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The Clock Came Off the Wall

In the spring of 2018, schools in England started taking analog clocks down from the walls of their examination halls. The reason arrived in the education press without a trace of shame: teenagers sitting their exams could no longer read a dial, they grew anxious watching a circle that told them nothing, and the schools judged it kinder to remove the clock than to teach the child. A deputy leader of the head teachers’ association explained that students were more accurate with digital displays. So the ladders went up, the hands came down, and an instrument that had governed rooms of learning for two centuries was carried to the storage closet as a courtesy to the people it once served. I have kept that ladder in my head ever since, because it shows the modern school system performing its signature move in a single gesture: confronted with an untaught skill, remove the evidence.

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The Silo Remembers the Harvest

From Nebraska to New York, the silos are hollow until hallowed. The elevator starts before the sun does. On a November morning in 2019, I stood by a rail siding in a county-seat town in Nebraska and watched a truck empty itself into the pit while the leg lifted the corn a hundred feet into the headhouse, kernel by kernel, out of sight. What stays with you is the sound. A grain elevator at work has a voice like weather, a steady granular rain inside a concrete throat, and the dust it exhales catches the first light and holds it for a moment above the tracks. The building does one thing a child could explain: it keeps the harvest, standing at the edge of town, taller than the church, the courthouse, and the water tower, doing that one thing for a hundred years. Yet the same word that names this building now names the most despised structure in American institutional life. Say “silo” in a boardroom or a hearing room and the response arrives on reflex: break them down. Somewhere between the rail siding and the hearing room, the container became the crime.

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The Whole Boodle

People keep asking me one question, so here is the answer, whole: the history, the intention, the meaning, the being, and, at the end, the me. “What’s a Boodle Boy?” I get the question at dinner tables, in podcast mail, in the pause after a lecture when someone has finally worked up the nerve. My business cards claim the title. My websites announce it. A consultancy of my own wears the name. The asker usually half-expects a punchline, because the phrase sounds like something a vaudeville comic would shout while falling off a stage, and some people assume the whole thing is a pun on Boles. Those vowels help, I admit. History does the heavy lifting. The honest answer needs a Sunday night in 1974, a Dutch probate record from 1699, a safe-deposit vault stuffed with bribe money in St. Louis, a candy raid at West Point, and a banana leaf piled with garlic rice somewhere on Luzon. It also needs a teenaged cadet holding a pot of coffee. Pour yourself a cup, and I will lay the whole boodle on the table.

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In Chicago, the Deaf Will Sing Don Giovanni

Since we opened ASL-Opera.com in September 2023, one question has arrived more often than any other: how rare is it, exactly, for an opera company to present a foreign-language title in American Sign Language? The question deserves a documented answer, and this fall Chicago supplies the occasion. Lyric Opera of Chicago opens its 2026-27 season with Mozart’s Don Giovanni, October 10 through November 1, 2026, in the Robert Falls production, Enrique Mazzola conducting, Christian Van Horn in the title role, the capstone of the company’s Mozart and Da Ponte trilogy. Inside that run sits something the season coverage barely mentions: a designated ASL performance on Sunday, October 18, at 2 p.m., which the company’s own production page marks on its ticketing calendar and describes plainly, all dialogue and lyrics translated into American Sign Language by “two certified interpreters located near the stage,” with select seats reserved for the sightlines a signed performance demands. Lyric has loaded the same matinee with its other access services, audio description and the haptic SoundShirt, a garment that lets the wearer feel the orchestra on the skin in real time. An Italian opera from 1787, interpreted live in ASL, on a major American mainstage, sold inside the regular season. In a healthy art form that sentence would read as routine. In the American record it reads as an event, and the distance between routine and event is the subject of this article.

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The Metropolitan Opera is Dying Because It Wants to Die

The pinnacle of the Performing Arts in America is collapsing not from the weight of its chandelier, but from the brittleness of its imagination. The Metropolitan Opera has chosen extinction over evolution, and the evidence is no longer circumstantial.

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Announcing Prairie Voice: Where Yesterday’s Wisdom Meets Tomorrow’s Questions

Prairie Voice launches today, not because the world needs another website, but because the present has become incomprehensible without the past. We live in an age of unprecedented change, facing questions that feel entirely new: How do we maintain human connection through screens? What does work mean when we produce nothing tangible? How do we raise children when childhood itself has been digitized? These questions aren’t new. They’re variations on themes our ancestors knew intimately. Prairie Voice exists to excavate that buried wisdom and translate it for contemporary crisis.

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1984: Murder in F-flat at the Daily Nebraskan

1984 was an interesting time to be alive, because you felt, every day, as if you were living in the George Orwell novel of the same name. Reagan was president, and the world seemed to be collapsing around you — likely just as many of us feel today with another, repressive, Republican president. 1984 also happened to be the year I started writing for the Daily Nebraskan — the school newspaper for the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. I was a Sophomore in 1984, and I was writing a weekly, serialized, novel called “Murder in F-Flat” — in the wake of Mark Twain, and others like him — and the effort was curious, odd, joyful, frustrating, and purely delightful.

1984 was the dawn of the Personal Computer Age, and while we could save electronic copies of our writing, the work was stored on a fragile 5 1/4″ floppy disk that was kept in a sleeve because its magnetic surface was exposed to the elements. You wrote on the computer, printed out your articles, handed in the paper, and an editor retyped what you wrote into their computer. Yes, you saved what you wrote, but retrieving it later, was an issue then, as it is now; so when I discovered yesterday that the Daily Nebraskan archives for 1984-1987 were now online, I pounded my memory to try to remember when, and what, I wrote in 1984; and the key to the memory trick was my 1984 September 28 pay stub from the Daily Nebraskan. I remembered a check was cut for us every 30 days and each article paid $10.

My search began, and ended, in money — and now I present to you what I was able to find — four FIVE installments of “Murder in F-flat” by Dave Boles! I think a couple of episodes are missing from the online archive; I will keep an eye on that Daily Neb portal, and if the other stories flash into the now from the past, I will dutifully update this article! If you prefer a larger version to read, please head over to my Boles.com Periodicals Archive.

August 22, 1984
(UPDATE: 5-31-10 — I found the first installment!)

August 31, 1984
Too bad you can’t see the whole graphic logo for the column — and today, you’d never want a graphic byline, because your name would never index online as text — “Murder in F-flat” is stylized, and hand-drawn, and I wish I could remember the artist’s name. I just realized now, the pen doing the writing, is being held the wrong way, and is actually stabbing me, the author, in the chest. Murder, indeed! The opening reference to “last week” tells me at least one previous episode installment is missing, so we’re leaping into the story mid-stream.

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