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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 Wound as Diploma

A transcript arrived this week: five signs of “traumatic intelligence,” clipped from a video and passed along as science. The research record tells a different story, and the difference matters. A reader sent me that transcript. It came without a link, without a channel name, without an author, the way most things travel now, and it ended in the middle of a sentence: “Sign five. Consider this for a moment. Everything you’ve heard so far, the perceptiveness, the empathy, the analytical mind, these are not weaknesses dressed up as strengths.” Then nothing. The clipboard closed before the payoff arrived. That dead cut turns out to be the most honest moment in the whole document, and I want to show you why. The reader’s question was whether the thing could run here as an article. It can, on the table, under the lights.

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Four Hundred Words for Six Hundred Dollars

The announcement arrived through LJExpress on a Friday in late July, dressed in the language of service. Media Source, the company that owns Library Journal, School Library Journal, The Horn Book, and the Junior Library Guild, had opened a storefront called Open Shelf Reviews, aimed at independent authors and small presses, and the copy asked me to hold two ideas at once: the reviews would be paid for by the authors under review, and a wall would keep those purchased reviews away from the magazines whose names give the wall its worth. The company described the operation as “a clearly identified paid service,” with its own editor, reviewer pool, and website, all kept apart from the editorial processes that made Library Journal matter to librarians for a century and a half.

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Stored Sun: What a Book Actually Is

Ask ten readers what a book is and you will get ten metaphors and no definitions. A mirror, they say, or a door, or a passageway with footfalls behind it. The metaphors flatter the reader and obscure the object. None of them tell you what is sitting on your shelf, dark and patient, while you sleep. Here is the answer. A book is stored sun.

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The Canon for Sale: How Congress Handed Literature to a Homeschool Company

On March 17, 2026, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce passed H.R. 7661, a bill that would strip federal education funding from any public school whose libraries contain “sexually oriented material.” The bill’s formal title is the “Stop the Sexualization of Children Act,” and it was introduced by Representative Mary Miller of Illinois on February 24, 2026, days after the State of the Union address. Eighteen Republican cosponsors signed on. No Democratic members supported the bill. The legislation now awaits a vote on the full House floor.

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The Page Isn’t Dead, Your Attention Is Under Siege

Every few years we are invited to attend the same funeral. Someone declares that nobody reads anymore, that the printed page is finished, that books are an aging technology destined to become a museum object while the living culture migrates to earbuds and short video. It is a tempting story because it flatters our sense that we are witnessing a clean break with the past, a decisive turn of the wheel.

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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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