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.

Sat down and added up the subscriptions. Seventy one pounds a month, and I could name four of them.

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

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.

I started leaving my phone in another room and I feel slightly deranged about how much better it is. That cannot be right. It is a phone.

First past the post keeps producing governments that most people voted against, and we keep describing this as stability.

Every awards ceremony is now three hours of people who have already won things being given more things by people who won them earlier.

"Free delivery" is not free and we all know it is not free and we all still pick it, which I think says something slightly embarrassing about all of us.

Startups are a worse deal for employees than they were ten years ago. Same hours, same risk, a much thinner slice, and the exit that justified it happens far less often.

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

Being good at your job and being good at describing your job are almost completely unrelated skills, and only one of them gets promoted.

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

Search has got noticeably worse and I have started adding the name of a forum to the end of every query, which is a strange thing to have to do in 2026.

Live music is the one thing that has actually got better, and it is because everything else got worse. Nobody can make money from a recording any more so they all have to be able to play.

T20 made Test cricket better, not worse, and the people who say otherwise have not watched a fourth innings run chase lately.

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.

Nobody I know under forty mentions a pension and nobody over fifty talks about anything else. There is no middle period where it gradually comes up. One day it is simply the topic.

Splitting the bill evenly is a tax on whoever ordered the salad, and everyone knows it, and everyone does it anyway because saying so costs more than the difference.

We built an entire economy on the idea that people will keep buying things they already have, and then act surprised when the things are designed to stop working.

There is no book everyone ought to have read, and the list is always suspiciously full of whatever the person making it was assigned at nineteen.

I want to defend something unfashionable, which is meetings that could have been an email. Sometimes the point of the meeting is not the information. It is that eight people are now jointly aware that they all heard the same thing at the same time, and nobody can later claim a different understanding. That is expensive and it is doing real work. The email version saves forty minutes and produces eight private interpretations, four of which are wrong and none of which surface until something breaks. Then you spend a great deal more than forty minutes finding out which four. I am not defending the recurring status meeting nobody has questioned since 2019. I am saying the calculation is not "was information transferred" — it is "did we need shared knowledge that everyone knows everyone else has", and for anything contested the answer is usually yes.

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

Years of reading about the Grenfell inquiry, on and off, and the thing that has stayed with me is not the cladding. It is that everybody involved was following a process. The manufacturers tested to a standard. The certifiers certified against the standard. The contractors specified a product that held a certificate. The building control officers checked the certificate existed. At every single link somebody did the thing their role required, and the result was a building that burned in a way everyone had been told was impossible. That is much more frightening than corruption. Corruption you can find and remove. A system where every participant discharges their duty correctly and the aggregate is catastrophic has no villain to sack, and no obvious repair. The inquiry's recommendations are mostly more checks, and I do not know what else they could have been. But every one of them adds a person who will be able to say, honestly, that they did their part.

Small talk gets a terrible press, mostly from people who have never had to sit next to a stranger for two hours.

We know more about the surface of Mars than the floor of our own ocean and that is a genuinely strange set of priorities.