Every organisation says it wants honest feedback and has exactly one person who gives it, and that person is always halfway out the door.

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

Live music is the one thing that has actually got better, and it is because everything else got worse. Nobody can make money from a recording any more so they all have to be able to play.

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

Won on the science, lost on the sequencing: almost nobody disputes the physics any more, and almost everybody disputes who pays first. Which means another decade spent explaining the greenhouse effect is a decade spent answering a question that stopped being asked.

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.

Football was better without VAR and I will not be moved on this. You cannot celebrate on a three minute delay.

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

Try watching a match with the commentary off. It is a completely different sport and you notice about twice as much.

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.

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

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.

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.