Most of what psychology published before about 2015 does not replicate, and the field has been much more graceful about admitting it than any other would have been.

Living in a city is greener than living in the countryside, which reliably annoys everyone who moved out for the fresh air.

The friends I have kept are not the ones I had most in common with, they are the ones who happened to live nearby at the right time.

Football has too much football now.

Remote work has made engineering teams worse, and the bit that broke is the part nobody wrote down: juniors learning by overhearing.

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.

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

Nobody has ever been promoted for the thing they are actually best at, in my experience, and I cannot decide whether that is a flaw.

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 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.

The useful question in a job interview is not what they ask you, it is whether anybody there seems to be enjoying themselves.

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

What I actually miss is software that was finished. You bought it, it did the thing, and nobody moved the buttons on a Thursday.

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

Every government now governs mainly by announcing things, and the announcement has become the policy rather than a description of one.

Everybody under thirty-five I know treats owning a home as roughly as likely as winning something, and talks about it in the same tone.

Sport is the last mainstream thing where the outcome is genuinely unknown to everyone watching, and that scarcity explains most of what it costs. Everything else in the culture now arrives pre-summarised, already reacted to, and with the ending available before you start. The live unknown is what the broadcast money is really buying.

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

Cash is going and I notice I spend more without it, which is embarrassing but seems to be true of nearly everybody I ask.

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

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.

The best decisions get made quickly. The ones that drag on for months usually dragged because nobody wanted to say the obvious thing out loud.

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.

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

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