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Hey Now! Best of David Boles, Blogs: Vol. 16 (2025): Buy Now!

Hey, there! Welp, it’s that time of the year again — yes, time for us to ask for the indulgence of your continued, kind, support for this blog by buying our eBook — Best of David Boles, Blogs: Vol. 16 (2025) — 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. Yes, we live in a money world — even for free reading!

Continue reading → Hey Now! Best of David Boles, Blogs: Vol. 16 (2025): Buy Now!

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Brander Matthews: Father of Dramatic Literature

Brander Matthews was one of the purist theatrical geniuses we’ve had in, and around, the intellectual American Stage.  Brander rightly believed a play only existed in performance and that the performance and the text must be evaluated separately. He was also one of the first professors at an American University — Columbia University in the City of New York starting in 1892 — to promote, and foster, the idea that Dramatic Literature was just as important a field of study as any historic cave wall painting or artistic sculpture or aesthetic structure. He believed in the power of the Playwright to form the world.

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The Muslim Women Conundrum: You Must Guarantee No Man Will Touch Us

One semester, I was teaching a Dramatic Literature course at a major public university on the East Coast, when I was approached by four women after the first session.

The four walked up to me and one of them told me they were Muslim and that I had to guarantee them no man would touch them during class.

I was stopped for a moment by their request.  When I looked up from my desk, I saw they were all dressed in traditional Eastern clothing and their heads were covered and they were deadly serious.

“We thought this was a literature class,” one of them said.

“It is,” I replied.

Continue reading → The Muslim Women Conundrum: You Must Guarantee No Man Will Touch Us