David W. Boles

In 2002 a public health director in Newark asked a dramatist whether he knew the word nosocomial. He did not. Nor did any of the graduate students in the room he taught the following week.Nosocomial means hospital-acquired. It names the illness a patient walks in without and walks out carrying...

Two words in red ink killed a screenplay and began a book. In 1985 a young dramatist sent a teleplay about William Jennings Bryan to a historian for review. It came back with BAD DRAMA scrawled across the title page, and the play was buried.

In the spring of 1973, a teacher in a Lincoln, Nebraska classroom handed an eight-year-old boy a blue armband marked S, for slave, and set the brown-eyed children over him for the day. The next morning the roles reversed. No one in that room was Black. The lesson, the teacher said, was empathy.

Three teenage girls. Three disabilities. Three elemental powers. Elle is Deaf, navigating a hearing world through lip-reading and American Sign Language. Meen lost her sight at nine and rebuilds reality through sound and temperature.

At the Emain Institute, a private psychiatric facility on the Hudson River, Dr. Francis Morrow documents patients whose visions defy clinical explanation. Cesare speaks prophecies in his sleep. Deirdre sees her own death in multiple versions, each ending different, none of them false.

A pack of wolves and a besieging army are doing the same thing. So are a surveillance state, a spreading wildfire, a cornered commodity market, and a species sliding toward extinction. In each case something is being closed in on, and its room to move is shrinking toward a single point.Synalosis...

What do the living owe the dead?Emma Vogel finds a photograph in her father's nightstand two days before they bury him: a young man in uniform, a young woman with dark eyes, and a name on the back—Ruth, 1946. The photograph her father carried for more than fifty years. The secret that changed...

Four disembodied cat heads drift through deep space in Life Helmets, searching for their missing bodies. A puppy head who has never had a body searches with them. The soup is stirring in the wrong direction. The quest continues. Whiskerfluff is the captain because someone has to be.

The Confederacy lost the war and won the memory. Its armies were destroyed, its claim to nationhood erased, and the idea those armies carried into the field outlived them all. In The Synthetic Cause, David Boles traces how a beaten cause captured the story of its own defeat.

An argument for taking a stolen title back. In 1595, in the Italian city of Padua, a medical student climbed a dark staircase and came out standing at a wooden rail, inside a funnel of carved walnut six galleries deep, every eye aimed at one lit table.

Sixty years ago, Peter Brook opened The Empty Space with a bare stage, a man walking across it, and someone watching, and the theatre took the sentence as scripture. The Occupied Space answers at the anniversary: the floor was never bare.

In 1545, the richest vein of silver ever found split open a mountain in the Andes.

Ottawa, February 2022. Canadian banks freeze the accounts of protest donors without a court order, and people learn at store counters that their cards have stopped working.

Verlin Bluffs, Nebraska. For more than a century a Black funeral house has kept the county's dead: washed, carried, and entered by name in a register whose Remarks column holds what no courthouse form would take.

Everyone is your friend now. The word that once required an altar can be had for a thumb. For fifty years, David Boles ran his life on one blanket rule: if I know you, you are my friend.

On April 23, 2016, a warning went up in a comment thread beneath a blog entry about the ugly laws: the ADA is in danger, and the disabled are being propelled backward. Ten years later came the memorandum that proved the warning right. Back to Willowbrook is the record of how America taught...

The conquest of Native America is usually told as two thefts, the theft of the land and the killing of the people. Beyond the Burial Tree adds a third, harder to see because it left no acreage and no body count: the seizure of a people's authority over its own dead. The right to decide how the...

You have heard that the human attention span has fallen below a goldfish's. It is one of the most quoted statistics of the digital age, repeated in TED talks and tenth-grade classrooms, in newspaper trend pieces and the pitch decks of companies selling a cure for the affliction they just named.

On January 30, 2026, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting filed its Articles of Dissolution with the District of Columbia. The federation that had carried American public broadcasting from the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act through fifty-eight years of programming, political contestation, and...

To recant is to take back a belief in public, under pressure, in front of the people who demanded the reversal. The word carries an older sense underneath the modern one. It comes from the Latin for singing again, and the act it names is a song performed backward, on command, so that the saying...