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

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

Ambition gets treated as a virtue and I am not convinced. Half the ambitious people I know are mainly frightened of turning out ordinary.

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

Small talk gets a terrible press, mostly from people who have never had to sit next to a stranger for two hours.

Everyone has become an amateur nutritionist about their own dog.

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

I've come round to thinking most productivity advice is just a way of feeling organised for about a week.

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.

Self-driving is a much harder problem than anyone selling it admits. The driving was never the bit — it is the one situation in ten thousand that nobody wrote a rule for.

Most "we need better communication" is really "somebody needs to make a decision and nobody wants to be the one who did".

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.

My mother has started every phone call for about eleven years by asking whether I have eaten, and I used to find it maddening. It is not really a question. She does not want to know what I ate. If I say yes she moves on immediately and if I say no she is briefly upset, so it is not information she is gathering, it is a check that I am alright, in a form that does not require either of us to say anything embarrassing. I have come round to thinking most of what people find irritating about their parents is this — a real thing being expressed in a code that got set decades ago and never updated. The content is fine. The format is from 1994. What changed my mind was catching myself asking my nephew whether he is keeping busy, which is the same question wearing a different coat, and realising I had inherited the whole apparatus without noticing.

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

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

T20 made Test cricket better, not worse, and the people who say otherwise have not watched a fourth innings run chase lately.

Nobody says out loud that getting fitter in your forties is mostly about being willing to be bad at something in public.

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

Open-plan schools, hospital targets and the gig economy will look like the same idea wearing three hats — measure the throughput, ignore the thing being thrown through.

Tipping has quietly become a thing you do for a screen rather than a person, and I notice I resent it far more.

Ask a city what it wants and it says better public transport. Ask about the bus and the room goes quiet. The bus is the only bit that is affordable, deliverable this decade and actually useful to people without money — and it is the one thing no city gets excited about announcing.

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.

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.

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.