Showing results by author "David Boles" in All Categories

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. Mittens is the navigator who feels phantom paws he cannot explain. Cookie Kitty is the engineer whose soup has become an eighteen-chapter emergency. Skeedootle is a puppy head sealed in a Life Helmet calibrated for a species she does not belong to, and she is the bravest creature on the ship.

In October 1972, a seven-year-old boy in Nebraska sat on red shag carpeting in front of a wood-grain television console and absorbed the full commercial curriculum of Saturday morning. He did not know he was being trained. That is the central finding of this book. Selling Saturday Morning reconstructs the twelve-year period between 1968 and 1980 in which American broadcast television built, contested, and politically ratified a commercial pedagogy of childhood.

There is a sign on a wall at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, mounted above a narrow shelf. The sign bears the universal symbol for Deaf access. The shelf once held a TTY, a text telephone that gave Deaf people their first access to instantaneous distance communication. The TTY is gone. The smartphone replaced it. The sign is still there, pointing to something that no longer exists. That empty shelf is the governing image of this book, because the pattern it represents is the story of every technology Western civilization has worshipped for the past century. Something arrives.

Robert was a garbage man before the system made such work obsolete. He spent decades watching what people threw away, learning the difference between what households claimed to value and what they actually discarded. He understood, long before the theorists caught up, that the person who decides what becomes trash holds invisible power over the world. Alma was designed to make humans comfortable while extracting information. She follows scripts optimized for efficiency. She is identical to ten thousand other units operating across the Eastern Administrative Zone.

A pharmacist's grandson discovers that art is the oldest prescription in Western civilization. For twenty-five centuries, from the Theatre of Dionysus to the infinite scroll on your phone, institutional art has functioned not as a liberating force but as a sedative: an analgesic for the pain of consciousness that keeps the patient still while the conditions producing the pain remain untouched. The beauty is real. The emotions are real. The catharsis is real. And the function of all of it is pharmacy. They can't help but stand. You are standing now. You just don't know it yet.

In March 1867, Ezekiel Washington, a Black veteran of the 5th U.S. Colored Troops, files a homestead claim on 160 acres of Nebraska prairie. He builds a soddie with his own hands, breaks the sod, plants corn, and waits for the land to become his. Five years later, a rigged hearing strips him of everything. In 1885, a Bohemian immigrant family purchases the land, never knowing who built the house they now call home. In 1993, Marcus Cole arrives at the prison built on that same ground. Over fifteen years, he learns the story of the man who first claimed it.

Walk south on Peachtree Street in downtown Atlanta on any Tuesday morning in 2026, and you will pass through more layers of surveillance than a federal inmate encountered in a maximum-security facility in 1975. You will not feel them. That is the point. Carceral Nation traces three centuries of surveillance, discipline, and control as they migrated from the prison yard to the schoolroom, the workplace, the digital platform, and the public square.

Nobody teaches you how to grieve. This is the strange truth at the center of an experience so common it touches every person who has ever lived long enough to lose someone. A hybrid cultural investigation and memoir that asks what grief is, where it comes from, who controls it, and what happens when the structures designed to support it are broken. From the neuroscience of loss to the mourning rituals of the Torajan highlands, the burning ghats of Varanasi, and the jazz funerals of New Orleans, this book traces grief across biology, history, culture, economics, and the deeply personal.

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 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. Ninety-three seconds of synthetic speech, engineered to pass forensic analysis, enters the public record through a local newspaper and dismantles the career, reputation, and civic identity of a woman whose only vulnerability was that she spoke in public. Drawing from D.W.

A boy stands in a bathroom and discovers his face can change. Asa Greer is five years old when the mirror shows him something that should be impossible: the features of the boy next door, worn on his own skull. The borrowed face lasts three seconds. The cost is permanent. He will never smell his own skin again. Over the next fifty years, Asa consumes more than a hundred faces. Each acquisition deposits a blueprint into his nervous system and extracts an irreversible sensory payment.

One year after going public, Elle, Meen, Teena, and Tal have become symbols in a national debate about powered individuals. Living in hiding on a Kansas farm, the four girls are summoned to Washington to testify before a Senate committee as Congress prepares to vote on the Protection and Integration Act—a bill that would require registration and monitoring of all people with abilities. Elle is Deaf and commands the wind. Meen is blind and controls fire. Teena has cerebral palsy and moves the earth. Tal is autistic and shapes water. Together, they are the EleMenTs.

An Autopsy of Urban Collapse. In late September 2013, a road crew buried 150-year-old cobblestones under fresh asphalt on Baldwin Avenue in the Jersey City Heights. Something durable was concealed beneath something disposable, for the convenience of the least permanent users of the road. That institutional habit, the preference for covering failure rather than studying it, is the subject of this audiobook.

Who decides what a character is on the American stage? The playwright who created the character, or the institution that controls the production?

Three months after escaping the tunnels beneath New York City, Elle, Meen, and Teena find themselves under constant surveillance. Prometheus Applied Sciences hasn't forgotten them, and a new operative named Sarah Miller has infiltrated their lives as a volunteer at the group home. Elle is Deaf and commands the wind. Meen is blind and controls fire. Teena has cerebral palsy and moves the earth itself. Together, they are the EleMenTs—three teenage girls whose names encode their identity and whose powers defy explanation.

Dr. Lena Vasquez sees something in the data that the statistics do not measure. A gravitational lensing researcher at the University of Chicago, Lena finds a periodic oscillation in the dark matter density profile of a candidate dark galaxy. The signal is faint but structured, repeating with a regularity that cold, collisionless dark matter should not produce.

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. Teena has cerebral palsy and fights for every inch of independence her wheelchair allows. Thrown together in a Bronx group home, they discover they share something beyond their status as "hard to place" foster children. Elle can command the wind with her hands. Meen controls fire and heat. Teena can sense and move the earth itself.

The title comes from "The Atomic Man," the seventh story in the collection, where a teenager named Calvin Reece understands what he has become. He has become light: the loneliest thing in the universe, touching everything, holding nothing. But the phrase describes all twelve protagonists. Each one reaches the world in some remarkable way and finds that the reach itself prevents the grasp. They affect everything around them and possess nothing of what they most need: ordinary human closeness, the unremarkable warmth of being known without being studied, feared, worshipped, or fled from.

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. A sentence written at noon arrives at six carrying a meaning the writer did not pack. The gap between sending and receiving is where meaning is made, lost, and transformed.

Abandoned in Place is a work of cultural criticism that traces the pattern of institutional abandonment from the personal to the political. Beginning with the author's own childhood, the book identifies the grammar by which abandonment is disguised: the passive voice that removes the actor, the euphemism that renames the departure, the appeal to inevitability that converts a decision into a condition, and the therapeutic instruction that recruits the abandoned into the management of their own forgetting.