This substack introduces you to a new thing I’m doing called Mixtape Fellows, and then introduce to the inaugural Fellows: two PhD students, Valentina Melentyeva and Alessandra Moresi, at the Universities of Cologne and Turin, respectively.
Pay It Forward was a Horrible Movie, but Al Roth is Awesome
I saw the movie Pay it Forward in the theater in 2000. It had great promise because it was Helen Hunt’s first film since winning Best Actress, plus Haley Joel Osment was coming off Sixth Sense. But it soon became clear that they’d put together a bunch of big names looking to cash a big paycheck. It was horrible. Sappy. I had such a bad reaction to the movie that anytime thereafter I ever heard the phrase “pay it forward”, I would cringe. When my daughter told me to pay for the person’s drinks in the car behind us at Starbucks and say to the barista that I was “paying it forward”, I happily did so, but I said the phrase itself reluctantly.
But then one day someone said it to me and it …
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