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The Third Casket: How Shakespeare Taught Us to Choose the Thing We Cannot Refuse

A man walks into a room and finds three boxes waiting for him. One is gold, one is silver, one is lead. He has been told that his whole life turns on which one he opens, and that the rules forbid him to open more than one. The woman he wants stands beside the boxes, unable to help him, bound by a dead father’s will. This is the casket scene from The Merchant of Venice, and it is one of the strangest moments in Shakespeare, because the test is rigged twice over. It is rigged inside the play, where Portia’s dead father designed the riddle so that only a man who can see past surface will win her. It is rigged outside the play, in the deeper sense Freud uncovered in 1913, where the choice was never free at all, and the man was always going to reach for the box that means his death.

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The God in the Wire: The Book That Began with an Empty Shelf

I did not set out to write a book about technology. I set out to understand an empty shelf. The shelf is at LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City, Queens, mounted on a corridor wall beneath a sign bearing the universal symbol for Deaf access. The shelf once held a TTY, one of those text telephones that gave Deaf people their first access to instantaneous distance communication. The TTY is gone. The smartphone replaced it. The sign is still there, pointing to something that no longer exists. I saw it during a workshop break, in a hallway I had no reason to be in, and for the next several years I could not stop thinking about it.

The God in the Wire book cover

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The Unfinished Work: Why Artists Demand Proof of Life

A playwriting teacher of mine once said something that has rattled around in my head for decades: “You can write a play, but it doesn’t exist until it finds life in the first production.” The Chair of our department disagreed with that assertion, and vehemently so. The script is the work, he argued. The text is complete in itself. The playwright’s obligation ends when the final period strikes the page.

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The Wound Remains Faithful: A Tragedy of Nora

It has taken me more than fifty years to write this book. That sentence appears in the author’s note, but it deserves to open this introduction because it explains everything that follows. The Wound Remains Faithful is not a thriller. It is not a mystery. It does not offer the satisfaction of solved cases or the comfort of justice delivered. It is a tragedy in the oldest and most precise sense of that word: an act of imagination in service of memory, written against the cultural instinct to forget.

The Wound Remains Faithful: A Tragedy of Nora
A new book by David Boles

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Unlikely Kindred Spirits: Kripke, Heaney, and Elizabeth I: A Linguistic and Philosophical Analysis

At first glance, the analytic philosophy of Saul Kripke, the dramatic poetry of Seamus Heaney, and the political statecraft of Queen Elizabeth I could not seem more disparate. What could a 20th-century logician, a Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet, and a 16th-century monarch possibly share? Yet, beneath the surface, each grappled with language, identity, and authority in redemptive ways. Each, in their own silo, understood that naming and narrative wield power – whether it’s designating a possible world in logic, naming the unnameable traumas of Irish history, or styling oneself “Virgin Queen” to command a realm. In this exploratory conversation, we’ll sink into Kripke’s revolutionary ideas about reference and necessity, examine Heaney’s dramatic explorations of history and identity, and uncover how Elizabeth I engineered her political identity through language. We’ll reveal subtle connections – the resonances in their treatment of naming, authority, and the notion of necessity – to see how each shaped their world and left a lasting impact on the future. The journey is a thoughtful occupation: part historical detective work, part philosophical reflection, as we uncover lessons and methods from this unlikely trio.

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Best of David Boles, Blogs: Vol. 9 (2018) is Ready for Purchase!

It is that time of year again, when we thank you for all the interactions you have shared with us throughout the last 12 months; and now we ask that you purchase the latest edition of — Best of David Boles, Blogs: Vol. 9 (2018) — to help us continue to protect the good intentions of humanity, and we do that every day, all year, without using any advertising, or making any other asks of you.

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Seven Seconds in Jersey City is a Lifetime Too Long

My ophthalmologist is always excitable. She enjoys life. She’s an excellent MD. She knows I’m a writer, and a Script Doctor, and she makes bumping into her at her office to pick up my contact lens order, a real delight!

My doctor is also a Jersey City girl, born-and-bred, and she’s tough, and smart, and she knows the city well; and my doctor implored me to watch the new Netflix Seven Seconds cable series because it was about the city in which we spin.

She told me Seven Seconds was dark, and ugly, and that “bad people live here in Jersey City” — but my doctor loved the series, and she binge-watched all 10 one-hour episodes in a single sitting! She went on to tell me I had to watch it too, and that she would be testing me on what happened in the story the next time I sat with her for my annual eye examination. I took her up on her offer — and challenge! — because I had no other choice!

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