David Boles

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.

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.

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 would take.

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.

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.

In 1545, the richest vein of silver ever found split open a mountain in the Andes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In the fall of 1984, in a darkened lecture hall at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, two professors offered competing arguments about why beauty matters. The art historian said beauty connects. The film scholar said beauty instructs. Both were right, and both were incomplete.

In the British Museum's Mesopotamian galleries, behind glass, sits a clay mask approximately three thousand eight hundred years old. The face was made to terrify. Hooded sockets sink the eyes into darkness, intestinal coils wrap the brow, and a chipped tooth grins from the left side of the mouth.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

On January 30, 2026, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting filed its Articles of Dissolution with the District of Columbia.

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.

Bologna, the 1920s. Giorgio Morandi spends his working life in a small room at 36 Via Fondazza, painting the same bottles and boxes from a low shelf. The objects barely change. The arrangements barely change. What changes across forty years is what Morandi sees in the space between the bottles.