"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.

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.

Sport is the last mainstream thing where the outcome is genuinely unknown to everyone watching, and that scarcity explains most of what it costs. Everything else in the culture now arrives pre-summarised, already reacted to, and with the ending available before you start. The live unknown is what the broadcast money is really buying.

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

Nobody plays anything until it goes dark any more and I cannot work out whether that is the traffic, the phones, or the parents.

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.

Tipping has quietly become a thing you do for a screen rather than a person, and I notice I resent it far more.

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.

Open-plan offices are the clearest case I know of an entire industry adopting something because it was cheaper and inventing the reason afterwards.

Reading fiction makes you more empathetic, or at least better at imagining that other people have an interior life at all, which may be the same thing.

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

Ambition gets treated as a virtue and I am not convinced. Half the ambitious people I know are mainly frightened of turning out ordinary.

The state of the roads is the most politically radicalising thing in this country and nobody in national politics has noticed.

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.

Football has too much football now.

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

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.

Open source got quietly captured by the companies it was supposed to be an escape from. Most of the big projects are staffed by people on three payrolls now, and the licence is the only part that still looks independent.

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

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.

The replication crisis never really ended, we just stopped finding it interesting.

Running is boring and that is the entire point. Every attempt to make exercise entertaining has produced something people stop doing in March.

Everybody says they want politicians to admit mistakes and everybody punishes the ones who do, and I include myself in that.

Living in a city is greener than living in the countryside, which reliably annoys everyone who moved out for the fresh air.

A pay rise disappears in about four months and nobody warns you. You adjust, the new number becomes normal, and you are back where you started with a bigger flat.