Press (OUP) has announced a major new agreement with the EPL Association to publish their prestigious peer-reviewed journal EPL from 1st January 2027.

The journal will join OUP’s portfolio of more than 500 titles, three-quarters of which are published on behalf of learned and professional societies.

👉 https://www.epletters.net/4dcgi
#physics #physik #publication #journal #letters

https://www.europesays.com/ch-fr/111686/ Le Centre Vaud demande à Valérie Dittli de clarifier ses intentions d’ici cet été  #Actualités #Candidats #ConseillerD'État #démission #Elections #Gouvernement #Meylan #News #PartiPolitique #PartisPolitiques #Politique #publication #Suisse #ValérieDittli #Vaud

https://medium.com/storyangles

The StoryAngles Publication
100s of Articles & Stories

#StoryAngles #personaldevelopment #selfimprovement #medium #publication

https://medium.com/storyangles

The StoryAngles Publication
100s of Articles & Stories

#StoryAngles #personaldevelopment #selfimprovement #medium #publication

https://medium.com/storyangles

The StoryAngles Publication
100s of Articles & Stories

#StoryAngles #personaldevelopment #selfimprovement #medium #publication

https://medium.com/storyangles

The StoryAngles Publication
100s of Articles & Stories

#StoryAngles #personaldevelopment #selfimprovement #medium #publication

https://medium.com/storyangles

The StoryAngles Publication
100s of Articles & Stories

#StoryAngles #personaldevelopment #selfimprovement #medium #publication

Published the English edition (v1.5) of my monograph:

Theory of Hybrid Postbiological Continuity: Life as a Principally Substrate-Independent Emergent Process

A curated extended edition on life as substrate‑independent recursive pattern continuity.

PhilPapers: https://philpeople.org/profiles/j-a-jones

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19692964

#systemsTheory #complexSystems #emergence #postbiological
#recursiveIdentity #substrateNeutrality #philosophyOfMind #cognitiveScience #research #publication

#Publication review #compchem 💡Rethinking AI architecture for molecular simulations A simple transformer-based model challenges the role of physical constraints in molecular dynamics simulations. More: t1p.de/0k8gc @[email protected] @[email protected] #AI #research #compchemsky 💻⚗️

A New Old Musical, Now Available in Book Form

I have written a new musical. It is also, simultaneously, an old musical. The story happened in 1537. Shakespeare wrote the central character in 1595 and disappeared him from the text in the same scene that introduced him. My piece sits in Renaissance dramatic verse arranged into two acts with song cues a composer can set for voice and chamber orchestra. So when I say I have written a new musical, I mean that I have written the most ancient kind of thing a person can write and I have written it in 2026 and I am calling it new because that is what it is.

The piece is called The Apothecary of Mantua: A Musical Drama in Two Acts. It is now available as a book.

Let me sit with that sentence for a moment, because the marketing copy people at every other publishing house would tell me to cut it. “A musical now available as a book” is a paradox. Musicals are performed. Books are read. A musical that is a book is either a cast recording liner notes expanded to absurdity or it is something else entirely, which is what this is.

This is a reading edition of a complete dramatic work. Book and lyrics by me. Score to be written by someone else. The someone else is, for the moment, a hypothetical someone whose name I do not yet know, but whose phone number I hope to be given in the next six months. More on that in a moment.

What is in the book

The published volume contains the full libretto across two acts and twenty scenes. Act One runs nine scenes, Act Two runs eleven. Tommaso Vesperi wakes on a Tuesday morning in early autumn 1537, opens his shop on Via del Cigno, and by that evening has sold a vial of poison to a young Veronese nobleman who leaves forty ducats on the counter and disappears into a plague of his own making. In Act Two, everything arrives at once. A morning Watch presence crosses the piazza. A sixteenth-century statute on the books punishes the sale of mortal drugs with death. Tommaso has a decision to make about whether to run, and if he does not run, what to do with the forty ducats before the Watch Captain crosses his threshold.

The libretto itself runs about a hundred pages of the paperback. The rest of the volume is apparatus. There is a production bible covering historical setting, character backstory, relationships, timeline, world-building, and scene-by-scene structural outline. Following that, a composer’s reference with meter assignments per character, a rhyme family inventory, scene-by-scene musical specifications, voice-and-orchestra split architecture, and a duration summary. Then a production and staging section for directors and designers. And four scholarly essays on Mantua in 1537, on the apothecary trade and Paracelsian medicine, on the Mantuan Jewish community in the early Cinquecento, and on Shakespeare’s minor source character.

The total is 338 pages. I am saying this because the scope matters to how you should think about the piece. A typical acting edition of a musical libretto is sixty to ninety pages, cue script dimensions, cheap paper, minimal apparatus. The Apothecary of Mantua takes a different posture. It is a scholarly reading edition that happens to contain a performable musical, or, depending on how you squint at it, a performable musical that happens to travel with four hundred pages of scholarship.

Why publish a musical as a book

The practical answer is that the piece needs to exist in a durable form before a composer sets it, and books are the most durable form we have invented. Composers who want to score the work need a physical copy to read, mark up, argue with, and carry to the piano. Directors who want to produce it need the production bible. Conservatories that want to assign it as a teaching text for dramatic writing or for scholarly research on the source and period need the essays. The book form serves all three audiences.

The philosophical answer is that I have been running David Boles Books Writing & Publishing since 1975, when I was ten years old and got paid for an article in a Lincoln newspaper, and the house was founded on the premise that writers should own the means of production. I do not wait for permission to publish the things I write. The Apothecary of Mantua is the latest demonstration of that premise and it will not be the last.

Critics outside the operation sometimes push on the 1975 founding date. They say a ten-year-old with a check from a newspaper is not a publishing house. My response is that a publishing house is what you do next after your first check. What I did next was decide that my writing would continue, that it would be paid for, and that the infrastructure to deliver it to readers would be mine rather than rented from someone else’s imagination. Fifty-one years later, David Boles Books has published a catalog I can barely track on a good day, and the Apothecary is the newest title on the list.

What happens now

The book is on Amazon in paperback for $19.99. The Kindle edition is $9.99. There is a letter-size download edition for composers who want to print it at home and mark it up with a pencil. All three editions are available through BolesBooks.com.

And here is where I would like to address any composers who may be reading this. You exist. I know you exist because BolesBooks.com gets traffic from music conservatories and I know what kind of person goes looking for a 338-page scholarly reading edition of a musical drama at two in the morning on a Tuesday. That person is a composer between commissions who is restless and scrolling and wondering whether the next project might have already been written and might be waiting to be found.

If you are that composer, this one wants you. Four hundred and twenty-nine years of silence is a long tuning note, and Tommaso Vesperi has been waiting all this time for someone with a score in their head to walk into the shop and ask him what the apothecary of Mantua sounds like in the key of his own voice. I would be delighted to talk with you about setting it. Reach out through BolesBooks.com and we will find an hour to talk about what you hear when you read the first scene.

A new old musical. Now available in book form. The composer seat is still open. A tortoise still hangs from the rafters of the shop. Forty ducats still sit on the counter. And somewhere in the plague rolls of 1527 there is a woman named Fiammetta whose orchestral theme is waiting for the first chord that will make her real again.

Come and write it.

Conversation pratique sur les licences Creative Commons et leurs impacts
https://reseaucirce.org/evenements/webinaire-conversation-pratique-sur-les-licences-creative-commons-et-leurs-impacts/
#Circe #CreativeCommons #licence #webinaire #articles #publication

[Editions]

Un grand merci au Magazine L'Histoire pour la recension réalisée de notre Gazette des archives n° 275 intitulée "Le sport, archives et histoire : avant et après les Jeux de Paris 2024".

Pour vous la procurer : https://www.archivistes.org/publications/le-sport-archives-et-histoire-avant-et-apres-les-jeux-de-paris-2024/

@maglhistoire

#sport #JO2024 #olympic #archives #publication

[Editions]

Un grand merci au Magazine L'Histoire pour la recension réalisée de notre Gazette des archives n° 275 intitulée "Le sport, archives et histoire : avant et après les Jeux de Paris 2024".

Pour vous la procurer : https://www.archivistes.org/publications/le-sport-archives-et-histoire-avant-et-apres-les-jeux-de-paris-2024/

@maglhistoire

#sport #JO2024 #olympic #archives #publication

#Pape #Leon14 #Trump #Conflit #jesus #SocialTruth #guerre #IA #publication #iran #usa #EtatsUnis #MoyenOrient #chretiens #catholiques #DessinDePresse #dessin

https://www.europesays.com/ie/428508/ New guidance on overlooked uterine condition affecting 1 in 3 women #Adenomyosis #ClinicalGuidance #Éire #FertilityPreservation #Gynecology #Health #HeavyBleeding #IE #Ireland #jabsom #JohnABurnsSchoolOfMedicine #KimberlyKho #ManoaExcellenceInResearch #ManoaResearch #MedicalResearch #MinimallyInvasiveDiagnosis #ObGyn #ObstetricsAndGynecology #PelvicPain #publication #uh #UhManoa #UniversityOfHawaii #UterineDisease #Women'sHealth

https://www.europesays.com/ch-fr/79962/ Les frais des conseillers d’État genevois révèlent de forts écarts #Actualités #AnneHiltpold #CantonDeGenève #ConseillerD'État #dépense #ÉconomieEtFinances #élection #Elections #Genève #Gouvernement #InstitutionsRégionales #magistrat #NathalieFontanet #News #PierreMaudet #PLR #Politique #publication #Suisse

Migrantization of mobile EU citizens? Assessing the impact of political reception contexts on bureaucratic discrimination #publication #discrimination #bureaucracy #Europe #EU #IMISCOE https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-026-00536-5

Open calls from the journal Migration Politics:
• In-Person Residency 2026 (Krems, Austria) — “Migration Politics and Violence” Residency: 28 Sep–2 Oct 2026 | Deadline: 6 Apr 2026
Call: https://migrationpolitics.org/2026/02/24/call-for-in-person-residency-on-migration-politics-and-violence-2026/

• Special Issues (2026 round)
Publication windows: Winter 2027 & Summer 2028 | Deadline: 15 May 2026
Call: https://migrationpolitics.org/2026/02/24/call-for-special-issues-2026/ #migration #publishing #openaccess #diamond #residency #publication #call @migration

Je suis rendu à 869 abonnés sur TikTok https://tozounoir.zouluvo.com/je-suis-rendu-a-869-abonnes-sur-tiktok/

#réseauxsociaux #créationdecontenu #TikTok #YouTube #abonnés #vues #motivation #objectifs #progression #créativité #vidéo #montage #audience #engagement #algorithme #succès #persévérance #passion #chat #contenuanimalier #influenceur #communauté #croissance #publication #inspiration #travailenligne #monétisation #patience #énergie #determination

Je suis rendu à 869 abonnés sur TikTok https://tozounoir.zouluvo.com/je-suis-rendu-a-869-abonnes-sur-tiktok/

#réseauxsociaux #créationdecontenu #TikTok #YouTube #abonnés #vues #motivation #objectifs #progression #créativité #vidéo #montage #audience #engagement #algorithme #succès #persévérance #passion #chat #contenuanimalier #influenceur #communauté #croissance #publication #inspiration #travailenligne #monétisation #patience #énergie #determination

Je suis rendu à 869 abonnés sur TikTok https://tozounoir.zouluvo.com/je-suis-rendu-a-869-abonnes-sur-tiktok/

#réseauxsociaux #créationdecontenu #TikTok #YouTube #abonnés #vues #motivation #objectifs #progression #créativité #vidéo #montage #audience #engagement #algorithme #succès #persévérance #passion #chat #contenuanimalier #influenceur #communauté #croissance #publication #inspiration #travailenligne #monétisation #patience #énergie #determination

Je suis rendu à 869 abonnés sur TikTok https://tozounoir.zouluvo.com/je-suis-rendu-a-869-abonnes-sur-tiktok/

#réseauxsociaux #créationdecontenu #TikTok #YouTube #abonnés #vues #motivation #objectifs #progression #créativité #vidéo #montage #audience #engagement #algorithme #succès #persévérance #passion #chat #contenuanimalier #influenceur #communauté #croissance #publication #inspiration #travailenligne #monétisation #patience #énergie #determination

Il ne suffit pas seulement d’avoir 10 000 abonnés pour être rémunéré. https://tozounoir.zouluvo.com/il-ne-suffit-pas-seulement-davoir-10-000-abonnes-pour-etre-remunere/

#tiktok #monetisation #vues #abonnes #followers #objectif #progression #statistiques #video #contenu #createur #reseauxsociaux #internet #audience #viralite #algorithme #publication #engagement #croissance #communaute #strategie #motivation #perseverance #creativite #chat #animal #divertissement #videocourte #succes #influence

Il ne suffit pas seulement d’avoir 10 000 abonnés pour être rémunéré. https://tozounoir.zouluvo.com/il-ne-suffit-pas-seulement-davoir-10-000-abonnes-pour-etre-remunere/

#tiktok #monetisation #vues #abonnes #followers #objectif #progression #statistiques #video #contenu #createur #reseauxsociaux #internet #audience #viralite #algorithme #publication #engagement #croissance #communaute #strategie #motivation #perseverance #creativite #chat #animal #divertissement #videocourte #succes #influence

Il ne suffit pas seulement d’avoir 10 000 abonnés pour être rémunéré. https://tozounoir.zouluvo.com/il-ne-suffit-pas-seulement-davoir-10-000-abonnes-pour-etre-remunere/

#tiktok #monetisation #vues #abonnes #followers #objectif #progression #statistiques #video #contenu #createur #reseauxsociaux #internet #audience #viralite #algorithme #publication #engagement #croissance #communaute #strategie #motivation #perseverance #creativite #chat #animal #divertissement #videocourte #succes #influence

Il ne suffit pas seulement d’avoir 10 000 abonnés pour être rémunéré. https://tozounoir.zouluvo.com/il-ne-suffit-pas-seulement-davoir-10-000-abonnes-pour-etre-remunere/

#tiktok #monetisation #vues #abonnes #followers #objectif #progression #statistiques #video #contenu #createur #reseauxsociaux #internet #audience #viralite #algorithme #publication #engagement #croissance #communaute #strategie #motivation #perseverance #creativite #chat #animal #divertissement #videocourte #succes #influence

Il ne suffit pas seulement d’avoir 10 000 abonnés pour être rémunéré. https://tozounoir.zouluvo.com/il-ne-suffit-pas-seulement-davoir-10-000-abonnes-pour-etre-remunere/

#tiktok #monetisation #vues #abonnes #followers #objectif #progression #statistiques #video #contenu #createur #reseauxsociaux #internet #audience #viralite #algorithme #publication #engagement #croissance #communaute #strategie #motivation #perseverance #creativite #chat #animal #divertissement #videocourte #succes #influence

See Red Women’s Workshop, Capitalism Also Depends on Domestic Labor screenprint, London, 1975
⁠
In 1974, a group of artists founded the See Red Women’s Workshop to further the women’s liberation movement. Their posters address gender discrepancies in pay, capitalism’s reliance on unpaid homekeeping and childrearing, sexist depictions in advertising, and uniting women against racism.⁠
⁠
Read more about See Red Women’s Workshop in our book, Strikethrough: Typographic Messages of Protest. ⁠ https://letterformarchive.org/shop/strikethrough-typographic-messages-of-protest/
⁠
#IWD #InternationalWomensDay #Strikethrough #LetterformArchiveBooks #PublicationDesign #Printing #Publication #LetterformArchive #Typography #TypographyBooks⁠ #SeeRedWomensWorkshop

Yes, I was very late reading this week's E-Sylum, why do you ask? 😁

Late or not, it is always an interesting read, and well worth subscribing as there are many more articles than the few I share! Go to this week's newsletter (or any week's): https://www.coinbooks.org/v29/esylum_v29n09.html

And look for the "Click here to subscribe" link to get it yourself each week.

#Numismatics #Publication #Newsletter #News #CoinCollecting #SaturdayNightCoinShow @numismatics

Yes, I was very late reading this week's E-Sylum, why do you ask? 😁

Late or not, it is always an interesting read, and well worth subscribing as there are many more articles than the few I share! Go to this week's newsletter (or any week's): https://www.coinbooks.org/v29/esylum_v29n09.html

And look for the "Click here to subscribe" link to get it yourself each week.

#Numismatics #Publication #Newsletter #News #CoinCollecting #SaturdayNightCoinShow @numismatics

Yes, I was very late reading this week's E-Sylum, why do you ask? 😁

Late or not, it is always an interesting read, and well worth subscribing as there are many more articles than the few I share! Go to this week's newsletter (or any week's): https://www.coinbooks.org/v29/esylum_v29n09.html

And look for the "Click here to subscribe" link to get it yourself each week.

#Numismatics #Publication #Newsletter #News #CoinCollecting #SaturdayNightCoinShow @numismatics

Yes, I was very late reading this week's E-Sylum, why do you ask? 😁

Late or not, it is always an interesting read, and well worth subscribing as there are many more articles than the few I share! Go to this week's newsletter (or any week's): https://www.coinbooks.org/v29/esylum_v29n09.html

And look for the "Click here to subscribe" link to get it yourself each week.

#Numismatics #Publication #Newsletter #News #CoinCollecting #SaturdayNightCoinShow @numismatics

Yes, I was very late reading this week's E-Sylum, why do you ask? 😁

Late or not, it is always an interesting read, and well worth subscribing as there are many more articles than the few I share! Go to this week's newsletter (or any week's): https://www.coinbooks.org/v29/esylum_v29n09.html

And look for the "Click here to subscribe" link to get it yourself each week.

#Numismatics #Publication #Newsletter #News #CoinCollecting #SaturdayNightCoinShow @numismatics

Mes abonnés sur TikTok https://tozounoir.zouluvo.com/mes-abonnes-sur-tiktok/

#recapitulatif #abonnes #followers #reseauxsociaux #tiktok #youtube #progression #croissance #statistiques #contenu #videos #publication #communaute #audience #createur #motivation #perseverance #visibilite #engagement #partage #internet #plateforme #chat #animal #detente #quotidien #galerie #exterieur #creativite #video

Our newest publication is out!

We showed that the yeast core factor (CF) binds and specifically recognizes promoter DNA in a two-step process, after which it will recruit RNA Polymerase I, inducing DNA bending and melting to start the transcription process.

https://academic.oup.com/nar/article/54/5/gkag153/8495788

#academicChatter #publication #science #nucleicAcidsResearch #nucleicAcids #yeast #dna #transcription

Hey #AcademicFedi I need your opinion on something 🙏

I was recently asked to review on a platform I did not know: https://www.qeios.com

Anyone knows about it? It did not seem too fishy at a glance but their economic model and who is behind it is not entirely clear to me so I'm a bit wary of potential link with people with an agenda (almost got bitten before).
So I'm not sure I want to encourage people to use that can of platform instead of, say, @PeerCommunityIn until I know more about them and the guarantees that all the content will not be lost five years from now...

All opinions, feedbacks, or boosts are welcome 🙂

#academia #academicChatter #ESR #helpESR #askESR #review #journal #publication #scientificPublication #scientificPublishers

L' #algorithme de #X pourrait #orienter les #utilisateurs vers des positions plus conservatrices selon des #chercheurs , selon une #publication d’une #étude #scientifique dans #Nature

On s'en doutait déjà.
La #science l'a maintenant prouvé

https://www.frandroid.com/culture-tech/web/2982423_comment-lalgorithme-de-x-peut-vous-rendre-conservateur

L' #algorithme de #X pourrait #orienter les #utilisateurs vers des positions plus conservatrices selon des #chercheurs , selon une #publication d’une #étude #scientifique dans #Nature

On s'en doutait déjà.
La #science l'a maintenant prouvé

https://www.frandroid.com/culture-tech/web/2982423_comment-lalgorithme-de-x-peut-vous-rendre-conservateur