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.

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

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.

Every messaging app eventually turns into a bad email client. Threads, then search, then folders, then somebody adds a rules engine and we are right back where we started.

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

Sport is the only place left where we are collectively fine with someone being obviously, measurably better than everyone else, and I find it interesting that we cannot tolerate that anywhere else.

For most software engineers a degree stopped being worth what it costs. It is now mainly a filter that employers use because filtering is expensive.

The number of people I know who have quietly cut something out of their diet and never mentioned it to a doctor is, now I think about it, most of them.

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

We built an entire economy on the idea that people will keep buying things they already have, and then act surprised when the things are designed to stop working.

Nobody I know under forty mentions a pension and nobody over fifty talks about anything else. There is no middle period where it gradually comes up. One day it is simply the topic.

Polarisation gets the blame, but the lasting damage from social media might be flattening — every subject arrives at the same size, in the same box, with the same three reactions available, whether it is a war or a sandwich.

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.

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.

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

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.

Test cricket is the only sport where the boring bit is the point and I will not be taking questions.

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.

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

Sequels have not got worse. We got older, and no film is ever going to land on you the way one did when you were fourteen.

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

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

Antibiotic resistance is the slowest emergency we have and being slow is the entire problem. Nothing that takes thirty years to arrive ever gets a budget.

I have started saying no to things eleven months in advance and it turns out absolutely nothing happens.

Renting is not throwing money away, and I say that as somebody who spent eight years feeling ashamed about it. You are buying the ability to leave.