Carceral Nation
How the Prison Escaped Its Walls and Made a Panopticonic Society. 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. Beginning with colonial lantern laws and moving through Bentham's panopticon, Foucault's theoretical escalation, the Cold War intelligence apparatus, the post-9/11 mass surveillance state, and the neighborhood platforms where citizens now report one another's movements, this book documents how a nation built on liberty constructed an invisible infrastructure of observation. Fifteen chapters across five parts, drawn from twenty years of writing on the Panopticonic blog and CarceralNation.com. The walls came down. The logic walked out through the gap.
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Selling Saturday Morning
Television, Advertising, and the Making of the Child Consumer. 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. This book reconstructs the twelve-year period between 1968 and 1980 in which five interlocking mechanisms taught American children the Grammar of Want: recognition, desire, articulation, normalization, and repetition. When regulators tried to stop it, they lost. The architecture survived its medium, migrated into cable, then the internet, then the algorithm, and it is still training children on every screen that has followed.
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The Human Universal Beautiful
How Civilizations See, Shape, and Rank the Human Form. An infant, hours old, will look longer at a face that adults rate as attractive. That perceptual tendency is real, measurable, and early-emerging. And no civilization has ever left it alone. Greece built a proportional canon. Egypt encoded the human figure in a grid. The Mende transmitted beauty standards through initiation societies. The Maya reshaped the skulls of their infants. Colonial empires ranked skin color into a global hierarchy of worth. The cosmetics industry monetized the tendency toward clear skin. Algorithms now generate beautiful faces that belong to no one. This book traces the institutional conversion of beauty from perception to system across ten chapters, eight scholarly traditions, and four thousand years of human history.
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The Likeness
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. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, Sinclair Lewis's Elmer Gantry, and Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, the novel traces the life cycle of a fabricated weapon through four perspectives: the technician who builds it, the official it destroys, the journalist who publishes it, and the public that consumes it.
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The Counterfeit Bargain
What We Gain and Lose When We Accept the Fake. The audiobook edition is narrated by a synthetic voice; no human speaker performed these sentences. The author chose a synthetic narrator because the book asks the listener to examine every bargain between the real and the fabricated, including this one. Nine species of fake, from the criminal to the socially necessary, pressure-tested against twelve domains: currency, art forgery, luxury goods, intellectual property, identity, social performance, theatrical fiction, corporate branding, propaganda, synthetic media, and the cumulative cost these domains impose on a civilization's capacity to tell things apart.
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The Broadway Machine
Forty-One Houses and the Architecture of an Art Form. On a Wednesday afternoon in midtown Manhattan, 25,000 people are sitting in the dark inside forty-one theatres owned, with near-total statistical certainty, by one of three organizations. A structural analysis of how Broadway functions as a system: ten interlocking components from the real estate cartel to the Tony Awards complex, each with its own history, its own internal logic, and its own consequences for the art that gets made and the art that does not. Why does a machine generating $1.89 billion in annual revenue find it harder than ever to sustain the conditions under which new work can survive?
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The Borrowed Saint
A Horror in Five Skins. A boy stands in a bathroom and discovers his face can change. Asa Greer is five years old when the mirror shows him the features of the boy next door, worn on his own skull. The borrowed face lasts three seconds. The cost is permanent. Over fifty years, he consumes more than a hundred faces, ascending to institutional power on a performed kindness his body is allergic to, while the one man whose authentic goodness he can never replicate works unseen in the infrastructure beneath the city. A horror novel about the distance between a window and a painting of a window.
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Fractional Fiction
View Series →A Series by David Boles
Classic literature meets contemporary research. Each novel synthesizes a public domain masterwork with modern science.
The Likeness
Voice cloning and the machinery of fabrication. What happens when ninety-three seconds of synthetic speech can destroy a career built over fifteen years?
Standard Deviation
Five characters caught in a municipal scoring system. What happens when the human body is inscribed within digital circles and squares?
Civility Certified
A dossier novella. What happens when access becomes a credential? A bureaucratic horror story told through the documents themselves.
The Somnambulist's Prophecy
Prophetic somnambulism and the burden of foreknowledge. What do we owe to visions we never asked for?
The Corollary
Women's witness networks in WWI. One refusal to say amen becomes an act of international resistance.
The Held Land
Black land dispossession and inherited memory in Nebraska. Three families, 159 years, one quarter-section of prairie.
The Dying Grove
Fungal consciousness and networked memory in the Pacific Northwest.
The Inheritance
Epigenetic trauma and family secrets in Nebraska.
The Kinship of Strangers
Genetic identity and unexpected connection.
The EleMenTs Series
View Series →A Trilogy by David Boles
Disabled superheroines of earth. Power that exists because of disability, not despite it.
Beneath the City
Elle commands wind. Meen controls fire. Teena moves earth. In the tunnels beneath New York, three girls discover what they can do.
The Invisible Hand
Tal arrives with power over water. Prometheus Applied Sciences springs its trap. Four elements, four girls, one choice.
The Reckoning
The fight goes to Washington. A Senate hearing. A shadow corporation exposed. The conclusion.
The Westborough Crusaders
View Trilogy →A Trilogy by David Boles
Eight scripts. Two episodes. One trilogy. A 1982 television series becomes three novels about a high school newspaper, a dying boy, and the adults who failed all of them.
The Year Before the Wire
The summer and school year before the cameras arrive. Ares, Crew, Stan, and eight lives converging toward a sophomore year that will change everything.
A Farewell to Shins
The eight episodes. The cameras record what the hallways produce. Tiffany Brass arrives. Stan disappears into the bottle. Bergie carries the paper bag to school.
The Stopped Clock
The year after the wire goes dark. Consequence, recovery, and the question of what remains when the cameras leave.
ASL Linguistics for Practitioners
View Series →A Series by David Boles & Janna Sweenie
The rigorous linguistic and pedagogical framework that advanced signers need. Three volumes covering arm biomechanics, spatial grammar, and non-manual syntax.
Arm Angles in ASL
Where does a sign live in space, and why does placement matter? The biomechanical coordinate system of the arms and hands, formalized for instruction.
Depicting Space
Classifiers as a grammatical system, not a handshape list. How signers construct, reference, and manipulate spatial relationships through classifier morphology.
Beyond the Hands
The face and body govern grammar. Eyebrow position marks questions, gaze assigns reference, body shift drives role play. Non-manual syntax, systematized.
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