Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
The hypocrisy of this final assignment was a fitting coda to the symphony of sleaze and slaughter that the United States bestowed on Puerto Rico in the name of good government. Winship was walking tall, waving documents, pointing fingers, trying others for their atrocities.
Nelson Denis • War Against All Puerto Ricans
his fundamental conviction has remained constant: the horrors of late twentieth-century life, whether Nazi, communist, racist, nationalist, or utilitarian in expression, are the products of defective concepts of the human person.
George Weigel • Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II
MANHATTAN AS MECCA If—in America—dense, transit-served cities are better, then New York is the best. This is the clear and convincing message of David Owen’s Green Metropolis, certainly the most important environmental text of the past decade. This book deserves a bit more of our attention, so profound is the revolution in thinking that it represen
... See moreJeff Speck • Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time
She’d come to her job inside the little box marked “Rural Development” without any particular ambition to be there. The sums of money at her disposal were incredible: the little box gave out or guaranteed $30 billion in loans and grants a year. But people who should have known about it hadn’t the first clue what it was up to. “I had this conversati
... See moreMichael Lewis • The Fifth Risk
The result was a combination of anarchy and Orwellian bureaucracy with horrifying consequences. Trucks with water and food were halted or diverted or refused entry by authorities—the supplies were not part of their plan. Bus requisitions were held up for days; the official request did not even reach the U.S. Department of Transportation until two d
... See moreAtul Gawande • The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right
About a mile away from the Orleans Ballroom, on St. Charles Avenue, stands the old headquarters of the United Fruit Company. There they traded in bananas, shaped the history of Central America, and provided the template for the modern multinational corporation. The heyday of United Fruit can be traced to Samuel Zemurray. In 1877, he was born to a J
... See moreImani Perry • South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation
His first action on reelection was to set about removing all treasonous works from the city’s schools and libraries. Thompson appointed a theater owner and former billboard changer named Sport Hermann to purge the city’s institutions of any works that were less than “100 percent American.” Hermann appointed a body called the Patriots’ League to dec
... See moreBill Bryson • One Summer
he would seem to run the fair like an international summit or United Nations (to use his term) rather than a profit-making enterprise. It’s a strategy that has no doubt contributed to Art Basel’s ascendancy over older fairs