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.

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.

Most advice on how to argue better assumes both people want to find out what is true, and in most real arguments at least one person is defending a position they have already told other people they hold.

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.

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.

Lending money to family, and why I have stopped. I have done it four times. Twice it came back, twice it did not, and the two that did not are the ones that changed things — not because of the money, which I could afford, but because every subsequent conversation had it sitting in the room. The advice everyone gives is "only lend what you can afford to give away", and I think that is right about the money and wrong about the relationship. What you cannot afford is the asymmetry. They know. You know they know. There is no amount small enough to be invisible once it has not come back. What I do now is give a smaller amount and say it is a gift, out loud, once. It has cost me less and I have not lost anyone over it. It also feels slightly dishonest, because I am managing the relationship rather than helping, and I have not worked out whether that matters.

Something I have thought about a lot since I started managing people, which nobody warned me about: you cannot tell someone they are underperforming in a way that does not change the relationship permanently. I do not mean they resent you, though sometimes they do. I mean that afterwards, every ordinary interaction has a second layer. You ask how the weekend was and they are checking whether you are asking because you are being normal, or because you are softening something. That layer does not go away when the performance improves. It just gets quieter. I still think you have to do it. Letting someone carry on failing is worse, and the version where you say nothing and then act surprised at review time is the genuinely unkind option. But I have stopped pretending it is a neutral conversation that a good manager can have without cost. It costs something every time, and the honest thing is to spend it deliberately rather than believe the technique makes it free.

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

An unpopular position I hold about hospitals: the food is bad for a reason that has nothing to do with catering, and fixing it would cost more than anyone will admit. Hospital food has to be safe for people with immune systems that barely work, edible by someone who cannot chew properly, compatible with about fourteen medical diets, transportable across a large building, and hold at temperature for the twenty minutes it takes to get to the far ward. Given those constraints, what arrives is roughly what has to arrive. Every campaign to improve it treats it as a failure of will, as though somebody in charge simply does not care whether patients enjoy lunch. Then a celebrity chef gets involved, produces something excellent in one ward for six weeks, and the programme quietly ends when it meets the other three hundred wards and the actual budget. I am not saying it could not be better. I am saying that "why is hospital food bad" has a real answer, and nobody campaigning about it ever engages with the answer.

Nobody prepares you for the phone call where your parent becomes the person who needs looking after. It does not arrive as a diagnosis. It arrives as a series of small things you decide individually not to worry about — a missed bill, the same story twice, a car with a scrape nobody mentions. Each one is fine. You notice the pattern about eight months after it started. What I was not ready for is that there is no moment where anybody tells you it has changed. No appointment, no letter. You simply find yourself doing more of the phoning and more of the deciding, and one day you realise the direction reversed some time ago and nobody said. The practical stuff I could handle. What I could not was that he knew too, and was managing it, and that both of us spent about a year protecting the other from a conversation we were separately already having.

Nobody finishes books and we have all quietly agreed to lie about it.

Home advantage is mostly the crowd, and the empty-stadium seasons proved it — it shrank, it did not vanish, and what was left was travel and the referee.

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

Films are too long. Not artistically, logistically — I have children and a bus to catch.

Telling people to "just move somewhere cheaper" ignores that cheap places are cheap because the work isn't there, which is the entire thing you needed the money for.

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

Software has got worse. Everything is a web page in a costume now — slower to open, does less, and it wants an account before it will tell you the time.

Nuclear is the safest energy we have per unit generated, and thirty years of being squeamish about it is a large part of why we are still burning gas.

Open-plan offices are the clearest case I know of an entire industry adopting something because it was cheaper and inventing the reason afterwards.

Nostalgia is mostly just not paying attention now. The past feels richer because it has been edited down to the good bits and you were not doing the admin.

Peer review does more harm than good at this point. Two anonymous strangers, no accountability, eighteen months, and a result nobody will ever try to reproduce.

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.

Every few years somebody announces that we have cured a thing in mice, and nobody ever writes the follow-up where it did not work in people.

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.