David Boles

David Boles is a book author, mega-media publisher and Blues guitarist.

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Getting Back Into the Swing: The Bell in the Corner

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The Number on the Wall: Why Physicists Call 137 Magic I came to 137 the way most people come to it, by hearing it called a magic number and wanting to know whether the word was earned.... https://bolesblogs.com/2026/06/03/the-number-on-the-wall-why-physicists-call-137-magic/

The Number on the Wall: Why Physicists Call 137 Magic

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The Book I Could Not Afford to Get Wrong Every book I take on carries some risk, and on most of them the risk is mine alone.... https://bolesblogs.com/2026/06/02/the-book-i-could-not-afford-to-get-wrong/

The Book I Could Not Afford to Get Wrong

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The Listener Will See You Now Ambient AI now records the conversation at the hospital bed and the exam table. The microphone is optional, for the moment....

The Listener Will See You Now

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Stop Applauding the Forced Apology

There is no such thing as a sincere statement made with a boot on the neck, and we have built a culture that pretends otherwise.Watch what happens now when someone steps out of line. A demand goes up for a statement. The statement arrives, in the approved shape, full of the approved words, and a crowd gathers to judge whether the sorrow inside it looks real enough to accept. We have a name for…

Stop Applauding the Forced Apology

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Backstage Collapsed: Universal Recording and the Architecture of Courtship

A panelist on a recent broadcast conversation made the following argument. Young people across the wealthy world are not having children. Before they do not have children, they do not date. Before they do not date, they do not interact at the dances, the parties, the mixers their parents and grandparents used as the primary infrastructure for finding mates. Even when they show up at such…

Backstage Collapsed: Universal Recording and the Architecture of Courtship

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The Lack of the Ack, Sixteen Years On

In February of 2010, I wrote about a small but symptomatic failure in our digital manners. Young people, then aged eighteen to twenty, would send you a message, receive your reply, and disappear. No acknowledgement, no “Ok,” no “Got it,” just the digital equivalent of someone slamming the door after asking you a question through the mail slot. The piece was called “How to Ack Back,” and the…

The Lack of the Ack, Sixteen Years On

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What the Dramatist Knows About Monsters

I sold my first paid byline to a Lincoln, Nebraska, newspaper at the age of ten. That was 1975. In the fifty-one years since, I have continued to be paid to construct figures that audiences will find frightening, or sympathetic, or contemptible, or laughable, on schedule, in plays and musicals and screenplays and novels and podcast scripts and editorial work. My Dramatists Guild membership dates…

What the Dramatist Knows About Monsters

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Magnifica Humanitas: The Pope Writes Like the Machine He Fears

On 15 May 2026, Pope Leo XIV released Magnifica Humanitas, an encyclical letter “On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.” The document runs roughly 35,000 words across five chapters and a conclusion. It positions itself as the 135th-anniversary successor to Leo XIII’s 1891 Rerum Novarum, recasting that founding labor encyclical for the age of machine intelligence.…

Magnifica Humanitas: The Pope Writes Like the Machine He Fears

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Has Technology Ever Reduced Labor?

Has technology ever reduced labor? The question sounds rhetorical. We carry small computers that answer any factual query in seconds, our laundry tumbles itself clean while we sleep, our cars drive themselves on highways our great-grandparents traveled by mule. Of course technology has reduced labor. The question barely needs asking. Continue reading Has Technology Ever Reduced Labor?

Has Technology Ever Reduced Labor?

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The Golden Age of Deafness: 1991, Tanya Towers, and the Long Erosion After

There was a year, exact and bounded, when the world we built held together. 1991. David and I had just celebrated our third wedding anniversary. He had finished his MFA at Columbia that spring under Peter Stone. I had just started teaching ASL at New York University, where I have now taught for thirty-five years. I had come east from Iowa, where I attended the Iowa School for the Deaf from first…

The Golden Age of Deafness: 1991, Tanya Towers, and the Long Erosion After

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The Wealth Defense Industry and the Working-Class Republic: What Equity Means Here

Henry Demarest Lloyd’s 1894 Wealth Against Commonwealth made the case that liberty produces wealth, and wealth destroys liberty. The question 132 years later is whether equity against the one percent can still be won inside a system they pay to keep tilted. Equity against the one percent describes parity of political voice, of legal protection, of access to courts and schools and air and water…

The Wealth Defense Industry and the Working-Class Republic: What Equity Means Here

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The Corner Store at the End of the World

Every local prepper carries the same private film in his head. He is the survivor. The neighbors who laughed at the Costco pallets and the propane tanks and the blue tarp over the generator are huddled in their cold houses while his basement lights still burn through week three of the outage. He sits on the front porch with a rifle across his knees, finally vindicated, the man on the block who…

The Corner Store at the End of the World

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Notes on Tomorrow as Tribute

The book is out. The title is Tomorrow as Tribute: The Politics of the Burnt Future. It is available in paperback, in Kindle, and as a free web edition through David Boles Books. The audiobook is in production with narrator selection underway. The web edition is free because I want the argument to circulate as widely as possible. Continue reading Notes on Tomorrow as Tribute

Notes on Tomorrow as Tribute

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The Senator Who Used to Be Cory Booker

We taught at Rutgers-Newark in the same years, before he was mayor, before the Senate, before the rebranding. We shared a building lobby on University Avenue. I never shook his hand. I did not need to. Everyone on that campus knew Cory. He pulled the air toward him when he walked through a door, a Rhodes Scholar, a Yale-trained lawyer who had chosen Newark when he could have chosen Manhattan or…

The Senator Who Used to Be Cory Booker

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Stored Sun: What a Book Actually Is

Ask ten readers what a book is and you will get ten metaphors and no definitions. A mirror, they say, or a door, or a passageway with footfalls behind it. The metaphors flatter the reader and obscure the object. None of them tell you what is sitting on your shelf, dark and patient, while you sleep. Here is the answer. A book is stored sun. Continue reading Stored Sun: What a Book Actually Is

Stored Sun: What a Book Actually Is

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Still Eating Your Patients

Seventeen years ago I asked whether every veterinarian should be required to be a vegetarian. The question has sharpened since then. The right word now is vegan, because the line between dairy cow and veal calf is no longer plausibly deniable, and because the climate science on animal agriculture has overrun the old fence between eggs and the slaughterhouse. The provocation in 2009 was short,…

Still Eating Your Patients