In Om, components can still look at the global state without using a cursor if they want. You could have a top level "authors" key in the data store that the ArticleItems would have hardcoded into them. They could look up the author themselves as you describe by looking up the "authors" key in the global data state.

Alternately, you can pass multiple cursors[1] to a component. In your example, you could pass each ArticleItem a cursor pointing to the right article, and a more general cursor pointing to the author store. This would eliminate the hard coding of "authors", but it would require ArticleList to pass along some sort of "additional-data" cursor.

[1] https://github.com/swannodette/om/wiki/Cursors#using-multipl...