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…

The Applause of Fools: How Erasmus Predicted Every Century After His Own In 1509, Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, writing from the restless perch of Thomas More's London house, composed The Praise of Folly (Moriae Encomium) in the span of roughly a week. The book was a satirical grenade lobbed at…

The Great Audio Laundering: How AI Scammers are Highjacking the ACX Premium Market and Defrauding the Human Soul The digital landscape of 2026 was supposed to be a golden age for the independent author, a time when the friction between a creative vision and a global audience finally dissolved into…

The People We Cannot See: What Dark Matter Galaxies Tell Us About Invisible Life In February 2026, astronomers confirmed the existence of a galaxy called CDG-2 that is, for all practical purposes, invisible. Sitting in the Perseus galaxy cluster some 300 million light-years from where you are…

The Westborough Crusaders: The Trilogy That Took Forty-Four Years to Earn Its Novels Some work waits for you. Not patiently. Not the way a dog waits by the door, loyal and uncomplicated. It waits the way a diagnosis waits in a family's bloodline, silently present, expressing itself in symptoms you…

The Zeroing of Knowledge: When Everything Is Known, What Remains Worth Learning? Knowledge used to be expensive. It cost years of apprenticeship, tuition in the tens of thousands, decades of practice, and, more than anything, the brutal currency of time. A physician spent twelve years beyond high…

The Conceit of the Clock: Aristotle, Time, and the Hunger That Devours Us Aristotle opens his investigation of time in Book IV of the Physics with a question so destabilizing it threatens to collapse the inquiry before it begins: does time even exist? His reasoning is not coy. The past has ceased…

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…

Cat Heads in Space: The Novel That Grew a Body Some books begin as sentences. Others begin as outlines or fragments scrawled on napkins at two in the morning. This one began as a sound. Specifically, it began as the sound of my own voice reading a line about a cat head floating through space in a…

Beautiful Numbness: The Book I Have Been Writing for Fifty Years Every book has a birthday, but not every book has a conception date. Some books arrive late and fast, fully formed, demanding to be transcribed before they vanish. The Last Living American White Male was like that. Others accumulate…

The Metropolitan Opera is Dying Because It Wants to Die The pinnacle of the Performing Arts in America is collapsing not from the weight of its chandelier, but from the brittleness of its imagination. The Metropolitan Opera has chosen extinction over evolution, and the evidence is no longer…

The Last Living American White Male: A Novel of Obsolescence and Love The title may make you uncomfortable. That was the point. For the past year, I have been living inside a grey city that exists only in my imagination, spending my days with a garbage man named Robert James Miller and an…

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…

Passage Land: What Do the Living Owe the Dead? Some questions cannot be answered. They can only be inhabited. For sixteen decades, three families have occupied the same stretch of Nebraska prairie, and for sixteen decades they have been asking variations of the same question: what do the living…

The Unfinished Work: Why Artists Demand Proof of Life A playwriting teacher of mine once said something that has rattled around in my head for decades: "You can write a play, but it doesn't exist until it finds life in the first production." The Chair of our department disagreed with that…

The EleMenTs Series Is Complete: A Young Adult Fantasy Trilogy Twenty years ago, I began imagining a story about three disabled teenage girls who discover they possess elemental powers. The idea stayed with me, growing and changing as I grew and changed, waiting for the right moment to be told.…

Memory in the Meme We live in an age of disposable context. We scroll through the infinite ribbon of the glass screen, pausing only for a microsecond to register a flicker of recognition before sliding our thumb upward, condemning the moment to the digital abyss. We have been trained by the…

Arm Angles in American Sign Language: The Textbook That Teaches What Other Textbooks Ignore Watch any native signer and then watch an intermediate student. The difference is not in the handshapes. It is not in the facial expressions, though those matter. The difference lives in the arms. The…

The Weight of the Digital Attic Sorting through a box of family photos in Nebraska last year, the physical weight of them stopped me. It wasn't just the heavy cardboard. It was the specific gravity of each print. I held a single, fading photograph of folks I did not know, captured on their wedding…

The Kinship of Strangers: When DNA Reveals What Identity Cannot Accept Some truths arrive uninvited. They come in the mail, in the form of a cardboard box containing a plastic tube, a prepaid envelope, and instructions for depositing saliva. Six weeks later, they return as a percentage breakdown,…

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…

The Inheritance: When the Body Remembers What the Mind Cannot Some secrets do not stay buried. They write themselves into blood and bone. They pass from grandmother to mother to daughter through mechanisms we are only beginning to understand. The Inheritance, the second novel in the Fractional…

Stop Paying Rent on Your Own Words! Stop paying rent on your own words. For decades, writers were taught that “real” authors have representation, an agent, sometimes even a manager, as if legitimacy were a credential issued by an industry gatekeeper. That belief was formed in an older media…

The Dying Grove: A Novel Born from the Collision of Joyce and Mycorrhiza Some books are written. Others are grown. "The Dying Grove" belongs to the second category, and that distinction is not metaphor but method. This novel, the first in a new series called Fractional Fiction, emerged from an…

The Curated Self as the New Delusion There is a specific, modern anxiety that is difficult to name. It is not the dread of a specific event, but a low-grade, constant hum of disconnection. It’s the feeling of living in a world that is eerily frictionless, a world that reflects your own thoughts…

The Wound Remains Faithful: A Tragedy of Nora It has taken me more than fifty years to write this book. That sentence appears in the author's note, but it deserves to open this introduction because it explains everything that follows. The Wound Remains Faithful is not a thriller. It is not a…

Here's the average weight for Percy and Lotty, the -- bolesbrits.com -- over the last six months! If you haven't checked out our BolesBrits.com website in awhile, you should, because it has a whole new look (and so do all of our web properties!)

Here's my latest Prairie Voice article about old school Midwestern football and what it's become today with NIL and the lack of moral commitment to purpose: prairievoice.com/p/from-bugea...

The killing of Rob Reiner has many specific, and tragic echoes across history. Here's my attempt to understand the turning of a son against a father: humanmeme.com/hand-against...

Our new ASL Consulting page is now live: hardcoreasl.com/consulting.h...

Here's my latest Human Meme podcast about inclusion and language: humanmeme.com/marthas-vine...

Hey Now! Best of David Boles, Blogs: Vol. 16 (2025): Buy Now! Hey, there! Welp, it's that time of the year again -- yes, time for us to ask for the indulgence of your continued, kind, support for this blog by buying our eBook -- Best of David Boles, Blogs: Vol. 16 (2025) -- to show your support so…

Here's my latest Human Meme podcast episode about truthful lying: humanmeme.com/pause-before...

The Replicated Man: AI and the Ghost in the Archive I finally did it. I committed the act of digital suicide. It was a gesture of clinical curiosity and personal dread. I took twenty years of archives, every Boles Blogs entry, every "Best of" compilation, the discarded drafts, the love letters to…

Here's my take on the adaptation of Wicked from stage to screen in my latest Human Meme podcast episode: humanmeme.com/wicked-the-b...

Here's my latest Human Meme podcast episode about... string! humanmeme.com/how-long-is-...

Here's my review of the new Meta v2 glasses from Ray-Ban and Oakley! vimeo.com/1136287644

Here's my latest Human Meme podcast episode: humanmeme.com/every-word-c...

The Application of Imagination: Where Thought Becomes Matter Imagination without application remains a private theater, brilliant perhaps, but ultimately sterile. The history of human achievement suggests that genius resides not in the capacity to imagine alone, but in the peculiar ability to…

A -- Boles TV -- walk through the Jersey City Islands. vimeo.com/1134334570

Here's my latest Human Meme podcast! We cry because we can! humanmeme.com/the-liquid-l...

Here's a live walking test of the Meta v2 AI glasses on the streets of New York City. vimeo.com/1133512095?f...

Happy Halloween@

Here's my free-to-read Prairie Voice -- Blood Corn -- Halloween story for your frightful enjoyment! prairievoice.com/p/blood-corn

All new Halloween story posting tomorrow -- on PrairieVoice.com -- free for all to read... if you dare!

Here's my latest Human Meme podcast. It's a Halloween horror story for your total enjoyment! humanmeme.com/that-thing-t...

Here's my latest Human Meme podcast episode explaining the history and following of a "Boodle Boy" also found online the Dot Com! humanmeme.com/boodle-boy-a...

So, here's the real terror of AI. I can add my headshot -- or another photo -- and I "become myself" in my own AI video as a "fully realized human being!" AI fills in the all of me, and a new reality is created!

Announcing Prairie Voice: Where Yesterday’s Wisdom Meets Tomorrow’s Questions Prairie Voice launches today, not because the world needs another website, but because the present has become incomprehensible without the past. We live in an age of unprecedented change, facing questions that feel…

PrairieVoice.com coffee.