Money has ruined more sport than it has rescued. Every competitive balance measure in every major league has got worse since it arrived, and that is the table, not nostalgia.

Term limits, everywhere, no exceptions. Nobody should be able to build a forty-year career out of a job that was meant to be temporary.

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.

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.

A thing about friendship after about thirty that I do not think anybody warns you about. It stops happening by default. School, university and your first job all put you in a room with the same people repeatedly for years, and every friendship you have was quietly manufactured by that. Then it stops, and the machinery goes with it, and nobody tells you because the people it has already happened to have stopped noticing. What replaces it is admin. You have to want it enough to put a date in a calendar six weeks out, and then to still want it on the night, which after a full week is a genuinely different question. The friendships that survive are not the deepest ones. They are the ones where somebody was willing to do the admin. I find that slightly bleak and also I have made my peace with it. The alternative was assuming it was about me, and it took about four years to work out that it was structural. Everyone I have said this to since has said some version of yes, and then said they thought it was just them.

Genuine question: can anyone name a single thing their MP has done? Not voted for. Done.

Everyone in this country agrees the trains are bad and nobody agrees about why, so here is an attempt at the actual causal chain rather than the usual list of villains. Start with the fact that almost every decision is made on a different timescale from the thing it affects. Rolling stock lasts thirty to forty years. Franchises ran seven to ten. Ministers last about eighteen months in post. Nobody who commissions a train is in the job when it arrives, and nobody who signs a timetable is there when the consequences of it show up. That mismatch produces a specific failure. It is always rational to defer maintenance, because the cost of deferring lands after you have gone. It is always rational to promise a route rather than fix an existing one, because the promise is legible now and the fix is invisible. Do this for thirty years and you get exactly what we have: a network that is simultaneously over-promised and under-maintained, staffed by people who mostly know what is wrong and have no mechanism to say so upwards. I do not think this is about nationalisation. Both models have produced it here, and both models have avoided it elsewhere. It is about whether the person making a decision is still around to receive its consequences.

Right, the thing nobody says about "learn to code" advice: It was decent advice in about 2012 and terrible advice by about 2020, and the people giving it never updated. It got handed to redundant workers as though the shortage was permanent and the barrier was purely knowledge. Both of those turned out to be wrong within a decade. What actually happened is that the entry level filled up while the senior end stayed short, which is the worst possible shape for someone retraining at forty. You can learn the language in a year. You cannot manufacture eight years of having seen things go wrong, and that is what the remaining jobs are actually asking for. I do not think the advice was cynical. I think it was given by people who got in early and genuinely could not see which parts of their own path were the ladder and which were the timing.

A pay rise disappears in about four months and nobody warns you. You adjust, the new number becomes normal, and you are back where you started with a bigger flat.

Polarisation gets the blame, but the lasting damage from social media might be flattening — every subject arrives at the same size, in the same box, with the same three reactions available, whether it is a war or a sandwich.

The state of the roads is the most politically radicalising thing in this country and nobody in national politics has noticed.

Statistics should be taught instead of trigonometry. I have needed one of them roughly weekly since school and the other precisely never.

UPI is the best thing an Indian government has built in my lifetime and it isn't close. A billion people moving money for free while most of the world still pays a card company three percent to do the same job.

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.

Subtitles have quietly changed how everybody watches television and nobody has written the piece about what that does to acting.

The useful question in a job interview is not what they ask you, it is whether anybody there seems to be enjoying themselves.

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

Nobody prepares you for the phone call where your parent becomes the person who needs looking after. It does not arrive as a diagnosis. It arrives as a series of small things you decide individually not to worry about — a missed bill, the same story twice, a car with a scrape nobody mentions. Each one is fine. You notice the pattern about eight months after it started. What I was not ready for is that there is no moment where anybody tells you it has changed. No appointment, no letter. You simply find yourself doing more of the phoning and more of the deciding, and one day you realise the direction reversed some time ago and nobody said. The practical stuff I could handle. What I could not was that he knew too, and was managing it, and that both of us spent about a year protecting the other from a conversation we were separately already having.

Open-plan schools, hospital targets and the gig economy will look like the same idea wearing three hats — measure the throughput, ignore the thing being thrown through.

I've come round to thinking most productivity advice is just a way of feeling organised for about a week.

Open source got quietly captured by the companies it was supposed to be an escape from. Most of the big projects are staffed by people on three payrolls now, and the licence is the only part that still looks independent.

Nobody budgets for the thing that actually ruins a month, because the thing that ruins a month is never in the categories.

I have started going to bed at the same time every night like a child and it has been more effective than every other thing I have tried combined.

Every popular fact you know about the brain is either wrong or from 1985. The ten percent thing, left brain right brain, learning styles, all of it, still being taught by people who mean well.