Here's an elevator pitch that I've heard several times from many people since I moved to southern California: healthy fast food. Set up a drive-through where people can get nutritious meals on the go. It's really not a bad idea: offer convenience in the health food market. (It doesn't necessarily have to take the form of a drive-through.) The problem is that people who are eating healthy are trying very hard to distance themselves from...
Demanding
A statistic that I've heard a few places: if all Americans started eating the alloted daily recommended quantities of fruits and vegetables every day, our agricultural system does not currently have enough land allocated to fruits and vegetables to meet the demand. (I can't verify if that's actually true, but I'm inclined to believe it.) Reputedly, Wal-Mart is a leader in stocking their stores with organic produce. They did this because their customers asked for...
First, Do No Harm
A co-worker of mine made an interesting point yesterday: ten years ago, socially responsible consumers were looking at the clothes they were buying and trying to determine if they were having a negative impact on the country where they were produced. People didn't want to buy sneakers if they were put together by children working in a sweatshop somewhere in Asia. The problem with this is that while this might prevent some undue suffering by...
Direct Mail
I gave a small donation to my local food bank about six months ago, in response to reports that they were falling on hard times and were possibly going to start cutting their programs. Shortly thereafter, I got a solicitation in the mail from them, asking for more money. I wrote a note to them telling them while I was extremely grateful for their service to our community, and while I was happy to help...
I saw a movie about five years ago called Art School Confidential. I thought it was a great flick, even though I have a particular distaste for those places where art meets academia. I have a friend who studied Art History in college who tells me that, based on his own experiences in art school, the film was very much true to life. It resonated with him, to some degree of accuracy. Despite this, the...
Little Things
Here's a sign that was spotted hanging in the window of a Borders that's closing soon: It's strange, because the public restrooms at Borders seemed to be a massive bone of contention over the past ten years. As the company started doing worse and worse, the employees seemed to put a squeeze on the bathrooms. Sometimes they were locked. Sometimes they were out of order for days at a time. Usually there were signs posted...
Well Spent
Two things you can do as a writer (that is, when you're not writing):
1. Look for a publisher.
2. Build an audience.
Time was, you had to do the first one in order to do the second one. Nowadays, I think you should focus all your effort on #2. It's not easy, but if you pull it off, #1 will take care of itself.
Here's one guiding principle I try to keep in mind every day: the true nature of a person's character doesn't lie in the merits of what they believe, but in how accepting they are of someone else who holds an opposing viewpoint.
Limits to Starting
In the movie Apollo 13, based on the mission to the moon that took a turn for the worse, the astronauts were up in space with plenty of oxygen, but due to the damage to their vessel, they were left without sufficient filters to get rid of the carbon dioxide they were slowly exhaling into the air. On the ground, NASA engineers are tasked with solving the problem: create an air filter out of the...
Someone Else's Shoes
Malcolm Gladwell once wrote that one attribute of good writing is that it lets you see the world through someone else's eyes. It lets you walk a mile in their circumstance and start to understand things as they understand them. This is the power of story. You can say things without saying them. In all this, there lies an opportunity for those who are teaching English classes. That's the lesson we can learn from books...