The Rented Mind
Education, the Unstealable Property, and the First Generation Asked to Borrow Its Own Intelligence. At 12:33 on an April afternoon in 2025, the Iberian grid lost fifteen gigawatts in five seconds, and two countries went dark. Police officers ran dead intersections with their hands, and shopkeepers made change the way their grandmothers had, out loud, coin by coin. Everything rented from the wire stopped that afternoon. Everything carried kept working. The offer on the table this decade is intelligence as a service, metered, priced by subscription, and delivered across a chain of dependencies that includes a power grid. Against the lease, the book sets the deed: a century of failed funerals for the classroom, the minds that crossed borders and outlived camps, the true terms of the rental, and the ten-to-twenty-year rebuild. The machine offers a deal. This book reads the fine print.
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Back to Willowbrook
The Slow Winning and Fast Losing of Disability Rights in America. The slow winning opens in May 1881, when Chicago made it unlawful for anyone “diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed” to appear in public view, and it runs through the wards of Willowbrook State School, the twenty-five-day occupation that forced Section 504 to be signed unchanged, and the week Gallaudet students seated a Deaf president, ending at the Americans with Disabilities Act. Then comes the fast losing: a 2026 memorandum adopting a reading of the law the federal courts have rejected, work requirements metering Medicaid by the reported hour, waiting lists growing where wards once stood. Inside the history stands a witness: Janna Sweenie has taught ASL at New York University since 1991 and spent two decades inside the systems this book documents. One window in the building is still lit. This book is the light in it.
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The Necessary Art
Aristotle's Six Elements in the Clinic, the Courtroom, the Proof, the Blueprint, and the Republic. In 1595 a medical student climbs a dark staircase in Padua and comes out at a wooden rail, inside a funnel of carved walnut six galleries deep, every eye aimed at one lit table. For most of Western history, art meant a principled, teachable discipline judged by its work, and the Poetics gave the physician, the advocate, the geometer, the builder, and the founder of a state one instrument: six load-points where a made thing carries weight. Then in 1746 a French abbé fenced the fine arts, Kant gave the wall its constitution, and everyone who works was put outside. The book clears four forgeries issued in Aristotle's name, then walks the five working rooms, from Harvey's seventy-two pages to the two Nurembergs. The wall is younger than the professions it divided. This book returns the title to its holders.
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Barbarous Ancestors
A Natural History of Rule by the Dead, from the Cadaver Synod to the Séance Court. In January of the year 897 the reigning pope had his predecessor pulled from the tomb, propped upright in the Lateran, and put on trial, with a junior deacon answering the prosecution in the dead man's voice. History shelves that morning as a freak show, and this book reads it as a working method, because the interrogation of the dead never stopped, and its newest bench is the highest court in America, where the recovered will of the founders keeps agreeing with the majority that summoned it. Jefferson supplied the title: we might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy. The antidote is on the cover, a seam of mismatched marble at a hundred and fifty feet, and the argument ends beneath it, on the side of the living.
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The Two Letters
The Golden Record, the Desert Warning, and the Direction of Human Hope. In the late summer of 1977 two spacecraft left Florida carrying ninety minutes of music, greetings in fifty-five tongues, a whale's song, and a newborn's cry. Sixteen years later a panel drafted the opposite message, cut for a nuclear waste grave in the New Mexico desert and meant to warn whoever digs there ten thousand years from now. One letter points up and says find us. The other points down and says flee. This book is the biography of both, from the committee that had to decide what four billion people sounded like to the atomic priesthood and the color-changing cats. We fling what we want at the sky, and we bury what happened in the ground. The sky has never sent a reply. The ground has never missed a delivery.
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The Wergild
A Black funeral parlor on the Missouri, 1919 to 2026, and the ledger that keeps what the county will not. One June morning the river gives up a man with no name, and the undertaker August Wardlaw buries him on the family's own account, then enters him twice in a tall marbled book: the county's answers on the left, and on the right, in a column headed Remarks, what no death certificate asks. American law never charged the man-price for the killings it sits on, the wergild the old courts levied on a killer to close a feud, so one family of undertakers assesses the debt itself and keeps the account open across a hundred and seven years and four generations. The debt for a death is a name. The century is the term of the loan.
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The Black Ram
The Single Beast Behind the Sacrifice, the Heresy, and the Purge, and What the Cast-Out Can Still Do. On a Paris morning in 1895 an army tore the braid from a captain's coat while the crowd screamed for his death, and the man was innocent, and everyone who mattered knew it. The same ceremony had already run for five thousand years: a community under strain loads its whole weight onto one marked victim and drives that victim out, and the calm that follows feels like proof. From the ram gods of the Nile through the witch fires to the show trials of the last hundred years, taking René Girard as its spine, the book argues it is one machine, and it closes on the ones who jammed it with their own hands. The book teaches you to know the ceremony before it starts.
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The Synthetic Cause
How the Confederate Idea Went Race-Neutral, Machine-Made, and Learned to Call Itself Truth. In 1861 three enslaved men rowed to a Union fort in Virginia and refused to be sent back, and by the war's end half a million more had walked off the land, the largest general strike in American history. The country was taught to forget it, and that erasure was the first work of the Lost Cause. This book follows the idea across a hundred and sixty years, out of the monuments and the schoolbooks, into the courts, onto the feed, and at last into the machine, where generative systems manufacture a plausible past on demand. The book arrives in the year the country turns two hundred and fifty. The fight over how it began has never been louder.
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Synalosis
The Single Shape Behind the Hunt, the Siege, and the Watch, and What a Target Can Still Do. A pack of wolves folds a moose into the corner of a marsh, a Roman army throws two walls around a trapped city, a surveillance system maps every road a life can travel. These pass for different subjects, and underneath they are one operation: take a target that still holds many possible futures and remove them, one at a time, until the single future left is its capture. This book names the operation, built from the Greek halosis, the fall of a besieged city, joined to syn, the many who close as one, and follows the shape from Caesar's wall at Alesia to the feed on the phone in your hand. The ring is already drawn around you. The seeing is the cut.
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The Eighteen-Minute Lie
How a Fake Number Convinced a Century It Had Lost Its Mind, and Who Got Rich Selling the Cure. In 2008 the author wrote that science had clocked the human attention span at around eighteen minutes, a figure he had pulled from the air and dressed in the authority of a lab report. The louder version beat his around the world: eight seconds, one tick below a goldfish. It carries a single defect. There was never a study, and there was never a goldfish. This book is the biography of that forgery, from the citation that points at nothing to the attention merchants who auction a human glance and rent you the app that promises it back. It ends on the reader who reached the last page and did the thing the panic swears can no longer be done.
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The Magnificent Loser
A Dramatist's Reckoning with William Jennings Bryan. In 1985 the author sent a teleplay about Bryan to the historian he most wanted to impress, and it came back with two words in red marker across the title page, BAD DRAMA, and no second page. The play went into a drawer for forty years, and this book is what came out of it. Most of us carry Bryan as the windbag at the Scopes trial; the record is larger. At thirty-six he gave the American farmer the cross of gold, and the program he kept losing on, the income tax, direct election, the vote for women, became the law of the land within a generation. It ends on what the author calls the third verdict, and it hands that verdict to you.
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Not My Thing
How We Teach Cruelty to Cure It, from the Armband to the Diversity Seminar. In the spring of 1973, a teacher in a Lincoln, Nebraska classroom handed an eight-year-old a blue paper armband marked S, for slave, set the brown-eyed children over him for the day, and called the lesson empathy. No one in that room was Black. This book is the case against that lesson and the whole family bred from it, the privilege walk, the poverty simulation, the scared-straight tour, the mandatory seminar, rituals that run on one machine: caste by accident, authority no one may refuse, licensed cruelty, an audience, and a reversal at the bell that gives the performance away. It is hard on the method and loyal to the goal, and it ends with an eight-year-old's refusal to wear the band.
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The Source Code of the Self
How a Playwright Wrote the Operating System of Popular Psychology. A man faces three boxes, gold, silver, and lead, and may open only one; the right box wins him the woman he loves, the wrong one sends him away for good. That is the casket scene from The Merchant of Venice, the most rigged fair contest in the language, and its work is to make an outcome settled in advance feel like a free choice earned by character. This book argues Shakespeare built a small machine in that scene and the machine never stopped running, into Freud's staged talking cure, the pricing decoy, and the feed that hands you a short row already selected. The only freedom the scene leaves open is the question it forbids: who set these three here, and what did they decide before I arrived?
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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 Wergild
A Black undertaker's parlor keeps a ledger from 1919 to 2026, recording what the county's death registers never asked. What does a family do when the debt owed for a killing will never be billed?
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.
An Institutional Autopsy
View Trilogy →A Trilogy by David Boles
Three long-form institutional histories, each at sufficient length to map an actual American architecture. Coroner-grade examination, primary sources, no policy recommendations.
Carceral Nation
Three centuries of American surveillance moving from the prison yard to every other institution. When the walls came down, the logic walked out through the gap.
The Claimed Body
American institutions divide the human organism among themselves under a registered-claim logic borrowed from the Homestead Act. The homestead did not end. It turned inward.
UNDERWRITTEN
The full institutional history of federated American public broadcasting, from the 1967 founding through the 2026 dissolution. The federation is not coming back.
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