Founded 1983: Liberal Mindset; Conservative Morality

May 11, 2026May 11, 2026

Ischia is Burning: The Novel I Have Been Writing for Thirty-Six Years

Most books are written. A few are excavated. Ischia is Burning is a book I excavated from a steel filing cabinet in a Manhattan apartment, where it had been sitting for more than three decades inside a folder marked Ischia, in the form of a screenplay I wrote at twenty-five years old in the second year of an MFA program at Columbia. The novel that has just been published is what happened when I sat down with that folder in May, found the staples rusted and half the dialogue wincing, and wrote what the twenty-five-year-old version could not yet write. The novel is now available as a paperback and a Kindle edition, and a complete free web reading edition lives at BolesBooks.com.

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March 28, 2026

The Borrowed Saint: The Book That Watched Me Back

I have been thinking about mirrors for forty-eight years. The thinking started in a dressing room at a community playhouse in Lincoln, Nebraska, where a row of mirrors lined the wall above a counter cluttered with spirit gum and cold cream and the residue of faces that had been built and removed hundreds of times. I was thirteen years old and I was watching an actor apply a prosthetic nose, and the thing that struck me was the moment when his own face disappeared under the new architecture. His eyes changed. The man in the mirror stopped being the person I had been talking to thirty seconds earlier and became someone whose bone structure carried a different social signal, a different set of expectations, a different gravitational field. Same eyes. Different face. Different world.

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November 10, 2023

The Risk of Erasing History with Ignorance

In the annals of time, history stands tall as an undying repository of deeds, triumphs, failures, and fables that have defined humanity’s trajectory. It is with a tinge of dismay, and a hint of alarming concern, that we discuss the burgeoning contempt for history against the people who dare not to know. We’re not just combating ignorance; we’re fighting an unfortunate relegation of the past to the inconsequential.

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March 6, 2013

An Open Letter to Google Glasses Pioneers: Prepare to Be Punched in the Eye!

Hi there, Google Glasses Pioneer!

This is an open letter warning you to put down your Google Glasses if you care about the health of your eyes and the prosperity of your soul. Those glasses are going to cost you a lot more than $1,500.00USD because your face is going to pay the price for prying into the public, everyday, lives of those all around you. Nobody will trust you. Everyone will suspect you are recording their every move — even if you are not — but because you can! Be thankful for universal Obamacare — because you are going to need it with the rising year. This is not a call for violence against you; this is a call out that violence will be waged against you.

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January 14, 2010

Peeping by Business Card

We already know that there are cameras all around us. You are hardly ever private when you use social networking sites. You know about how your criminal past may easily come back to haunt you. But did you know that dropping a seemingly harmless slip of paper could also open a door to destroy your privacy?

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August 28, 2009

Hiding Dominick Dunne's Death

In a strange twist of one celebrity having more fame than another, the family of writer Dominick Dunne tried to hide his death from the media so his death wouldn’t be overshadowed by the demise of Senator Ted Kennedy:

The Vanity Fair journalist and novelist Dominick Dunne has died from cancer at 83. It transpires that he passed away on Wednesday just when the world’s media were scrabbling to cover the death of Edward Kennedy. Because they did not want his obituaries to be overshadowed by the senator’s death, Dunne’s family tried to keep his death a secret, with a spokesman initially refusing to confirm it.

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October 6, 2008

Hiding Behind Your Children Online

In a previous article — Take Your Children Offline NOW — we discussed low-self esteem parents that publish images of their children on their blogs and websites in order to feel better about their station in the world. Those parents value the self-promotion of — “Look What I Made!” — over the need to protect the privacy of their underage offspring. Today, there’s a next cowardly wave of parental privacy trumping childhood innocence indicated in parents that actively choose to hide behind their children online.