Lower league football is better to attend and worse to watch, and the people who only do one of those never believe the other.

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.

Years of reading about the Grenfell inquiry, on and off, and the thing that has stayed with me is not the cladding. It is that everybody involved was following a process. The manufacturers tested to a standard. The certifiers certified against the standard. The contractors specified a product that held a certificate. The building control officers checked the certificate existed. At every single link somebody did the thing their role required, and the result was a building that burned in a way everyone had been told was impossible. That is much more frightening than corruption. Corruption you can find and remove. A system where every participant discharges their duty correctly and the aggregate is catastrophic has no villain to sack, and no obvious repair. The inquiry's recommendations are mostly more checks, and I do not know what else they could have been. But every one of them adds a person who will be able to say, honestly, that they did their part.

Cricket is the only sport where you can go for lunch, come back, and nothing has happened, and that is a feature.

I have started going to bed at the same time every night like a child and it has been more effective than every other thing I have tried combined.

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.

The honest reason I have not switched energy supplier, bank or insurer is that it is dull, and the entire industry is built on exactly that.

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.

For most software engineers a degree stopped being worth what it costs. It is now mainly a filter that employers use because filtering is expensive.

Buying a house is the only serious purchase where you bid against a number nobody will show you, and everyone has agreed to find this normal.

Music got worse when it got easy to make — not the songs, the filter. When a studio cost real money somebody had to believe in you before you got in the room.

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.

Most people would be happier with fewer options. Ask anyone who has spent forty minutes scrolling and then rewatched something they had already seen twice.

Every generation gets told it is uniquely bad at attention, and every generation was in fact being sold something new that was uniquely good at taking it. Novels, radio, television, phones. I do not think the people were ever the variable.

Inheritance decides more about how someone's life goes than education does, and we spend all our time arguing about schools because that is the lever we are allowed to touch.

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.

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.

I have started saying no to things eleven months in advance and it turns out absolutely nothing happens.

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

The best manager I ever had appeared to do almost nothing. It took me three years to work out that was the job.

We built an entire economy on the idea that people will keep buying things they already have, and then act surprised when the things are designed to stop working.

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

Genuine question: has anyone actually changed their mind because of something they read online? Not softened, not "considered" — changed.

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

Weddings have got completely out of hand and everybody involved seems to be having a worse time than they would at a decent party.