Running is boring and that is the entire point. Every attempt to make exercise entertaining has produced something people stop doing in March.

We know more about the surface of Mars than the floor of our own ocean and that is a genuinely strange set of priorities.

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

Most people who say they "believe in science" mean they trust institutions, which is a completely different thing and much easier to break.

The algorithm has quietly killed the thing where you find something you were not looking for. Every recommendation is a slightly worse version of what I already like.

Shah rukh is indeed the last of the stars. Prove me wrong ✌🏻

Getting a GP appointment has become a competitive sport and the people who are worst at sport are the ones who need it most.

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.

Peer review does more harm than good at this point. Two anonymous strangers, no accountability, eighteen months, and a result nobody will ever try to reproduce.

Am I the only one who finds "quiet luxury" is just expensive clothes for people who got embarrassed about logos?

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.

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

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

Right, the thing nobody says about "learn to code" advice: It was decent advice in about 2012 and terrible advice by about 2020, and the people giving it never updated. It got handed to redundant workers as though the shortage was permanent and the barrier was purely knowledge. Both of those turned out to be wrong within a decade. What actually happened is that the entry level filled up while the senior end stayed short, which is the worst possible shape for someone retraining at forty. You can learn the language in a year. You cannot manufacture eight years of having seen things go wrong, and that is what the remaining jobs are actually asking for. I do not think the advice was cynical. I think it was given by people who got in early and genuinely could not see which parts of their own path were the ladder and which were the timing.

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.

Youth sport got professionalised and the result is ten year olds with strength programmes and nobody left to make up the numbers on a Sunday.

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.

Here is what I think happened to local news, and it is not really about the internet. The classified ads were paying for the journalism. Not the news, not the subscriptions, not the advertising in any form readers noticed — the small ads at the back, cars and jobs and flats. That was the margin, and the reporting was in effect a loss leader that made people pick the paper up. When classifieds moved online they did not move to news websites. They went to dedicated sites that did that one thing well and had no newsroom to fund. So the subsidy vanished, and what vanished with it was the only economic reason anybody had ever paid a person to sit through a council planning meeting. Nothing has replaced it, because nothing was ever paying for it directly. Local journalism was funded by an accident, and when the accident stopped, we discovered nobody had ever been willing to buy the thing itself.

Cities that solved housing did it by building an unremarkable amount of unremarkable housing for a very long time, which is why nobody can point to a dramatic example. The absence of a dramatic case is the finding, and it is also the politics: a policy whose costs are immediate and local and whose payoff is twenty years out is the hardest thing an elected person can attempt.

The best decisions get made quickly. The ones that drag on for months usually dragged because nobody wanted to say the obvious thing out loud.

Nobody has ever said "we should document this properly" and then documented it properly.

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.

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

Nostalgia is mostly just not paying attention now. The past feels richer because it has been edited down to the good bits and you were not doing the admin.

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.