Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
There’s a historical event that haunts and shames the region. And shows the machine of power. The story is about a boy named George. George was owned by Lilburn Lewis, the nephew of Thomas Jefferson, in the Kentucky mountains. In 1812, a cherished water pitcher slipped from the fifteen-year-old George’s hands, and it shattered. In a drunken rage, L
... See moreImani Perry • South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation
In December of 1982, the Cuban-born Luis Alvarez, a Miami police officer, shot and killed Neville Johnson Jr., a young Black Caribbean American man, in an Overtown arcade as Johnson was playing a video game. The following conflagration left eighteen dead and shut down more than two hundred businesses. There was no conviction.
Imani Perry • South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation
Later, at the mortuary, the director told Strong that though she was paying for the funeral, she had no right to make decisions, “a family member must do it.” Fleming’s death certificate stated she was unmarried.3 Charlene Strong, who hadn’t been a gay rights activist before, became one.
Lillian Faderman • The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle

On another night of searching, a centuries-old academic journal yielded a reference to a Gaspery J. Roberts. The journal had been devoted to prison reform. The hit sent Olive down a rabbit hole, at the end of which she found prison records from Earth: Gaspery J. Roberts had been sentenced to fifty years for a double homicide in Ohio in the late twe
... See moreEmily St. John Mandel • Sea of Tranquility: A novel
wrote about Scott, for example, but I gave him a cover name: Julian [in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”].