here is one, so you know what you are looking at:
Everyone agrees the trains are bad and nobody agrees about why.
Nationalised for forty years and they were not better. Ownership is not the variable.
Depends which line. Some of it is ownership, most of it is that track and trains are run by different people.
Every decision is made on a shorter timescale than the thing it affects. Defer the maintenance, leave before the bill lands.
no likes, no ranking, nothing to win.
create an account or sign in to crib.
Films are too long. Not artistically, logistically — I have children and a bus to catch.
Cricket commentary has got unbearable. Nobody describes anything any more, they just wait for a stat to read out.
Everything now assumes you have a phone on you, and we made that assumption into infrastructure without ever voting on it.
We have lost the ability to be mildly interested in something. It is either your whole personality or you have not heard of it.
Health advice aimed at women is still mostly either about being thinner or about having children, and it is genuinely strange how little else there is.
Cash is going and I notice I spend more without it, which is embarrassing but seems to be true of nearly everybody I ask.
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.
A thing I keep noticing about rereading. I used to think rereading a book was a waste of a life that only has room for so many books. Then I reread one I had loved at nineteen and found a completely different novel inside the same sentences — the bits I had underlined were not the good bits, and the character I had dismissed as tiresome was plainly the one the author cared about. What I had actually done at nineteen was read my own circumstances and call it a book. That is not a criticism of nineteen. It is what reading is. But it means a book you have only read once is a book you have read exactly one way, and the copy on the shelf has more in it than you took. I have no system for this and I am not going to pretend otherwise. I just stopped feeling guilty about the ones I go back to.
Moving house is the only reliable way to find out what you actually own, and the answer is always "far less than this".
Nobody finishes books and we have all quietly agreed to lie about it.
A university degree is now mostly a signal about who your parents were, and only incidentally about what you know. The tell is that employers screen on institution rather than transcript, and institution is set by admissions, which is set by schooling, which is set by money.
Walking is free, works for nearly everybody, and has no equipment attached, which is exactly why you never hear about it.
Nostalgia for early internet culture ignores that it was small, homogeneous and mostly male, and that almost everything people miss about it was a property of being small. Two hundred people can hold a norm in their heads without writing it down. Nothing about that survives contact with two million.
Most people who say they "believe in science" mean they trust institutions, which is a completely different thing and much easier to break.
Museums should explain less. I have started reading the wall text before looking at the thing, which means I am now being told what to see before I have seen it.
The best manager I ever had appeared to do almost nothing. It took me three years to work out that was the job.
Open-plan offices are the clearest case I know of an entire industry adopting something because it was cheaper and inventing the reason afterwards.
something you reckon. a gripe, a hunch, a hill you will die on. serious or not.
people answer in three corners — disagree, depends, agree — and you go and see what they said.
anyone can join with an email address. it is used to send you a code and nothing else.
what all this does to your head, and what to do about it.