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 circumstantial.

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 administrative processing unit named Alma. Today, their story is finally available to readers. The Last Living American White Male…

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 the covers appeared. That is not what happened.

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 owe the dead? Passage Land is my attempt to inhabit that question long enough to understand why it refuses resolution.

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 assertion, and vehemently so. The script is the work, he argued. The text is complete in itself. The playwright's obligation ends when the final period strikes the page.

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. That moment has arrived. The EleMenTs Series is complete, and all three novels are now available.

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 Technocrats, those right-brained architects of our algorithmic prisons, to view this behavior as consumption.

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 native signer's shoulders engage when emphasis requires it. The elbows extend and contract with meaning. The signing space expands for formal address and contracts for intimacy. The…

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 day. Just one. It wasn't one of twenty-seven burst-mode variations kept "just in case."

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, a haplogroup designation, a list of genetic relatives you never knew existed. The Kinship of Strangers, the third novel in the Fractional Fiction series…

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 earbuds and short video. It is a tempting story because it flatters our sense that we are witnessing a clean break with the past, a decisive turn of the wheel.

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 Fiction series, asks what happens when a scientist trained to study transgenerational trauma in laboratory mice discovers that the patterns she has been mapping exist in her own DNA.

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 economy: fewer publishers, fewer channels, slower production cycles, and a cultural aura around scarcity. In 2026, the belief is not merely old fashioned.

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 experiment in literary hybridization: what happens when you take the formal architecture of modernist masters and seed it with contemporary scientific research? The result is something that belongs fully to neither tradition but could not exist without both.

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 back at you with placid, unwavering agreement. It is the anxiety of a consensus of one; the quiet, digital loneliness of being the only person in your own universe.

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 mystery. It does not offer the satisfaction of solved cases or the comfort of justice delivered. It…

How Midwestern Football Schools Lost Their Educational Souls to the Altar of Commerce

This is the particular tragedy of sons against fathers. The father does not see it coming. The father still thinks of the son as his child, as someone he made, as someone who carries his hopes. The fa...

Hardcore ASL - American Sign Language consulting, fluency evaluation, program design, and curriculum development by Janna Sweenie and David Boles.

Martha's Vineyard. You know it now as a summer retreat for the wealthy, a place of pristine beaches and celebrity sightings. But between the late seventeenth century and the middle of the twentieth, s...

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 we may continue to publish this blog without advertising while still being able to cover our yearly, ongoing, online publication costs…

Listen to your own voice the next time you tell the truth. Notice how it flows, uninterrupted, from thought to speech. Now pay attention when you're about to lie. Feel it? That hesitation, that gather...

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 lost eras, and I fed the entire body of work into the AI maw. My digital soul, offered up for digestion and analysis...

Today, we are standing in the wings of the theater, looking out at the empty stage, asking ourselves a question about the ghosts that haunt the floorboards. We are talking about the "Original Cast Rec...