Antibiotic resistance is the slowest emergency we have and being slow is the entire problem. Nothing that takes thirty years to arrive ever gets a budget.

Being the person in the group who organises things is a thankless job and it is always the same person, and that person is usually tired.

Nobody has a local team any more, they have a team, and the difference turns out to matter.

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

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.

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

Remote work did not fail. Managers who could only manage by looking at people failed, and remote work is what made that visible. Four years on, the teams that kept it are the ones that already wrote things down, and the teams that abandoned it are mostly the ones that never did.

Running is boring and that is the entire point. Every attempt to make exercise entertaining has produced something people stop doing in March.

Nobody actually likes standing desks. We all just got told sitting was killing us and now we're too embarrassed to sit back down.

Software has got worse. Everything is a web page in a costume now — slower to open, does less, and it wants an account before it will tell you the time.

"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.

Subtitles on, always. I don't care that it supposedly means my hearing is going — I catch about a third more of what is actually said.

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.

A cricket match that ends in a draw is a better result than most wins and this is the single hardest thing to explain to anyone who did not grow up with it.

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

What I actually miss is software that was finished. You bought it, it did the thing, and nobody moved the buttons on a Thursday.

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.

Hot take: the reason nobody trusts polls any more isn't that polls got worse. It's that we started reading them as predictions instead of measurements, and then blamed them for failing at a job they never claimed to do.

Group chats replaced forums and we lost the thing where a stranger's answer from four years ago was still there when you needed it.

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

Everyone I know is on their phone in bed and everyone I know is tired. I am not saying it is causal. I am saying it is a hell of a coincidence.

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

Lower league football is better to attend and worse to watch, and the people who only do one of those never believe the other.

Nobody says out loud that getting fitter in your forties is mostly about being willing to be bad at something in public.