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.

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.

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

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.

Most productivity advice is survivorship bias with a system bolted on. Setting the system up feels like work, which is the whole appeal.

Science journalism is mostly press releases with the caveats removed, and the caveats were the science.

The best manager I ever had appeared to do almost nothing. It took me three years to work out that was the job.

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

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.

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

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.

Nuclear is the safest energy we have per unit generated, and thirty years of being squeamish about it is a large part of why we are still burning gas.

Your council decides more about your actual week than Parliament does — the bins, the buses, whether the road gets fixed — and you probably can't name a single councillor.

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.

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.

AI is going to destroy more jobs than it makes. Every previous wave moved people up a ladder; this one is coming for the rungs.

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

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.

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

Test cricket is the only sport where the boring bit is the point and I will not be taking questions.

Half the arguments I have with my partner are about the same four things and we have never once finished one. I am not sure that is a problem, which is new.

The four-day week only really works if your job is thinking. Every pilot anyone quotes was an office, and nobody ever ran one in a warehouse.

Nearly everything we were told about food between about 1980 and 2015 turned out to be wrong, and almost nobody who told us has ever accounted for it.

Remote work has made engineering teams worse, and the bit that broke is the part nobody wrote down: juniors learning by overhearing.

Youth sport got professionalised and the result is ten year olds with strength programmes and nobody left to make up the numbers on a Sunday.