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.

A thing I keep noticing about rereading. I used to think rereading a book was a waste of a life that only has room for so many books. Then I reread one I had loved at nineteen and found a completely different novel inside the same sentences — the bits I had underlined were not the good bits, and the character I had dismissed as tiresome was plainly the one the author cared about. What I had actually done at nineteen was read my own circumstances and call it a book. That is not a criticism of nineteen. It is what reading is. But it means a book you have only read once is a book you have read exactly one way, and the copy on the shelf has more in it than you took. I have no system for this and I am not going to pretend otherwise. I just stopped feeling guilty about the ones I go back to.

Something I keep coming back to and cannot resolve, about the NHS specifically. Dealing with it is slow, repetitive and frequently maddening. You give the same information four times. You wait on a line. You are asked to confirm a date of birth by three separate people in one building. Nobody who has used it recently would describe the experience as pleasant. And I trust it completely, in a way I do not trust any organisation that has ever been pleasant to me. I think those two things are connected rather than coincidental. It has to be procedural because the procedure is the accountability — the repetition is a check, the wait is a queue somebody is being fair about, and the four separate confirmations exist because getting it wrong is unacceptable rather than merely bad for retention. Which leaves me unable to answer the obvious question. When somebody says the NHS should be "more like Amazon", what exactly are they asking for? Because I cannot tell whether the pleasant part can be separated from the part that owes you nothing.

We are going to spend the next ten years discovering which parts of the internet were being held together by people doing it for free.

Every device I own wants to update itself at the exact moment I need it. I do not think this is bad luck any more.

I have started saying "I don't know" out loud in meetings and conversations and it has been quietly transformative, which I did not expect.

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.

Every awards ceremony is now three hours of people who have already won things being given more things by people who won them earlier.

unpopular opinion but most "food deserts" are actually time deserts. the shop is there, people are working two jobs.

Anyone else notice that every "wellness" thing at work is something that would be unnecessary if the job were slightly less bad?

Most people who say they want honest feedback want accurate praise, and the two are easy to confuse until the feedback is actually negative. You can watch the switch happen in real time: the request is sincere, and then the first genuine criticism arrives and the next twenty minutes are spent supplying context.

Nobody has a local team any more, they have a team, and the difference turns out to matter.

Public transport should be judged on whether it is usable by someone with a pram, a suitcase and a bad knee — not on its top speed. Every network that passes that test turns out to be pleasant for everyone else too, and almost every network that fails it was designed around a commuter who is twenty-eight and carrying a laptop.

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.

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.

Every government IT project fails the same way and everybody involved can describe the failure in advance, which is the part I cannot get past.

Nostalgia for early internet culture ignores that it was small, homogeneous and mostly male, and that almost everything people miss about it was a property of being small. Two hundred people can hold a norm in their heads without writing it down. Nothing about that survives contact with two million.

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

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

Every handover document is written by somebody who has already mentally left, which is why none of them are any good.

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.

"Free delivery" is not free and we all know it is not free and we all still pick it, which I think says something slightly embarrassing about all of us.

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

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.

We will still be typing passwords in ten years. We have been promised their death for two decades and I am still resetting one most weeks.