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This Is Not the World I Wanted to Leave for You: Reflections on Legacy, Loss, and the Future We Shape

I have been thinking a great deal lately about living and dying, and about the strange, stubborn human hunger to leave something meaningful behind. The faces of those I have known who have already passed return to me in quiet moments, and I find myself watching those who are, even now, nearing the end of their own stories. I also include my final braided prairie knot in that wondering. In the background of these thoughts runs a deeper worry, a shadow that lengthens each day: the growing political instability that presses in on the goodness of life and threatens the fragile hope we carry in our personal lives. I wonder, in darker hours, if all the labor, all the love, all the sacrifice we invest in this world will ever prove to be worth it. And then, as if called back from the edge of despair, I remember what my friend, mentor, and teacher, Dr. Howard Stein, told me as he lay dying at age 91.

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The Braided Prairie: Six Nebraskan Literary Voices on Land, Life, and Legacy

The American Great Plains have produced a literary tradition as vast and complex as the landscape itself. Nebraska, with its braided rivers and endless horizons, stands at the heart of this tradition, having shaped some of the nation’s most distinctive literary voices. From the rolling Sandhills to the fossil-rich badlands, from pioneer settlements to Native American territories, the state’s diverse geography has inspired equally diverse literary responses. This study examines six Nebraska authors who transformed their regional experiences into enduring art: Willa Cather, Mari Sandoz, John G. Neihardt, Loren Eiseley, Wright Morris, and Bess Streeter Aldrich. Each brought a unique perspective to bear on the Nebraska experience, from Cather’s lyrical immigrant sagas to Sandoz’s unflinching historical accounts, from Neihardt’s spiritual epics to Eiseley’s paleontological meditations, from Morris’s photographic existentialism to Aldrich’s domestic chronicles.

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Kamala On Men

As Kamala Harris takes the torch from Joe Biden, I am hopeful she can continue to win over those who do not believe a woman can be president. One of the major initiatives of her campaign will be the loss of autonomy for women in the reversal of Roe v. Wade. There is, however, a trap that is being set for her, and I want to bring attention to that trip wire and offer a resolution.

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The New Book Burning: Rewriting Roald Dahl

There’s nothing new in having established books censored. In 2011, I wrote about the concentrated effort to have Mark Twain’s books “rewritten” and “edited” without him. Today, there is a similar effort to “rewrite” and “edit” the fine work of author Roald Dahl. These reverse efforts, after publication, to quiet the writer’s voice through “social context” editing, is absolutely the same as burning books on a wood pyre — but with the excuse of protecting children. and of being sensitive to the new emancipation of provocative social norms.

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Boles.xyz, Post.News and Pixelfed Are the New Social Media

I finally took steps to distance myself from three moldy, overdead, social media services. I deactivated my verified Facebook business page with 17,000 followers. I also deactivated my Instagram account. I made my verified, 47,000 follower, Twitter account, private. I let go of those social media services because all three have lost the common touch. They’re run by robots, mastered by intentional cruelty, subjected to bad human policy decisions, bothered by awful automation and, in one case, a sort of madman rules the nest. Today, none of those ideations of those social media services are what they were when they started, and I made the decision to no longer be a part of the “creative community”  that makes content for those services just so mega media can sell advertising off our hard work. Enough!



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OpenAI Chat is the Unreal Uncanny

AI (Artificial Intelligence) is not only just coming for us — it’s already here and ready to stay. AI can create our Art, write our music, craft our blog articles, write our screenplays and even provide intelligent chat responses! OpenAI is a leader in this discovery of the coagulation of information — using both GPT-3 and GPT-4 we can suddenly become the smartest person in the room, but never the smartest person in chat — and OpenAI now have an interesting ChatBot that provides information and realizations that are both unreal and uncanny.

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Best of David Boles, Blogs: Vol. 12 (2021) is Available to Buy Now!

It’s that time of the year again — yes, time for us to ask for the pleasure of your continued, kind, support for this blog by joyously buying our eBook — Best of David Boles, Blogs: Vol. 12 (2021) — to show your support so we may continue to publish this blog without advertising while still being able to cover our yearly, ongoing, online publication costs that include server space, hosting fees, and bandwidth payments.

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The Sponsored Post Brigade

I’m not sure what’s going on with this blog, and my verified Facebook page, but over the last few months, I’ve been getting lots of requests — more than usual — to add paid links in my old articles as well as being offered “thousands of dollars” to post advertising on my Facebook page.

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The Lashed Author

We, as authors, are lashed upon the whale we hope to tame; we are lashed by our publishers against the rail, who fail to tame us; we are lashed by our detractors upon the sun, and, they too, cannot tame our darkness — and yet! — we still try to thrive in the memorialization of what we hope to know, and what we know must be shared. In the light of that pitiful delight, the Authors Guild have released a new report concerning the overall mean income for authors, and the results are astounding, resounding, and, unfortunately for too many of us, sublimely familiar.

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Trumpanization of a Nation

It seems insane that a man who has excellent government health insurance is able to lift himself from a surgeon’s table, hop a plane from Arizona to Washington, D.C. and then cast the Senate’s deciding vote opening the opportunity to strip healthcare protection from everyday citizens; but this is the world now in which we hurl, where the sky is green, and the Grim Reaper is now the Giver of Life, and facts are lies, and the truth isn’t published anywhere, and can never be known — because nothing is understandable, and everything else is just all made up to set up the next spin of a still life into a grave.

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