 Following the script Fans of 1990s popular literature may be pleased to learn that Nick Hornby, chronicler-in-chief of the inadequacies of the Western male, now has a Substack. Hornby’s novels Fever Pitch, About a Boy, A Long Way Down, and High Fidelity were all made into films, and he wrote four successful screenplays, including An Education, which kickstarted actress Carey Mulligan’s career. One of his first Substack posts, therefore, is about scriptwriting, and in particular: How come it takes so damn long? “I have written four movies that you may or may not have seen,” he says. “Three of the four films … took five years, from the time I started writing until their release.” The screenplay of High Fidelity, which he didn’t write, also took five years from when he sold the rights. Others are in theory still going through the process: One script is “eight or nine years old, and yet still people talk about making it.” Projects clash, plans change, six months get lost here and a year there. Even books as amazing as The Secret History sell their movie rights and then nothing happens: The planned adaptation “was to be directed by Alan J Pakula, and written by John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion. All three of them are now dead.” Student politics The Biden administration has or is canceling many billions in student debt. This is popular among large parts of the media, which by coincidence or otherwise is often staffed by university graduates on relatively low pay. But, the economics writer Maxwell Tabarrok argues on Maximum Progress, almost any political ideology would consider it a bad idea. From a perspective of equity and fairness, he argues, it will disproportionately benefit rich, white Americans: “72% of African Americans have no student debt because they never went to college.” From a perspective of fiscal conservatism, it is expensive: Hundreds of billions have been spent so far, to be financed by national debt, the interest on which is already one of the biggest items on the balance sheet. From a Marxist perspective, it is a transfer of wealth from the workers — whose labor will produce the value which is taxed to pay it — to the bourgeoisie. Its only likely value, he argues, is to Biden’s reelection campaign. Driven to extinction In 1980, drunk drivers caused 1,450 deaths in the UK. In 2020, there were 220. In the US, a similar story: There were 28,000 drunk-driving deaths in 1980, down to 11,654 in 2020. Partly, that’s to do with car safety improvements and improved emergency medicine. But it’s also because driving while drunk has become unacceptable. Writing in Works in Progress, the criminologist Nick Cowen notes that this stigma is a deliberate construct. Governments around the world engaged in education campaigns about the risks; they also fined and jailed tens of thousands of people. It is, he argues, an example of criminal deterrence working: Criminals are rational actors who respond to incentives, who balance “the expected costs of crime — how likely they are to be caught, multiplied by how badly they will be punished — against the benefits of offending.” |
