Honestly think the four-day week debate is mostly people who already have autonomy arguing about the calendar, while everyone in a warehouse gets nothing out of either version.

Every complaint about immigration in my town is actually a complaint about not being able to get a GP appointment, and both parties have found it easier to argue about the first one.

Everything is a franchise now and the honest reason is that an unknown thing is a risk somebody has to personally sign off on.

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

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.

Index funds have made markets less efficient — half the money in the room is now buying without an opinion about anything.

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.

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.

We are going to spend the next ten years discovering which parts of the internet were being held together by people doing it for free.

Half of what gets called "doing your own research" is reading until you find somebody who already agrees with you and then stopping.

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.

We will still be typing passwords in ten years. We have been promised their death for two decades and I am still resetting one most weeks.

Cash is going and I notice I spend more without it, which is embarrassing but seems to be true of nearly everybody I ask.

An unpopular position I hold about hospitals: the food is bad for a reason that has nothing to do with catering, and fixing it would cost more than anyone will admit. Hospital food has to be safe for people with immune systems that barely work, edible by someone who cannot chew properly, compatible with about fourteen medical diets, transportable across a large building, and hold at temperature for the twenty minutes it takes to get to the far ward. Given those constraints, what arrives is roughly what has to arrive. Every campaign to improve it treats it as a failure of will, as though somebody in charge simply does not care whether patients enjoy lunch. Then a celebrity chef gets involved, produces something excellent in one ward for six weeks, and the programme quietly ends when it meets the other three hundred wards and the actual budget. I am not saying it could not be better. I am saying that "why is hospital food bad" has a real answer, and nobody campaigning about it ever engages with the answer.

Most advice on how to argue better assumes both people want to find out what is true, and in most real arguments at least one person is defending a position they have already told other people they hold.

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.

Getting a GP appointment has become a competitive sport and the people who are worst at sport are the ones who need it most.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

If you could only fix one, fix your sleep, not your exercise. Nobody wants to hear it because you cannot post about sleeping.

Every organisation says it wants honest feedback and has exactly one person who gives it, and that person is always halfway out the door.

Football has too much football now.