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.

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.

I want to defend something unfashionable, which is meetings that could have been an email. Sometimes the point of the meeting is not the information. It is that eight people are now jointly aware that they all heard the same thing at the same time, and nobody can later claim a different understanding. That is expensive and it is doing real work. The email version saves forty minutes and produces eight private interpretations, four of which are wrong and none of which surface until something breaks. Then you spend a great deal more than forty minutes finding out which four. I am not defending the recurring status meeting nobody has questioned since 2019. I am saying the calculation is not "was information transferred" — it is "did we need shared knowledge that everyone knows everyone else has", and for anything contested the answer is usually yes.

Everyone in this country has a story about a builder and I have started to think they are all the same story. Someone comes, quotes low, starts, disappears for eleven days, returns, discovers something behind a wall, revises the price upward by forty percent, and finishes to a standard you would describe as fine. You pay it. You tell the story at dinner parties as a comedy. Nothing happens to the builder. The reason it keeps happening is not that builders are dishonest. It is that almost nobody commissions building work often enough to get good at it. You will do this twice in your life. He does it every week. The information is entirely on one side, and no amount of getting three quotes fixes that, because you cannot evaluate the three quotes either. Which is why every piece of advice you get is useless. Get it in writing, agree a schedule of works, hold back a retention — all sound, all assume you know what should be in the writing. The one thing that would actually help is having done it before, and by the time you have, you are finished.

"Trauma" now stretches from genocide to a bad line manager, and somewhere in that stretch the word stopped doing any work at all.

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.

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.

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

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.

Your council decides more about your actual week than Parliament does — the bins, the buses, whether the road gets fixed — and you probably can't name a single councillor.

First past the post keeps producing governments that most people voted against, and we keep describing this as stability.

Being poor is expensive and nobody tells you until you are in it. Cheap shoes twice a year, the meter that costs more per unit, the deposit you cannot save because you are paying someone else's mortgage.

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

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

The state of the roads is the most politically radicalising thing in this country and nobody in national politics has noticed.

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.

Years of reading about the Grenfell inquiry, on and off, and the thing that has stayed with me is not the cladding. It is that everybody involved was following a process. The manufacturers tested to a standard. The certifiers certified against the standard. The contractors specified a product that held a certificate. The building control officers checked the certificate existed. At every single link somebody did the thing their role required, and the result was a building that burned in a way everyone had been told was impossible. That is much more frightening than corruption. Corruption you can find and remove. A system where every participant discharges their duty correctly and the aggregate is catastrophic has no villain to sack, and no obvious repair. The inquiry's recommendations are mostly more checks, and I do not know what else they could have been. But every one of them adds a person who will be able to say, honestly, that they did their part.

We are going to spend the next ten years discovering which parts of the internet were being held together by people doing it for free.

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.

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.

Calling it phone addiction misses it. Most people are bored at work, and the phone is the only thing that isn't.

Public transport should be judged on whether it is usable by someone with a pram, a suitcase and a bad knee — not on its top speed. Every network that passes that test turns out to be pleasant for everyone else too, and almost every network that fails it was designed around a commuter who is twenty-eight and carrying a laptop.

Remote work did not fail. Managers who could only manage by looking at people failed, and remote work is what made that visible. Four years on, the teams that kept it are the ones that already wrote things down, and the teams that abandoned it are mostly the ones that never did.

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.

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.