David Boles

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.

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 fall of 1984, in a darkened lecture hall at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, two professors offered competing arguments about why beauty matters. The art historian said beauty connects. The film scholar said beauty instructs. Both were right, and both were incomplete.

In 1862, President Lincoln signed the Homestead Act. The Act said that any American willing to settle on 160 acres of public land, live there for five years, and improve the parcel, could file a claim and receive title.

A Fractional Fiction Novel. A freelance audio engineer in Columbus, Ohio, is hired to clone the voice of a county commissioner and fabricate a recording of a conversation that never took place.

The light that touches your face right now left the sun eight minutes ago. You have never seen the present sun. No one has. Every act of writing shares this property. The moment a word is set down, it begins traveling away from the person who wrote it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

An argument against rule by the dead. In January of the year 897, the reigning pope had his predecessor's corpse pulled from its tomb, dressed in full vestments, propped upright, and put on trial in Rome.

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.

The Brittle Self is a history of one of the oldest fears a mind can hold: that the self is fragile, that it can be seen through, broken, switched off, or shown to be unreal.

In the British Museum's Mesopotamian galleries, behind glass, sits a clay mask approximately three thousand eight hundred years old. The face was made to terrify. Hooded sockets sink the eyes into darkness, intestinal coils wrap the brow, and a chipped tooth grins from the left side of the mouth.

In the Republic of Buryatia, in southern Siberia, the funerals come in a steady cadence. Since February 2022, Buryatia has supplied combat soldiers to the war in Ukraine at a per-capita rate among the highest of any region in the Russian Federation.

Ischia is Burning is a novel 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.