We keep calling it a housing crisis like it's weather.

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.

Subtitles have quietly changed how everybody watches television and nobody has written the piece about what that does to acting.

Every complaint about immigration in my town is actually a complaint about not being able to get a GP appointment, and both parties have found it easier to argue about the first one.

The honest reason I have not switched energy supplier, bank or insurer is that it is dull, and the entire industry is built on exactly that.

We should be spending vastly more on stopping the next pandemic, and we will not, because prevention has no photograph attached to it.

Live music is the one thing that has actually got better, and it is because everything else got worse. Nobody can make money from a recording any more so they all have to be able to play.

A thing about going to the doctor that took me far too long to work out. For years I went in and described my symptoms in the order they had bothered me, which is the order they occurred to me, which is almost exactly the wrong order. The thing I was most worried about came last, usually in the doorway, usually prefixed with "oh, and probably nothing, but". What changed it was a GP who interrupted me about forty seconds in and asked what I was actually frightened of. I said it out loud, she dealt with it in two minutes, and the remaining eight were useful for the first time in my adult life. I now write down one sentence before I go in, which is the thing I am afraid of, and I say it first. I am aware this sounds like a productivity tip for being ill. It has changed every appointment I have had since.

A genuine question for anyone who did science at school more recently than me: how much of what I was taught has quietly been revised? Nobody sends an update.

I have started going to bed at the same time every night like a child and it has been more effective than every other thing I have tried combined.

An unpopular position I hold about hospitals: the food is bad for a reason that has nothing to do with catering, and fixing it would cost more than anyone will admit. Hospital food has to be safe for people with immune systems that barely work, edible by someone who cannot chew properly, compatible with about fourteen medical diets, transportable across a large building, and hold at temperature for the twenty minutes it takes to get to the far ward. Given those constraints, what arrives is roughly what has to arrive. Every campaign to improve it treats it as a failure of will, as though somebody in charge simply does not care whether patients enjoy lunch. Then a celebrity chef gets involved, produces something excellent in one ward for six weeks, and the programme quietly ends when it meets the other three hundred wards and the actual budget. I am not saying it could not be better. I am saying that "why is hospital food bad" has a real answer, and nobody campaigning about it ever engages with the answer.

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

Hot take: the reason nobody trusts polls any more isn't that polls got worse. It's that we started reading them as predictions instead of measurements, and then blamed them for failing at a job they never claimed to do.

Most productivity advice is survivorship bias with a system bolted on. Setting the system up feels like work, which is the whole appeal.

If you could only fix one, fix your sleep, not your exercise. Nobody wants to hear it because you cannot post about sleeping.

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.

How somebody looks after their own body is nobody else's business. Not mine, not yours, not their colleague's, not a stranger's on the internet.

Long covid got dropped from the conversation very abruptly and I do not think anything about it was resolved.

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

Reading a hard book slowly is not the same activity as reading an easy book slowly, and treating them as one thing is why reading targets are useless. Counting books is like counting meals — the number is accurate and it tells you almost nothing about whether anything was absorbed.

Everything now assumes you have a phone on you, and we made that assumption into infrastructure without ever voting on it.

The best thing about going to a match is the twenty minutes before anything happens, and no broadcast has ever worked out how to show it.

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

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.

The four-day week only really works if your job is thinking. Every pilot anyone quotes was an office, and nobody ever ran one in a warehouse.