Cities keep building cycle lanes that stop. Just end, mid-road, and you are in traffic. What is the point of ninety percent of a cycle lane?

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.

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.

Sport is the only place left where we are collectively fine with someone being obviously, measurably better than everyone else, and I find it interesting that we cannot tolerate that anywhere else.

Everyone in this country has a story about a builder and I have started to think they are all the same story. Someone comes, quotes low, starts, disappears for eleven days, returns, discovers something behind a wall, revises the price upward by forty percent, and finishes to a standard you would describe as fine. You pay it. You tell the story at dinner parties as a comedy. Nothing happens to the builder. The reason it keeps happening is not that builders are dishonest. It is that almost nobody commissions building work often enough to get good at it. You will do this twice in your life. He does it every week. The information is entirely on one side, and no amount of getting three quotes fixes that, because you cannot evaluate the three quotes either. Which is why every piece of advice you get is useless. Get it in writing, agree a schedule of works, hold back a retention — all sound, all assume you know what should be in the writing. The one thing that would actually help is having done it before, and by the time you have, you are finished.

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.

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.

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.

My handwriting has become genuinely illegible and I only found out because I had to fill in a form in front of somebody.

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

Every job I have had contained about four hours of real work a day and an enormous amount of theatre around it.

Nobody has ever explained to me why we accept that a phone lasts three years.

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

Owning things is overrated, says the man with a garage he cannot park in.

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.

I have changed my mind about anonymity online, and I want to set out why, because I argued the other side for years. The case I used to make was straightforward. Anonymity protects the vulnerable — whistleblowers, people in hostile countries, anyone whose opinion could cost them a job. Real-name policies were introduced by companies with a commercial interest in identity, and they were sold with a safety argument that the evidence never really supported. All of that is still true and I have not stopped believing any of it. What changed is that I stopped treating anonymity as one thing. There is anonymity from the state, anonymity from your employer, anonymity from other users, and anonymity from the platform itself. These are four different properties. A system can give you the first three and none of the fourth, and for almost everyone that combination is what they actually want. The mistake I was making was arguing about a slider when the real question was who each end of it protects you from. Once I separated them, most of the disagreements I had been having turned out to be people defending different columns of the same table.

Nobody budgets for the thing that actually ruins a month, because the thing that ruins a month is never in the categories.

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

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

Being a fan of something has turned into a job. Watch the thing, read the discourse about the thing, have a position on the discourse. I miss just liking a programme.

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.

Something I have thought about a lot since I started managing people, which nobody warned me about: you cannot tell someone they are underperforming in a way that does not change the relationship permanently. I do not mean they resent you, though sometimes they do. I mean that afterwards, every ordinary interaction has a second layer. You ask how the weekend was and they are checking whether you are asking because you are being normal, or because you are softening something. That layer does not go away when the performance improves. It just gets quieter. I still think you have to do it. Letting someone carry on failing is worse, and the version where you say nothing and then act surprised at review time is the genuinely unkind option. But I have stopped pretending it is a neutral conversation that a good manager can have without cost. It costs something every time, and the honest thing is to spend it deliberately rather than believe the technique makes it free.

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.

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