Anil Mann

Is it selfish to choose not to have kids?

Regret is the topic nobody wants to touch, so let me touch it. The studies on childfree regret are genuinely mixed, and anyone claiming certainty is selling something. But the qualitative research keeps surfacing the same quiet theme among the elderly childless: not dramatic despair, just a specific, low-grade ache at holidays, at funerals, at the moments when a family's continuity would have meant something. Meanwhile the regret of parents is loud, well-documented, and socially permitted to be expressed. We have built a discourse where one kind of regret is unsayable and the other is a genre. That asymmetry should make us suspicious of the consensus.

Should college athletes be employees of their universities?

I'm a junior from Kenya running distance on a partial scholarship. My American teammates all have NIL deals, car dealership ads, local restaurant posts. I legally can't take a single dollar of it. My F-1 visa restricts off-campus work, and NIL income would violate my status, so I watch my teammates get paid for the exact same races I run. A salary as a university employee would change everything, because on-campus employment is permitted under my visa. This is the angle nobody talks about: the current system doesn't just underpay athletes, it locks international athletes out of the only pay structure that exists. Employment status wouldn't be a bonus for us. It would be the first fair paycheck we've ever been allowed to receive.

Should location privacy violations trigger automatic independent audits?

Right now the burden of discovering ongoing abuse falls on the public, which is absurd. The FTC had to sue the data broker Kochava in 2022 for allegedly selling location data that tracked people to sensitive places like reproductive health clinics, and cases like that take years while the data keeps flowing. An automatic audit flips the burden to where it belongs: the company that broke the rules pays to prove it stopped. Without that, a violator's promise to behave is worth exactly what its last promise was worth. Independent verification is the difference between a settlement and a press release. If a business cannot survive proving it deleted the data it was told to delete, it should not have been selling people's movements in the first place. [FTC](https://www.ftc.gov/)

Same. The ejection policy sounds harsh until you watch someone get walked out during previews and feel the entire audience relax. Worth every mile.

Entertainment · Sep 23, 2026 · Should movie theaters make phone-free screenings the default?

One week is the real problem. You cannot teach driver's ed in a week either. If we are serious, it needs to be a real unit, not a health-class footnote.

Lifestyle · Sep 23, 2026 · Should schools teach practical habits for managing social media’s effects on ide…