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Preplay: The Courtroom in the Wings

The news of my removal from my own show came from the producer. I had obtained the rights, signed us to a first-class theatrical option, and written the book and lyrics, all of it inside the year the rights contract granted to us. The director hired to stage the all-or-nothing reading was not my choice, and he was friends with my collaborator. After the failed previews, I was unceremoniously let go. When I asked my composer collaborator why this had happened, the director called me instead, and said that nobody wanted to talk to me. I had no choice but to sever the show, and my attorney fought to get me paid, credit on show. Everyone stonewalled him as well. That is the whole record, at the width the print ruling allows, because the identifying details of the production and the collaboration stay blurred in print for the privacy of the living, and the blur is logged in the specimen record beside its telling.

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The Mercy of Forgetting: The Story Leads the Telling, and Perfect Memory Is the Enemy of Inspiration

At a dinner table, the worst storyteller is often the person with the best memory. He begins with the route to the restaurant, the trouble finding parking, the waiter’s name, the table beside the kitchen, the appetizer nobody liked, and the exact minute when rain began ticking against the window. Twenty minutes later, he has not reached the thing that made the evening worth recounting. He is not lying. His defect is more serious. He has not decided what happened. Every remembered detail has presented itself for admission, and he lacks a law of relevance. The salt cellar enjoys the same narrative standing as the marriage proposal. The price of the wine competes with the sentence that ended a friendship. Accuracy has occupied the table, ordered dessert, and refused to leave. The teller possesses the evening as an archive, but not yet as a story.

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Begging for My Mother: Find A Grave and the Strangers Who Collect Our Dead

This morning I signed into Find A Grave to update my mother’s memorial and discovered that I no longer manage her page. No email warned me. Nothing in my account records the change. Six family memorials, five of them sponsored with my own money in the weeks after my mother died, and my name has been stripped from every one. The site that once made me beg for custody of my own dead has taken that custody back, in silence, and left me to discover the loss the way you discover a missing wallet: by reaching for something that should be there.

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The Late Edit: How Belief Turns Revision Into Revelation

We have become a provenance culture, and I count myself an enforcer of it. Galleries now label machine-made images. Legislatures draft watermark bills, publishers add disclosure lines to copyright pages, and coders audit the licenses of every scraped repository. I am a plaintiff in litigation over the corpora used to train commercial language machines, so my commitment to the chain of custody is on file in federal court. The question a serious reader asks of any artifact in 2026 is blunt: who made this, from what, and who touched it on the way to me? That question is healthy. It is also, in one enormous and telling case, suspended.

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Two Hundred Fifty Years of What, and What For?

A drummer boy surfaced in my pocket change this week, on a quarter so worn his tricorn hat has gone soft at the edges. The Mint struck him by the hundreds of millions for the Bicentennial, Jack Ahr’s little colonial drummer with the dual date 1776-1976 stamped beneath his heels, and fifty years later he still turns up in laundromats and bodegas like a veteran who never quite made it home. I was eleven when that coin was new. Holding it on a Tuesday in Jersey City, the day the country turns two hundred fifty, I felt the whole distance between that summer and this one settle into my palm, small and cold.

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Where Are the Deaf Children at Aladdin?

Yesterday I sat in the New Amsterdam Theatre for the interpreted performance of Disney’s Aladdin. The show was fine. The interpreting was fine. Neither held my attention the way the audience did. It was Scouts Day. The hearing children came dressed as princes and princesses, sashes weighed down with badges, parents fussing over phones and snacks. The aisles filled with the small chaos that always attends a children’s matinee. Within all of that, in a designated seating block to the side, sat the Deaf audience. I counted, roughly, sixty of us. The youngest among us looked sixty herself. Most of those sixty people were between sixty and eighty-five years old. A handful of hearing family members translated stage business in side conversations. Deaf children were absent from the section. Deaf teenagers, if any were present, were too few for me to identify in a careful sweep.

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The Consciousness Trilogy: Reading Three Wagers on the Question We Cannot Settle

This page exists for readers who want a map of the consciousness sequence published on BolesBlogs in the spring of 2026. Three articles, taken together, cover the contemporary terrain on the deepest question philosophy still asks. Each can be read alone. Read in sequence, they form a coordinated treatment of the consciousness problem that points beyond any single solution toward what the field as a whole has and has not accomplished.

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