Nothing is allowed to be medium-sized any more. Everything is either a phenomenon or it failed.

Money has ruined more sport than it has rescued. Every competitive balance measure in every major league has got worse since it arrived, and that is the table, not nostalgia.

Local elections are the only ones where your vote plainly matters and they have the lowest turnout, which I cannot square with anything.

Meetings are not the problem. Nobody distinguishing a meeting for deciding from a meeting for informing is the problem. Half the frustration in any organisation is people arriving in different modes and spending an hour discovering it, then booking a follow-up to do the thing they came to do.

Most political arguments look like disagreements about facts and are really disagreements about what matters. The first kind can be settled. Nobody in history has settled the second by producing a better statistic.

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

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.

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.

Small talk gets a terrible press, mostly from people who have never had to sit next to a stranger for two hours.

Calling it phone addiction misses it. Most people are bored at work, and the phone is the only thing that isn't.

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

Everyone I know is one broken boiler away from a genuinely bad month and we have all agreed not to bring it up.

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.

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

How somebody looks after their own body is nobody else's business. Not mine, not yours, not their colleague's, not a stranger's on the internet.

Getting a GP appointment has become a competitive sport and the people who are worst at sport are the ones who need it most.

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

Open-plan schools, hospital targets and the gig economy will look like the same idea wearing three hats — measure the throughput, ignore the thing being thrown through.

We keep calling it a housing crisis like it's weather.

Software has got worse. Everything is a web page in a costume now — slower to open, does less, and it wants an account before it will tell you the time.

Everybody is tired and nobody can say precisely of what, and I think that is the actual condition rather than a symptom of one.

Walking is free, works for nearly everybody, and has no equipment attached, which is exactly why you never hear about it.

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.

Polarisation gets the blame, but the lasting damage from social media might be flattening — every subject arrives at the same size, in the same box, with the same three reactions available, whether it is a war or a sandwich.

Nobody has ever been promoted for the thing they are actually best at, in my experience, and I cannot decide whether that is a flaw.