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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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No One Dies Lying

On the twenty-second of May, 1929, at Fort Riley, Kansas, a woman named Zenana Shepard sent her nurse to a closet for a bottle of bootleg whiskey. She said the liquor had a strange smell and a strange taste, and she asked whether enough remained in the bottle to test it for poison. Then she said the sentence that would outlive her by four years and travel all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States: “Dr. Shepard has poisoned me.” The doctor was her husband, Charles A. Shepard, a major in the Army medical corps, and the government would later argue he had salted that whiskey with bichloride of mercury because he loved a woman named Grace Brandon and his wife declined to divorce him. Zenana Shepard died on the fifteenth of June. Her husband was convicted of her murder, and her sentence, the spoken one, did much of the convicting.

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The Candlelit Lie: The Illuminati, the Masons, the Skull and Bones, and the Power That Hides Nothing

The word Illuminati arrives wrapped in candlelight and oath, conjuring a hidden council of masterminds who steer history from a chamber no camera has ever found. The image has held its grip for more than two centuries, and the grip tightens whenever the world feels ungovernable. A pandemic, a market crash, an election that smells stolen, a war that makes no sense to the people paying for it: each crisis sends a fresh wave of seekers hunting for the secret hand behind the curtain. The search flatters the seeker, because it promises that the chaos has an author, that the suffering was planned, and that a door exists somewhere with the guilty men sitting behind it. That promise is a lie, and the lie does real damage, since the energy poured into chasing phantoms gets stolen from the visible machinery that shapes an actual life.

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Stop Applauding the Forced Apology

There is no such thing as a sincere statement made with a boot on the neck, and we have built a culture that pretends otherwise.Watch what happens now when someone steps out of line. A demand goes up for a statement. The statement arrives, in the approved shape, full of the approved words, and a crowd gathers to judge whether the sorrow inside it looks real enough to accept. We have a name for that performance when a dictator stages it. We call it a show trial. What we have not admitted is that we run a softer version of the same machine every week, on our phones, for sport.

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The Cognitive Bargain Has Ended: A Generation Born Without Comparative Advantage

The claim circulating in policy papers, venture capital essays, and parental anxiety threads runs like this: no child born this year will grow up to be smarter than artificial intelligence. The line gets used as a slogan, which is the first sign it deserves examination. Slogans that move easily through dinner parties usually carry hidden machinery. The machinery here is a definition of intelligence narrow enough to fit on a benchmark and broad enough to terrify a parent. Both functions are intentional, and both deserve to be unbundled before the consequences can be argued honestly.

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Best of David Boles, Blogs: Vol. 10 (2019) Waits for You!

If it’s the end of the year, then that means it is time, once again, to thank you for all soulful investments you have shared with us throughout the last 12 months! We now humbly ask you to continue to believe in us by purchasing the latest edition of — Best of David Boles, Blogs: Vol. 10 (2019) — to help us continue to protect the truth when covered in facts-of-lies and fits-of-dismay, and we do that every day, across all our communication platforms, to keep alive the right life of the mind.

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Best of David Boles, Blogs: Vol. 8 (2017) is Ready for Reading!

It is our delight to announce that the immediate availability of our yearly eBook volume of collected blog articles — Best of David Boles, Blogs: Vol. 8 (2017) — is now ready for download from the Amazon Kindle store!

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