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.

Ask a city what it wants and it says better public transport. Ask about the bus and the room goes quiet. The bus is the only bit that is affordable, deliverable this decade and actually useful to people without money — and it is the one thing no city gets excited about announcing.

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.

You can love the work of someone appalling. I have never once met a person who manages it consistently, but in principle you can.

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

Music got worse when it got easy to make — not the songs, the filter. When a studio cost real money somebody had to believe in you before you got in the room.

Every government IT project fails the same way and everybody involved can describe the failure in advance, which is the part I cannot get past.

Tipping has quietly become a thing you do for a screen rather than a person, and I notice I resent it far more.

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.

Ambition gets treated as a virtue and I am not convinced. Half the ambitious people I know are mainly frightened of turning out ordinary.

We treat mental health at work like it is about resilience training when it is mostly about workload and whether your manager is a decent person.

Every few years somebody announces that we have cured a thing in mice, and nobody ever writes the follow-up where it did not work in people.

We talk about AI as though the hard part is intelligence. The hard part has always been that we cannot say what we want precisely enough.

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.

Every device I own wants to update itself at the exact moment I need it. I do not think this is bad luck any more.

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

Most people who say they want honest feedback want accurate praise, and the two are easy to confuse until the feedback is actually negative. You can watch the switch happen in real time: the request is sincere, and then the first genuine criticism arrives and the next twenty minutes are spent supplying context.

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.

That dentistry sits outside the NHS is the strangest line anyone has ever drawn through a human body. Teeth are in there. They hurt. Nobody can explain it.

Every sport eventually optimises the fun out of itself, because the people playing are trying to win and nobody is trying to make it enjoyable to watch.

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.

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.

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

Podcasts are radio with the editing taken out and we have agreed to call that intimacy.

Everybody is tired and nobody can say precisely of what, and I think that is the actual condition rather than a symptom of one.