F1 drivers are athletes in exactly the same sense footballers are, and the people who scoff have never held their neck steady at 4g for two hours in fifty degree heat.

Most productivity advice is survivorship bias with a system bolted on. Setting the system up feels like work, which is the whole appeal.

Ask anyone whether they want the truth from their doctor and they say yes, then go to pieces the moment a doctor is actually blunt with them.

Why is every app now trying to be a social network? I want the thing to do the thing.

Every generation gets told it is uniquely bad at attention, and every generation was in fact being sold something new that was uniquely good at taking it. Novels, radio, television, phones. I do not think the people were ever the variable.

Shah rukh is indeed the last of the stars. Prove me wrong ✌🏻

Make voting compulsory. Australia manages it, turnout sits around ninety percent, and nobody there appears to be living under tyranny.

Cookie banners were meant to give people control and have instead taught an entire continent to click the nearest button without reading anything. We have trained a reflex, not a decision.

Sequels have not got worse. We got older, and no film is ever going to land on you the way one did when you were fourteen.

Walking is free, works for nearly everybody, and has no equipment attached, which is exactly why you never hear about it.

Films are too long. Not artistically, logistically — I have children and a bus to catch.

Am I the only one who finds "quiet luxury" is just expensive clothes for people who got embarrassed about logos?

Tipping culture has completely lost the plot and I'm saying that as someone who used to wait tables.

Half the arguments I have with my partner are about the same four things and we have never once finished one. I am not sure that is a problem, which is new.

My handwriting has become genuinely illegible and I only found out because I had to fill in a form in front of somebody.

Everyone in this country has a story about a builder and I have started to think they are all the same story. Someone comes, quotes low, starts, disappears for eleven days, returns, discovers something behind a wall, revises the price upward by forty percent, and finishes to a standard you would describe as fine. You pay it. You tell the story at dinner parties as a comedy. Nothing happens to the builder. The reason it keeps happening is not that builders are dishonest. It is that almost nobody commissions building work often enough to get good at it. You will do this twice in your life. He does it every week. The information is entirely on one side, and no amount of getting three quotes fixes that, because you cannot evaluate the three quotes either. Which is why every piece of advice you get is useless. Get it in writing, agree a schedule of works, hold back a retention — all sound, all assume you know what should be in the writing. The one thing that would actually help is having done it before, and by the time you have, you are finished.

Genuine question: has anyone actually changed their mind because of something they read online? Not softened, not "considered" — changed.

A backdoor for one government is a backdoor for everyone, and this is arithmetic rather than politics. A key that exists can be stolen.

For most software engineers a degree stopped being worth what it costs. It is now mainly a filter that employers use because filtering is expensive.

A genuine question for anyone who did science at school more recently than me: how much of what I was taught has quietly been revised? Nobody sends an update.

Football fans do not want their club to be successful, they want it to be theirs. That is why every ownership row goes the way it does.

unpopular opinion but most "food deserts" are actually time deserts. the shop is there, people are working two jobs.

Open-plan offices are the clearest case I know of an entire industry adopting something because it was cheaper and inventing the reason afterwards.

The number of people I know who have quietly cut something out of their diet and never mentioned it to a doctor is, now I think about it, most of them.

A thing I have noticed after fifteen years of interviewing people: almost every interview process is measuring how comfortable someone is being evaluated, and then reporting that as a measure of how good they are at the job. The tell is that the same candidate performs completely differently depending on the room. Give someone a whiteboard and three strangers and you learn how they handle being watched. Give them a real problem and an afternoon and you learn something about how they think. These correlate weakly, and we have built an entire industry on assuming they correlate strongly. What makes it hard to fix is that the noisy signal is cheap and the good signal is expensive. An hour of whiteboarding costs an hour. A realistic work sample costs a day of the candidate's time and half a day of yours, and multiplied across a funnel that is a real budget line that somebody has to defend. So we keep the cheap test and then add stages to compensate for its noise, which is how a process ends up with six rounds that are each individually indefensible. I do not have a clean answer. I have stopped pretending the current thing measures what we say it measures.