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.

Everyone I know who is good with money either earns a lot or was quietly given something early. The budgeting apps are for the rest of us to feel busy with.

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

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

The algorithm has quietly killed the thing where you find something you were not looking for. Every recommendation is a slightly worse version of what I already like.

Saying the uncomfortable thing is usually the kind option, and almost nobody does it, because the discomfort arrives immediately and the kindness turns up months later.

Within fifty years ageing will be treated as a condition rather than a fact, and the argument will move to who can afford the treatment.

Calling it phone addiction misses it. Most people are bored at work, and the phone is the only thing that isn't.

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

The honest reason I have not switched energy supplier, bank or insurer is that it is dull, and the entire industry is built on exactly that.

Something I keep coming back to and cannot resolve, about the NHS specifically. Dealing with it is slow, repetitive and frequently maddening. You give the same information four times. You wait on a line. You are asked to confirm a date of birth by three separate people in one building. Nobody who has used it recently would describe the experience as pleasant. And I trust it completely, in a way I do not trust any organisation that has ever been pleasant to me. I think those two things are connected rather than coincidental. It has to be procedural because the procedure is the accountability — the repetition is a check, the wait is a queue somebody is being fair about, and the four separate confirmations exist because getting it wrong is unacceptable rather than merely bad for retention. Which leaves me unable to answer the obvious question. When somebody says the NHS should be "more like Amazon", what exactly are they asking for? Because I cannot tell whether the pleasant part can be separated from the part that owes you nothing.

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

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

Sat down and added up the subscriptions. Seventy one pounds a month, and I could name four of them.

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.

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

Everybody says they want politicians to admit mistakes and everybody punishes the ones who do, and I include myself in that.

The best sporting moments are almost never the winning ones, which is inconvenient for everybody who sells sport.

Inheritance decides more about how someone's life goes than education does, and we spend all our time arguing about schools because that is the lever we are allowed to touch.

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.

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

Cities keep building cycle lanes that stop. Just end, mid-road, and you are in traffic. What is the point of ninety percent of a cycle lane?

Nobody tells you that recovering from something takes about three times longer than the leaflet says, and that the last third is almost entirely boredom.

Sport is the only place left where we are collectively fine with someone being obviously, measurably better than everyone else, and I find it interesting that we cannot tolerate that anywhere else.

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.