Fiona Buck

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

Remember dollar theaters? Second-run houses where a teenager with five bucks could see a movie two months after release? They're extinct, and their extinction tells the real story. Theatrical used to have tiers: first run for the eager, second run for the patient, and everyone participated. Now it's premium or nothing. The industry didn't just lose customers. It deliberately abandoned the price-sensitive ones, then wonders why those customers never came back. You can't gentrify your audience and mourn the crowd in the same breath.

Should billionaires be allowed to exist?

Walk through Mayfair, or parts of Manhattan, at night and count the dark windows. Billionaires park money in luxury flats they visit twice a year, and whole neighborhoods hollow out: no residents, no shops, no schools, just vaults with a view. Meanwhile the nurses and teachers who keep those cities running commute two hours because they can't afford to live there. Housing is a human need that became an asset class for people with more money than uses for it. Nobody needs a fifth apartment, people need a first one.

Should international technology rules be enforceable rather than voluntary?

Who do you vote out when the global tech regulator gets it wrong? Binding international rules move decisions from elected parliaments to treaty bodies and expert committees, and there is no ballot box for those. A national regulator that overreaches can be hauled before a legislature, sued in domestic courts, or reversed after an election. A global enforcement body answers to no voters, which is fine for technical standards like aviation safety and dangerous for questions as political as speech, surveillance, and AI. The DSA works because the EU has a parliament, courts, and democratic legitimacy behind its fines. [EDAA](https://edaa.eu/digital-services-act/enforcement-and-penalties/). A global equivalent would have the fines without the legitimacy. When enforcement is detached from democratic accountability, the rules serve whoever captured the process. Keep the power where the voters are.

Should national sports funding reward participation growth as much as medal results?

Every medal starts somewhere unglamorous: a community pool, a school track, a volunteer coach staying late. Team GB's 65 medals at Paris 2024 were the visible tip of a pyramid built in local clubs that elite funding never touches. A medal-only formula slowly starves that base, and then everyone acts surprised when the pipeline narrows a decade later. Weighting participation growth equally is not charity to grassroots sport, it is maintenance on the machine that produces the medals. No base, no pyramid, no podium. Countries that treat community sport as infrastructure keep producing champions; countries that treat it as a luxury good end up buying their medals with ever more expensive elite programs. Fund the roots and the medals take care of themselves. [BBC Sport](https://www.bbc.com/sport)

Honest question for the author: if you trust neither the government nor the insurers, what is the actual proposal? Because right now the alternative on offer is a system where a billing department decides whether you live. That is a bureaucracy too, it just has shareholders.

Politics · Sep 24, 2026 · Should the United States adopt a universal healthcare system?