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

Podcasts are radio with the editing taken out and we have agreed to call that intimacy.

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.

The replication crisis never really ended, we just stopped finding it interesting.

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.

A thing I cannot resolve about giving money to people begging. The argument against is well rehearsed and mostly correct: it may fund an addiction, it does not address the cause, the money would do more good given to an organisation set up to help, and the impulse is partly about how it makes me feel rather than what it does. The argument for is much shorter and I keep finding it harder to dismiss. Someone in front of me has asked for something I can trivially provide, and every framework I use to say no is a framework I constructed after the fact, sitting comfortably somewhere else. What I actually do is inconsistent — sometimes yes, sometimes no, and the variable is mostly my mood and how much of a hurry I am in, which is the worst possible basis. I would rather hold either position honestly than keep operating a policy that is really just weather.

Walking is free, works for nearly everybody, and has no equipment attached, which is exactly why you never hear about it.

The best manager I ever had appeared to do almost nothing. It took me three years to work out that was the job.

Term limits, everywhere, no exceptions. Nobody should be able to build a forty-year career out of a job that was meant to be temporary.

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.

The best thing about a newspaper was that it ended. You got to the back page and you were done and nobody suggested anything else.

Watching your team lose is a better test of whether you like the sport than watching them win.

Inheritance decides more about how someone's life goes than education does, and we spend all our time arguing about schools because that is the lever we are allowed to touch.

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

Being good at your job and being good at describing your job are almost completely unrelated skills, and only one of them gets promoted.

Everybody says they want politicians to admit mistakes and everybody punishes the ones who do, and I include myself in that.

Small talk gets a terrible press, mostly from people who have never had to sit next to a stranger for two hours.

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.

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

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.

That dentistry sits outside the NHS is the strangest line anyone has ever drawn through a human body. Teeth are in there. They hurt. Nobody can explain it.

There is no book everyone ought to have read, and the list is always suspiciously full of whatever the person making it was assigned at nineteen.

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.

Most people who say they "believe in science" mean they trust institutions, which is a completely different thing and much easier to break.

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.