Every popular fact you know about the brain is either wrong or from 1985. The ten percent thing, left brain right brain, learning styles, all of it, still being taught by people who mean well.

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

We talk about AI as though the hard part is intelligence. The hard part has always been that we cannot say what we want precisely enough.

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

Won on the science, lost on the sequencing: almost nobody disputes the physics any more, and almost everybody disputes who pays first. Which means another decade spent explaining the greenhouse effect is a decade spent answering a question that stopped being asked.

Honestly think the four-day week debate is mostly people who already have autonomy arguing about the calendar, while everyone in a warehouse gets nothing out of either version.

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.

A university degree is now mostly a signal about who your parents were, and only incidentally about what you know. The tell is that employers screen on institution rather than transcript, and institution is set by admissions, which is set by schooling, which is set by money.

Most people do not actually want a shorter commute, they want the commute to be the last unclaimed part of their day, and those are different things. When I moved fifteen minutes from the office I was delighted for about a month and then quietly miserable. It turned out the forty minutes on a train had been the only time nobody could reach me. Not leisure exactly. Just uninterrupted. I read more in that year than in the three since. Everyone I have said this to responds with either violent agreement or complete bafflement, and I have not found a pattern in which. It might be about whether you have people at home who need things from you the moment you arrive. I am not romanticising it. Standing on a platform in the rain is not contemplative. But I notice that the people who successfully work from home have all invented something to replace it — a walk, the gym, a stupidly long coffee routine — and I do not think that is a coincidence.

Everyone I know is one broken boiler away from a genuinely bad month and we have all agreed not to bring it up.

Everything is a franchise now and the honest reason is that an unknown thing is a risk somebody has to personally sign off on.

Every few years somebody announces that we have cured a thing in mice, and nobody ever writes the follow-up where it did not work in people.

Genuine question: can anyone name a single thing their MP has done? Not voted for. Done.

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.

Every restaurant is too loud now and I refuse to accept it is just me getting old.

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.

Voting for the least bad option is not cynicism, it is the entire mechanism working as designed, and I have got tired of being told otherwise.

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.

Watching your team lose is a better test of whether you like the sport than watching them win.

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

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.

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.

Moving house is the only reliable way to find out what you actually own, and the answer is always "far less than this".

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.

The best thing about a newspaper was that it ended. You got to the back page and you were done and nobody suggested anything else.