Word: thanked
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...book called Thank You for Smoking, a satire about a Washington tobacco lobbyist and his somehow weirdly valiant efforts to convince the world that smoking isn't conclusively unhealthy. Mel Gibson, or more accurately, "Mel's people" (as we movie folks say), optioned the rights to it in 1994, even before it was published. Mel's people couldn't have been nicer. They announced with conviction, "This will be Mel's next movie." That was extremely pleasing to hear. And, indeed, I would hear it many, many times over the ensuing decade...
Sometime after that, an old friend of mine called. He said, "There's this guy I know from Stanford. He was chief operating officer of something called PayPal, which was sold to eBay for $1.4 billion. Now he wants to get into moviemaking and wants to make Thank You for Smoking." I told him my absolute rule is to accept phone calls from people worth $1.4 billion who want to make my novels into movies...
...days later, I got an e-mail from David: "Pigs are flying, snowballs are forming in hell. Thank You for Smoking is finally in production...
Great news for David and Jason, but it certainly put the kibosh on my plans for a novel called Thank You for Nothing...
...tenets as revealed truth. Those who gain from trade?the great undifferentiated mass of consumers who enjoy a range of products from around the world sold at prices that reflect intense competition?are by definition less identifiable than those who lose from it. Nobody lobbies a legislature to thank them for cheap T shirts; any group of workers in the industrialized world whose job has just been "lost" to China's Pearl River Delta can be assured of a hearing on the evening news. And just as in the 1980s, when U.S. legislators had panic attacks after Japanese investors overpaid...