This page will regularly offer ideas for books or stories or works in other media, from those who can’t act upon them. In all cases they are offered in the hopes that these worthy projects will find their way to someone with the time and wherewithal to pursue them.
The best of all multi-generational sagas is yet to be written: namely the saga of the Romany diaspora. The gypsies left India a thousand years ago and wandered all the way to Central Europe where their language and culture became like no other. They are, by virtue of their resistance to private property, the most threatening minority in Europe. A big thousand-page novel from the beginning of their migration to the present difficulties in Middle Europe would be an amazing book.
Someone should write a travel book recreating the trip Mark Twain took in his satire The Innocents Abroad. It would be interesting to see a) how much Europe and “the Holy Land” have changed since the nineteenth century and b) how much our American “innocence” has failed to abate—despite the fact that we’re hardly as innocent as they were in the nineteenth century, despite the lessons of history and the easy availability of other cultures through technology, etc.
Do foreign countries have government-sponsored witness protection programs, and if so, do we ever swap with them? Maybe that guy that you buy your coffee from at the deli on the corner was a huge don in the Micronesian mafia? And a bunch of our criminals are maybe carrying suitcases on their heads for tourists hiking in Thailand?
There should be a yearly award for a elected official who makes a difficult decision based on principle rather than political expediency. The selection process would inevitably be complicated and controversial, but shouldn’t we be paying more attention to things like Governor Ryan’s decision on the death...
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