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

Nobody plays anything until it goes dark any more and I cannot work out whether that is the traffic, the phones, or the parents.

Anyone else notice that every "wellness" thing at work is something that would be unnecessary if the job were slightly less bad?

A thing I have noticed after fifteen years of interviewing people: almost every interview process is measuring how comfortable someone is being evaluated, and then reporting that as a measure of how good they are at the job. The tell is that the same candidate performs completely differently depending on the room. Give someone a whiteboard and three strangers and you learn how they handle being watched. Give them a real problem and an afternoon and you learn something about how they think. These correlate weakly, and we have built an entire industry on assuming they correlate strongly. What makes it hard to fix is that the noisy signal is cheap and the good signal is expensive. An hour of whiteboarding costs an hour. A realistic work sample costs a day of the candidate's time and half a day of yours, and multiplied across a funnel that is a real budget line that somebody has to defend. So we keep the cheap test and then add stages to compensate for its noise, which is how a process ends up with six rounds that are each individually indefensible. I do not have a clean answer. I have stopped pretending the current thing measures what we say it measures.

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

Weddings have got completely out of hand and everybody involved seems to be having a worse time than they would at a decent party.

The hardest thing to find now is something made by one person who was not thinking about an audience.

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

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.

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

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.

Every device I own wants to update itself at the exact moment I need it. I do not think this is bad luck any more.

I started leaving my phone in another room and I feel slightly deranged about how much better it is. That cannot be right. It is a phone.

Everyone in this country agrees the trains are bad and nobody agrees about why, so here is an attempt at the actual causal chain rather than the usual list of villains. Start with the fact that almost every decision is made on a different timescale from the thing it affects. Rolling stock lasts thirty to forty years. Franchises ran seven to ten. Ministers last about eighteen months in post. Nobody who commissions a train is in the job when it arrives, and nobody who signs a timetable is there when the consequences of it show up. That mismatch produces a specific failure. It is always rational to defer maintenance, because the cost of deferring lands after you have gone. It is always rational to promise a route rather than fix an existing one, because the promise is legible now and the fix is invisible. Do this for thirty years and you get exactly what we have: a network that is simultaneously over-promised and under-maintained, staffed by people who mostly know what is wrong and have no mechanism to say so upwards. I do not think this is about nationalisation. Both models have produced it here, and both models have avoided it elsewhere. It is about whether the person making a decision is still around to receive its consequences.

Everyone I know who is good with money either earns a lot or was quietly given something early. The budgeting apps are for the rest of us to feel busy with.

Everyone I know is on their phone in bed and everyone I know is tired. I am not saying it is causal. I am saying it is a hell of a coincidence.

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

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.

Every company I have joined has a three week onboarding plan and the actual onboarding is one person who has been there six years and answers questions. Nobody has ever written that person into the plan.

Group chats replaced forums and we lost the thing where a stranger's answer from four years ago was still there when you needed it.

Every generation gets told it is uniquely bad at attention, and every generation was in fact being sold something new that was uniquely good at taking it. Novels, radio, television, phones. I do not think the people were ever the variable.

Search has got noticeably worse and I have started adding the name of a forum to the end of every query, which is a strange thing to have to do in 2026.

Index funds have made markets less efficient — half the money in the room is now buying without an opinion about anything.

A cricket match that ends in a draw is a better result than most wins and this is the single hardest thing to explain to anyone who did not grow up with it.

Half of what gets called "doing your own research" is reading until you find somebody who already agrees with you and then stopping.