Conrad Morris

Is it selfish to choose not to have kids?

I grew up with a father who was present in the way furniture is present, and I spent my twenties in therapy unwinding what that did to me. Choosing not to have kids was the first decision I ever made entirely for someone else's benefit: the child who will never have to recover from my damage. People call that selfish because from the outside it looks like freedom, like I just wanted my sleep and my money. From the inside it felt like the hardest, most selfless thing I have ever done, admitting I couldn't guarantee I would be the parent a kid deserves. Not every childfree person has my story. But some of us aren't running from responsibility. We're refusing to pass the bill to an innocent third party.

Are movie theaters dead, or is the big screen irreplaceable?

My daughter was six when I took her to her first movie, and I would pay a thousand dollars to relive her face when the lights went down and the screen lit up the whole room. She gasped at the opening logo. The logo! At home, movies compete with the iPad, the dog, the doorbell. In a theater, a child learns what it feels like to give something her full attention, surrounded by strangers doing the same. That's not a minor feature. It might be the most valuable thing the building teaches: that some experiences deserve your whole self, and that wonder is better in company.

Health savings get exaggerated by advocates. The people who take up funded sport are mostly already active; the truly sedentary rarely join programs. The return-on-investment math is softer than it looks.

Sports · Sep 23, 2026 · Should national sports funding reward participation growth as much as medal resu…