Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
Real America has always needed to feel that both a shiftless underclass and a parasitic elite depend on its labor. In this way it renders the Black working class invisible. From its beginnings Real America has also been religious, and in a particular way—evangelical and fundamentalist, hostile to modern ideas and intellectual authority. The truth w
... See moreGeorge Packer • Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal
Republicans don’t just aim to cause fear, as some Democrats charge. They trigger the full range of intuitions described by Moral Foundations Theory. Like Democrats, they can talk about innocent victims (of harmful Democratic policies) and about fairness (particularly the unfairness of taking tax money from hardworking and prudent people to support
... See moreJonathan Haidt • The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
By its visionary conception, and immense effect, the Immigration Reform Act of 1965 rightfully joined the two great civil rights laws as a third enduring pillar of the freedom movement.
Taylor Branch • At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68
Florida drew the transient and rootless on the eternal promise of a second chance, with more than its share of scammers and con men. So who was to say the guy living next door wasn’t one of them? A subdivision like Carriage Pointe was Jane Jacobs’s vision of hell.
George Packer • The Unwinding
Between 2007 and 2010, the average white family experienced an 11 percent reduction in wealth, but the average black family lost 31 percent of its wealth. The average Hispanic family lost 44 percent.
Matthew Desmond • Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
Dad deprivation still leaves boys vulnerable to Nazis—these days, neo-Nazi groups.
John Gray PhD • The Boy Crisis
behavior was changing.
Elaine Tyler May • Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era
The White religious right rest their theology on an ideal of moral “cleanliness” that is, if challenged, to be defended violently. There is nothing new about ugliness in a very dressed-up place. It is endemic in some ways. That is something you must understand. Perhaps you remember from lessons of the civil rights movement that the White citizens’
... See moreImani Perry • South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation
One young woman, reared during the era of domestic containment, resented the fact that her mother had not been a full-time homemaker.