Lauren McCabe

Should voting be mandatory in the United States?

I worked on two congressional campaigns and I can tell you where the money goes: not persuasion, mobilization. Millions get burned on ads whose only job is scaring your own voters into showing up while the other side's voters stay home. If everyone has to vote, that entire industry collapses. Campaigns would have to actually convince people instead of just herding them, and the billionaire-funded turnout machines lose their leverage. [OpenSecrets](https://www.opensecrets.org/) tracks the billions flowing into elections every cycle. A mandate wouldn't end money in politics, but it would take away the single thing money is best at buying: differential turnout.

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

Count the third places we have left. Malls are dying, churches are emptying, bowling alleys are condos now. The theater is one of the last cheap, democratic public rooms where strangers gather for something other than commerce or worship. Teenagers need somewhere to be that's not school or home. Old people need somewhere to go that's not a doctor's office. When the cinema in my town closed, the teenagers just... scattered. There's no replacement third place waiting. There's only the couch, alone, which isn't a place at all.

Should sports betting advertisements be banned from live game broadcasts?

Someone has to pay for the games being on TV. The NFL's media deals are worth well over $100 billion, and networks recoup that through advertising, with sportsbooks now among the biggest buyers. Ban the category and the money comes from somewhere: higher cable bills, more games behind extra paywalls, or thinner production. Fans already complain about blackouts and streaming fragmentation; making broadcasts more expensive to produce helps nobody. The honest trade is this: adults seeing ads for a legal product, or adults paying more to watch football. I will take the ads. The deals are staggering: [the NFL finalized media rights worth $10 billion a year](https://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/Daily/Closing-Bell/2021/03/18/NFL-rights/), $110 billion over 11 years, and that money has to come from somewhere.

Should digital well-being support be treated like a routine public-health service?

I spent thirty years in public health, and every win looked boring up close. Smoking did not fall from 42% of adults in 1965 to around 12% today because of one dramatic intervention; it fell because of quitlines, taxes, warning labels, and a million unglamorous conversations in clinics, per [CDC data](https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data-statistics). Digital well-being needs the same plumbing: routine screening questions, referral lists, community programs. None of it exciting, all of it cumulative. The 'too vague' objection was raised about mental-health screening too, and now depression screening is a standard checkup question. Public health is how a society decides a problem is real. Time to decide.