Renting is not throwing money away, and I say that as somebody who spent eight years feeling ashamed about it. You are buying the ability to leave.

The useful question in a job interview is not what they ask you, it is whether anybody there seems to be enjoying themselves.

The best sporting moments are almost never the winning ones, which is inconvenient for everybody who sells sport.

Tipping culture has completely lost the plot and I'm saying that as someone who used to wait tables.

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.

Your council decides more about your actual week than Parliament does — the bins, the buses, whether the road gets fixed — and you probably can't name a single councillor.

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.

First past the post keeps producing governments that most people voted against, and we keep describing this as stability.

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.

Podcasts are radio with the editing taken out and we have agreed to call that intimacy.

I want to defend something unfashionable, which is meetings that could have been an email. Sometimes the point of the meeting is not the information. It is that eight people are now jointly aware that they all heard the same thing at the same time, and nobody can later claim a different understanding. That is expensive and it is doing real work. The email version saves forty minutes and produces eight private interpretations, four of which are wrong and none of which surface until something breaks. Then you spend a great deal more than forty minutes finding out which four. I am not defending the recurring status meeting nobody has questioned since 2019. I am saying the calculation is not "was information transferred" — it is "did we need shared knowledge that everyone knows everyone else has", and for anything contested the answer is usually yes.

I started leaving my phone in another room and I feel slightly deranged about how much better it is. That cannot be right. It is a phone.

A genuine question for anyone who did science at school more recently than me: how much of what I was taught has quietly been revised? Nobody sends an update.

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

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

A thing about going to the doctor that took me far too long to work out. For years I went in and described my symptoms in the order they had bothered me, which is the order they occurred to me, which is almost exactly the wrong order. The thing I was most worried about came last, usually in the doorway, usually prefixed with "oh, and probably nothing, but". What changed it was a GP who interrupted me about forty seconds in and asked what I was actually frightened of. I said it out loud, she dealt with it in two minutes, and the remaining eight were useful for the first time in my adult life. I now write down one sentence before I go in, which is the thing I am afraid of, and I say it first. I am aware this sounds like a productivity tip for being ill. It has changed every appointment I have had since.

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

The number of people I know who have quietly cut something out of their diet and never mentioned it to a doctor is, now I think about it, most of them.

Reading a hard book slowly is not the same activity as reading an easy book slowly, and treating them as one thing is why reading targets are useless. Counting books is like counting meals — the number is accurate and it tells you almost nothing about whether anything was absorbed.

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.

AI is going to destroy more jobs than it makes. Every previous wave moved people up a ladder; this one is coming for the rungs.

Nobody knows what to do with an afternoon any more. Give most people four unplanned hours and they will tidy something.

Cricket commentary has got unbearable. Nobody describes anything any more, they just wait for a stat to read out.

Try watching a match with the commentary off. It is a completely different sport and you notice about twice as much.

Search has got noticeably worse and I have started adding the name of a forum to the end of every query, which is a strange thing to have to do in 2026.