Most "we need better communication" is really "somebody needs to make a decision and nobody wants to be the one who did".

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.

Reading a hard book slowly is not the same activity as reading an easy book slowly, and treating them as one thing is why reading targets are useless. Counting books is like counting meals — the number is accurate and it tells you almost nothing about whether anything was absorbed.

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

Weather forecasting got quietly, enormously better and nobody noticed because we only remember the times it was wrong.

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.

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.

Most political arguments look like disagreements about facts and are really disagreements about what matters. The first kind can be settled. Nobody in history has settled the second by producing a better statistic.

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

Here is what I think happened to local news, and it is not really about the internet. The classified ads were paying for the journalism. Not the news, not the subscriptions, not the advertising in any form readers noticed — the small ads at the back, cars and jobs and flats. That was the margin, and the reporting was in effect a loss leader that made people pick the paper up. When classifieds moved online they did not move to news websites. They went to dedicated sites that did that one thing well and had no newsroom to fund. So the subsidy vanished, and what vanished with it was the only economic reason anybody had ever paid a person to sit through a council planning meeting. Nothing has replaced it, because nothing was ever paying for it directly. Local journalism was funded by an accident, and when the accident stopped, we discovered nobody had ever been willing to buy the thing itself.

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

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

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

Moving house is the only reliable way to find out what you actually own, and the answer is always "far less than this".

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.

Football fans do not want their club to be successful, they want it to be theirs. That is why every ownership row goes the way it does.

Nobody budgets for the thing that actually ruins a month, because the thing that ruins a month is never in the categories.

The most useful thing I was ever taught about science is that a result with no error bars is a story.

Everything is a franchise now and the honest reason is that an unknown thing is a risk somebody has to personally sign off on.