David Boles

In the last minutes of Robert Eggers's The Witch, a girl walks into a barn to meet the Devil in the shape of a black goat. That image is five thousand years old.When a community cannot face the truth about itself, it manufactures an outside and puts its fear there. It wants a face for that fear...

Paris, August 19, 1839. François Arago reads the technical details of Louis Daguerre's photographic process into the joint session of the Académie des Sciences and the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Within weeks the satirical press is mocking photographers as mechanics and copyists.

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...

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...

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...

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. Somebody owns it, somebody polices it, and somebody pays...

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 Greek word for a theater means the...

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. It wrote the...

In 1545, the richest vein of silver ever found split open a mountain in the Andes. The flood of new money made Spain an empire, enriched the merchants and the crown who stood beside the flow, and left the laborers, the savers, and the distant subjects to meet rising prices with wages that lagged...

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. Four years later, in January 2026, Canada's Federal Court of Appeal rules the emergency invocation behind those freezes...

"You owe me the name of the man who killed Odell Rooks, and I will take nothing in its place." 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...

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...

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. Then an actor he calls Curtis said six words in a rehearsal room, and a laugh came out where a sentence...

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...

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.

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...

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...

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...

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. Forty years later the writer went back to find out...