This page regularly offers 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.

Someone should write a cultural history of the T-shirt. Over the last seven decades, at least, the T-shirt has become an acceptable form of outerwear for men, women, and children, and has even become an expected site for writing and images, to an extent beyond any other article of clothing, except maybe the baseball cap. Many transformations in the way we think about clothing were probably required along the way.

With the exception of JetBlue—which offers dozens of channels of DirecTV piped into every seat on every flight—airplanes are one of the last places where the majority of people, regardless of their everyday habits, find themselves reading. For the most part, they read mass market thrillers: Nelson DeMille, Tom Clancy, and the like. Thus, most airport terminal bookshops offer a selection almost entirely made up of those titles. What if we assume, however, that people tend to read the mass-market titles largely because terminal bookshops stock very few alternatives? Some terminals, in a few specially-chosen airports, should experiment with bookshops and newsstands that stock exclusively “literary” titles; it is at least conceivable that, given how many people read on airplanes, this could have a tremendous effect on the broader reading habits of the nation.

During the Cold War, American engineers and intelligence gatherers dug underground tunnels from West to East Berlin, in order to listen in on East German communications. These tunnels were very elaborate, made of metal coated in rubber (to minimize sound) and air-conditioned (to prevent the snow above the tunnels melting). Someone should write a story, fictionalized or not, about the people who worked inside these tunnels.

Someone with access to Eddie Murphy should ask him about his occasional but increasing habit of appearing on movie posters with his left eyebrow raised. Excepting Shrek (which doesn’t really count), the left eyebrow is raised on posters for all of Murphy’s movies released in 2001 and 2002: Dr Dolittle 2, Showtime, The Adventures of Pluto Nash, and I-Spy. The left eyebrow is also raised on posters for The Golden Child and Boomerang. In the Boomerang poster, the eyebrow is a prominent visual element—almost...