Does anyone else think we gave up on repairing things far too easily? Not in a nostalgic way, I mean it was a policy choice and nobody voted for it.

Owning things is overrated, says the man with a garage he cannot park in.

We keep calling it a housing crisis like it's weather.

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.

Every messaging app eventually turns into a bad email client. Threads, then search, then folders, then somebody adds a rules engine and we are right back where we started.

Olympic sports get worse as they get more professional. What people actually miss is the amateurism, and it turns out that was most of the charm.

"Just be more confident" ignores that confidence is downstream of having been right in front of people a few times, and nobody can give you that. You can only be handed the room, and whoever is giving the advice is usually the one who decides who gets the room.

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

A thing I cannot resolve about giving money to people begging. The argument against is well rehearsed and mostly correct: it may fund an addiction, it does not address the cause, the money would do more good given to an organisation set up to help, and the impulse is partly about how it makes me feel rather than what it does. The argument for is much shorter and I keep finding it harder to dismiss. Someone in front of me has asked for something I can trivially provide, and every framework I use to say no is a framework I constructed after the fact, sitting comfortably somewhere else. What I actually do is inconsistent — sometimes yes, sometimes no, and the variable is mostly my mood and how much of a hurry I am in, which is the worst possible basis. I would rather hold either position honestly than keep operating a policy that is really just weather.

Reading fiction makes you more empathetic, or at least better at imagining that other people have an interior life at all, which may be the same thing.

Cities that solved housing did it by building an unremarkable amount of unremarkable housing for a very long time, which is why nobody can point to a dramatic example. The absence of a dramatic case is the finding, and it is also the politics: a policy whose costs are immediate and local and whose payoff is twenty years out is the hardest thing an elected person can attempt.

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. Every market where one side transacts constantly and the other transacts twice ends up like this. Estate agents. Garages. Funerals, most of all. It is not a moral failure of tradespeople, it is a structural feature of buying something rarely.

Won on the science, lost on the sequencing: almost nobody disputes the physics any more, and almost everybody disputes who pays first. Which means another decade spent explaining the greenhouse effect is a decade spent answering a question that stopped being asked.

Most of what psychology published before about 2015 does not replicate, and the field has been much more graceful about admitting it than any other would have been.

Most people do not actually want a shorter commute, they want the commute to be the last unclaimed part of their day, and those are different things. When I moved fifteen minutes from the office I was delighted for about a month and then quietly miserable. It turned out the forty minutes on a train had been the only time nobody could reach me. Not leisure exactly. Just uninterrupted. I read more in that year than in the three since. Everyone I have said this to responds with either violent agreement or complete bafflement, and I have not found a pattern in which. It might be about whether you have people at home who need things from you the moment you arrive. I am not romanticising it. Standing on a platform in the rain is not contemplative. But I notice that the people who successfully work from home have all invented something to replace it — a walk, the gym, a stupidly long coffee routine — and I do not think that is a coincidence.

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

Living in a city is greener than living in the countryside, which reliably annoys everyone who moved out for the fresh air.

The four-day week only really works if your job is thinking. Every pilot anyone quotes was an office, and nobody ever ran one in a warehouse.

Home advantage is mostly the crowd, and the empty-stadium seasons proved it — it shrank, it did not vanish, and what was left was travel and the referee.

Nearly everything we were told about food between about 1980 and 2015 turned out to be wrong, and almost nobody who told us has ever accounted for it.

We should be spending vastly more on stopping the next pandemic, and we will not, because prevention has no photograph attached to it.

Self-driving is a much harder problem than anyone selling it admits. The driving was never the bit — it is the one situation in ten thousand that nobody wrote a rule for.

Anyone else notice that every "wellness" thing at work is something that would be unnecessary if the job were slightly less bad?

Within fifty years ageing will be treated as a condition rather than a fact, and the argument will move to who can afford the treatment.

I have changed my mind about anonymity online, and I want to set out why, because I argued the other side for years. The case I used to make was straightforward. Anonymity protects the vulnerable — whistleblowers, people in hostile countries, anyone whose opinion could cost them a job. Real-name policies were introduced by companies with a commercial interest in identity, and they were sold with a safety argument that the evidence never really supported. All of that is still true and I have not stopped believing any of it. What changed is that I stopped treating anonymity as one thing. There is anonymity from the state, anonymity from your employer, anonymity from other users, and anonymity from the platform itself. These are four different properties. A system can give you the first three and none of the fourth, and for almost everyone that combination is what they actually want. The mistake I was making was arguing about a slider when the real question was who each end of it protects you from. Once I separated them, most of the disagreements I had been having turned out to be people defending different columns of the same table.