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The Generative Excess: Soul, Dream, and Idea

There are three things you cannot show me. You cannot open your hand and reveal your soul. No technology exists to replay your dream from last night with any fidelity. And no surgeon can extract from your skull the moment a thought first assembled itself into an idea. Each of these phenomena exists, if it exists at all, only as a first-person event, invisible to external observation, resistant to measurement, and stubbornly private. That shared inaccessibility is worth taking seriously, because it suggests that the most important operations of human consciousness happen in a place that science can describe from the outside but never enter.

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Your Three-Year-Old Already Knows the Brand Name

Watch a three-year-old in a grocery store. Watch her eyes when you turn into the cereal aisle. Her gaze is not scanning the shelves the way you scan them, evaluating prices and nutritional labels and unit costs. A search is underway. The child already knows what she wants, and she knows it by name, and she knows the name because a screen taught it to her before she could read the word printed on the box. The box appears in her sightline. A finger goes up. The name comes out of her mouth. You have just witnessed the end product of a commercial pedagogy that has been operating in American media for more than fifty years, and the child has no idea it happened to her.

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The Failed City: I Wrote a Book About What We Bury

I have been staring at a patch of asphalt in Jersey City for thirteen years. That is not a figure of speech. I mean that in late September 2013, I watched a road crew roll fresh blacktop over 150-year-old granite cobblestones on Baldwin Avenue in the Heights, and the image has not released me since. The cobblestones were ballast stones, carried across the Atlantic Ocean in the holds of empty cargo ships and dumped on American docks because the ships needed the weight for the crossing and needed to shed it to load American exports for the return trip. Those stones were repurposed as paving. They became streets. They outlasted the ships, the shipping companies, the trade routes, the empires that commissioned them. And in 2013, a man in a road roller buried them under asphalt because, as he told me with the patience of someone explaining gravity, cobblestones eat up tires.

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The Book Lives Three Times: How Seneca Got Reading Wrong by Getting It Right

You finish writing a book and the manuscript sits there, cooling on the screen like bread pulled from an oven. It is done. It is no longer yours. This is the part no one tells you about authorship: the moment the final sentence locks into place, the book begins its first death, because it has stopped being a living negotiation between you and the language and has become, instead, a fixed object. A thing. The writer’s relationship to the finished text is not unlike the relationship a parent has to an adult child who has just walked out the front door with a suitcase. You made this. You cannot unmake it. You are, from this point forward, irrelevant to its survival.

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Is It From the Birds? Stephen Sondheim Asked the Right Question About Music and Then Preferred Not to Hear the Answer

In November of 1997, Stephen Sondheim sat in his Manhattan townhouse with Mark Eden Horowitz, a senior music specialist from the Library of Congress, and said something extraordinary. Not extraordinary in the way that most Sondheim quotes are extraordinary, which is to say technically precise and laced with a craftsman’s impatience for imprecision. Extraordinary because it was none of those things. It was, instead, the sound of a man who had spent his entire adult life inside music admitting that the existence of music itself was something he could not explain.

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I Wrote the Book I Was Born to Write

Fifty years is a long time to prepare for a single sentence. I did not know I was preparing. I thought I was living, which I was, and writing, which I was, and teaching, which I was, and publishing, which I was. I thought the Fractional Fiction novels and the EleMenTs trilogy and the Prairie Voice reporting and the Human Meme episodes and the dramatic literature and the ASL linguistics and the cultural criticism were separate projects, separate impulses, separate rooms in the interior country I have been building since I was old enough to read. They were not separate. They were all rehearsals for this.

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Collecting the Shards

Over the past few weeks, I have published several new books. From the outside, that can look like some kind of creative superpower. Like I locked myself in a room, drank a heroic amount of coffee, and sprinted through a stack of fresh manuscripts until the world blurred and the covers appeared. That is not what happened.

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The Inheritance: When the Body Remembers What the Mind Cannot

Some secrets do not stay buried. They write themselves into blood and bone. They pass from grandmother to mother to daughter through mechanisms we are only beginning to understand. The Inheritance, the second novel in the Fractional Fiction series, asks what happens when a scientist trained to study transgenerational trauma in laboratory mice discovers that the patterns she has been mapping exist in her own DNA.

The Inheritance: A Fractional Fiction Novel

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The Replicated Man: AI and the Ghost in the Archive

I finally did it. I committed the act of digital suicide. It was a gesture of clinical curiosity and personal dread. I took twenty years of archives, every Boles Blogs entry, every “Best of” compilation, the discarded drafts, the love letters to lost eras, and I fed the entire body of work into the AI maw. My digital soul, offered up for digestion and analysis… psychoanalysis.

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How Do AI Write a Joke?

What makes funny? How do we learn how to tell a joke? If a sense of humor is a sign of intelligence, then a “Turing Test” of an AI Bot must include the ability to create an original joke that will make us humans laugh, right? Well, I decided to ask three AI Bots — ChatGPT 4, Gemini 1.5 Pro, and Claude Opus — to explain how to write and create a joke, and here are the inconclusive, exclusive, results!

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