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.

Owning things is overrated, says the man with a garage he cannot park in.

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.

Shah rukh is indeed the last of the stars. Prove me wrong ✌🏻

Cricket commentary has got unbearable. Nobody describes anything any more, they just wait for a stat to read out.

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.

We will still be typing passwords in ten years. We have been promised their death for two decades and I am still resetting one most weeks.

Voting for the least bad option is not cynicism, it is the entire mechanism working as designed, and I have got tired of being told otherwise.

Splitting the bill evenly is a tax on whoever ordered the salad, and everyone knows it, and everyone does it anyway because saying so costs more than the difference.

I cannot do a phone call any more and I genuinely do not know when that happened.

A pay rise disappears in about four months and nobody warns you. You adjust, the new number becomes normal, and you are back where you started with a bigger flat.

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

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.

Everyone I know is one broken boiler away from a genuinely bad month and we have all agreed not to bring it up.

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

Every generation gets told it is uniquely bad at attention, and every generation was in fact being sold something new that was uniquely good at taking it. Novels, radio, television, phones. I do not think the people were ever the variable.

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.

Running a car costs most people about four hundred a month once you count everything, and almost nobody has ever counted everything.

I have never regretted spending money on a good mattress or decent shoes. Almost everything else I have regretted.

Denzel curry is better than lil dicky. They're not even in the same league

Follow the rules that make no sense anyway. The alternative is everybody deciding privately which ones are silly, and that unravels faster than you would think.

Most people would be happier with fewer options. Ask anyone who has spent forty minutes scrolling and then rewatched something they had already seen twice.

Renting is not throwing money away, and I say that as somebody who spent eight years feeling ashamed about it. You are buying the ability to leave.

Nobody has ever explained to me why we accept that a phone lasts three years.

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