A Marriage of Literature and ... Burritos?

Author Jonathan Safron Foer is no stranger to innovative prose. And a new partnership with restaurant chain Chipotle is taking his wordsmithing to a new audience: burrito eaters everywhere. While Foer was eating (book and smartphone-less) at a Chipotle one day, the thought struck him: "What if there were something truly good to read on his … cup? Or the bag? Wouldn't it be cool to just put some interesting stuff on it? Get really high-quality writers of different kinds, creating texts of different kinds that you just give to … customers as a service." He contacted the company with the innovative idea. They liked it.

Liked it so much, in fact, that Foer is now working with the company to organize the delivery of top-notch prose, by literary luminaries like Foer, Malcolm Gladwell, Toni Morrison, and others, to the otherwise recyclable surfaces of a burrito wrapper near you. Score one for literature, innovation, and the ability of a person with creativity and a little initiative to make the world a slightly more beautiful place.

Six Tips to Think Like an Entrepreneur

… "even if you're not one," promises this list from Fast Company. Their six tips:

1. Shape Your Life Experience: "An entrepreneur is someone deeply engaged in life and willing to do the daily work of transforming it."

2. Think Pragmatic Idealism: "We must be sensitive to the world we wish to see and conscious of the world as it is. The entrepreneur's work, then, lies in connecting the two."

3. Think Strategically: "An entrepreneur is a great strategist and a master at getting others excited [about the mission]."

4. Act Purposefully with Vision: "Vision is what we hope to do with the time that we have."

5. Understand the Ecosystem: "What organizations and individuals define your community? How do they relate to one another?"

6. Learn to Focus Your Energy: "It is easy to become scattered and distracted. Successful people develop the ability to focus and concentrate to maximize their resources and effort."

Your definition of success is far different from a start-up's bottom line. But there might still be some wisdom to glean from this list.

"[We Christian leaders] should know our neighbors' names. We should shop at local stores and know where our food comes from. We should befriend the outsider and take the stranger into our homes. We should practice hospitality, generosity, neighborliness, and place-making. The Internet can be used to contribute to this end, but ultimately it cannot achieve this goal alone. That happens primarily 'in the flesh.'"

—Michael Frost in "Christians, Engaged and Incarnate," on the PARSE site.

Disney's Ideas that Didn't Work

"The idea of Disneyland is a simple one," opens the recently (anonymously) obtained prospectus for the legendary theme park, shared by the BoingBoing website. "It will be a place for people to find happiness and knowledge." The document, coming to public light for the first time, shows the creative inspiration and planning behind Walt Disney's massive undertaking, a showcase for one of the most innovative visionaries of the 20th century.

One interesting revelation: many of Disney's ideas never made it to reality, either because of their impractibility, or their dubious appeal. Ideas such as a "scientifically accurate" rocket ride to the moon, a farm filled with (living) miniature versions of full-sized animals, boring attractions like a "miniature newspaper office" ("Please, Mom! I want to set the bold type again!"), and even a (legally and ethically doubtful) catalog to order your very own rare and exotic animals, which would then be mailed to your home.

Laughable in hindsight. But the unrealized ideas of Disney's park highlight a truth for innovators: your ideas that don't work by no means invalidate your ideas that do. At least, so think the hundreds of millions of people who have found happiness and knowledge because of Disney's crazy idea.

Americans Exaggerate Church Attendance

According to a recent study, Americans may not be telling the truth about their church attendance. But the real point of interest here isn't just that headline; it's where the exaggeration of church attendance comes from in the first place.

For context: gauging exaggeration in a poll is notoriously difficult—after all, your numbers are only as good as people's honesty. So to see how much exaggeration was present in people's reported church attendance, this study gathered data by using two platforms—a phone interview and an online survey. In the impersonal online survey, participants were less likely to exaggerate their church attendance showing "much lower levels of worship attendance." Why? Because of what sociologists call "social desirability bias"—the desire to exaggerate something about ourselves that we feel will impress others.

We live in a culture where church attendance is dropping dramatically, but people still feel a strong bias to be perceived (even just by a surveyor) as attendees. Where does that hypocrisy come from? Is it positively or negatively motivated? If church is so socially desirable, why aren't we attending it more? I guess we need another survey.

—Data from the Public Religion Research Institute and The New York Times.

Excerpts from parsemagazine.com