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.

Football was better without VAR and I will not be moved on this. You cannot celebrate on a three minute delay.

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.

The hardest thing to find now is something made by one person who was not thinking about an audience.

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.

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

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

Everyone I know who is good with money either earns a lot or was quietly given something early. The budgeting apps are for the rest of us to feel busy with.

Films are too long. Not artistically, logistically — I have children and a bus to catch.

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

Long covid got dropped from the conversation very abruptly and I do not think anything about it was resolved.

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 budgets for the thing that actually ruins a month, because the thing that ruins a month is never in the categories.

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.

Football fans do not want their club to be successful, they want it to be theirs. That is why every ownership row goes the way it does.

"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.

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

Make voting compulsory. Australia manages it, turnout sits around ninety percent, and nobody there appears to be living under tyranny.

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

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

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

If you could only fix one, fix your sleep, not your exercise. Nobody wants to hear it because you cannot post about sleeping.

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

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.

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