Harvey Redd

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

The obituaries are premature only in the sense that the patient is on life support rather than dead. Domestic box office was $11.4 billion in 2019. By 2024 it was about $8.8 billion, and that gap is the new shape of the business ([yearly totals](https://www.the-numbers.com/market/)). The studios have voted with their calendars: Paramount sends films to streaming after 45 days, Universal after as little as 17 for smaller titles, and Disney keeps shrinking its windows whenever a film underperforms. The average ticket now sits near $10.78 according to exhibitor data ([NATO](https://www.natoonline.org/data/ticket-price/)), and concessions keep climbing, which means the per-visit cost of a family of four rivals a month of every streaming service combined. Theaters lost to arithmetic.

Should voting be mandatory in the United States?

Every back-to-school night, a parent tells me uninformed voters should stay home, and I think that gets the order backwards. People don't learn about politics and then vote. They vote and then learn about politics. When voting is mandatory, people pay attention in the weeks before an election because they know they will have to make a choice. [Pew](https://www.pewresearch.org/) surveys on political knowledge show how little most Americans absorb passively. An electorate that's required to participate becomes an electorate that starts to care, because nobody likes walking into a test they didn't study for.

The China argument is just fear dressed as strategy. American strength never came from protecting monopolies; it came from competition forcing companies to get better. Coddling giants because Beijing exists is how you get lazy giants.

Politics · Sep 23, 2026 · Should the federal government break up Big Tech companies?

Tennis is the exception, not the rule, and building policy around the exception is how you stall progress everywhere else. Most federations have a clear revenue gap running one direction.

Sports · Sep 23, 2026 · Should record-setting athletes receive standardized bonuses across men’s and wom…