Nigel MacDonald

Is it selfish to choose not to have kids?

Every generation before you did the hard thing. Your great-grandmother had five kids without painkillers, without daycare, without a washing machine, and she did it while working. You have every convenience ever invented and you have concluded that raising one child is an unbearable imposition. I'm not romanticizing her life. It was brutal. I'm pointing out the direction of the trend. Each generation finds the previous generation's normal intolerable, and calls the retreat liberation. At some point the retreat ends at zero, and then there's no one left to write the think pieces.

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

Everyone romanticizes the theater until you do the math out loud. Two tickets at $19 each, a large popcorn split down the middle for $11, two drinks at $7, parking at $12. That's $75 to watch a movie you could rent for $6 in six weeks, and the "unmatched experience" mostly consists of trailers for other $75 evenings and a stranger's phone glowing three rows down. AMC spent the last decade converting to recliners and cocktails, which was really just a confession: the movie itself is no longer the draw... the furniture is. You don't save a dying medium with nicer chairs. You save it by giving people a reason to leave the house, and Hollywood has spent 15 years training everyone that the house is fine.

Should tipping be abolished in favor of higher base wages for service workers?

Ask any longtime server about the worst part of the job and it is not the slow Tuesdays. It is the customer who knows your income depends on his mood. The tipping system hands every diner leverage over the person serving them, and study after study has found that tipped workers, disproportionately women, face higher rates of sexual harassment because enduring it is part of the paycheck. The Restaurant Opportunities Centers United has documented this dynamic for years. [ROC United](https://rocunited.org/). A higher base wage does not end harassment, but it ends the economic hostage situation: a server who can afford to walk away from a table can afford to report the man at it. Nobody should have to smile through groping to make rent. Abolish the subminimum wage and take the customer's thumb off the scale.

Nobody is proposing line cooks work four tens with no coverage plan. The policy conversation is about overtime thresholds and norms, not forcing every diner onto the same calendar.

Business · Sep 23, 2026 · Should the standard full-time workweek be cut to four days with no pay cut?