The best thing about going to a match is the twenty minutes before anything happens, and no broadcast has ever worked out how to show it.

"Just be more confident" ignores that confidence is downstream of having been right in front of people a few times, and nobody can give you that. You can only be handed the room, and whoever is giving the advice is usually the one who decides who gets the room.

Within fifty years ageing will be treated as a condition rather than a fact, and the argument will move to who can afford the treatment.

Startups are a worse deal for employees than they were ten years ago. Same hours, same risk, a much thinner slice, and the exit that justified it happens far less often.

We talk about AI as though the hard part is intelligence. The hard part has always been that we cannot say what we want precisely enough.

The friends I have kept are not the ones I had most in common with, they are the ones who happened to live nearby at the right time.

Self-driving is a much harder problem than anyone selling it admits. The driving was never the bit — it is the one situation in ten thousand that nobody wrote a rule for.

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

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.

Everyone in this country has a story about a builder and I have started to think they are all the same story. Someone comes, quotes low, starts, disappears for eleven days, returns, discovers something behind a wall, revises the price upward by forty percent, and finishes to a standard you would describe as fine. You pay it. You tell the story at dinner parties as a comedy. Nothing happens to the builder. The reason it keeps happening is not that builders are dishonest. It is that almost nobody commissions building work often enough to get good at it. You will do this twice in your life. He does it every week. The information is entirely on one side, and no amount of getting three quotes fixes that, because you cannot evaluate the three quotes either. Which is why every piece of advice you get is useless. Get it in writing, agree a schedule of works, hold back a retention — all sound, all assume you know what should be in the writing. The one thing that would actually help is having done it before, and by the time you have, you are finished.

Splitting the bill evenly is a tax on whoever ordered the salad, and everyone knows it, and everyone does it anyway because saying so costs more than the difference.

Most people who say they "believe in science" mean they trust institutions, which is a completely different thing and much easier to break.

My mother has started every phone call for about eleven years by asking whether I have eaten, and I used to find it maddening. It is not really a question. She does not want to know what I ate. If I say yes she moves on immediately and if I say no she is briefly upset, so it is not information she is gathering, it is a check that I am alright, in a form that does not require either of us to say anything embarrassing. I have come round to thinking most of what people find irritating about their parents is this — a real thing being expressed in a code that got set decades ago and never updated. The content is fine. The format is from 1994. What changed my mind was catching myself asking my nephew whether he is keeping busy, which is the same question wearing a different coat, and realising I had inherited the whole apparatus without noticing.

Health advice aimed at women is still mostly either about being thinner or about having children, and it is genuinely strange how little else there is.

Every handover document is written by somebody who has already mentally left, which is why none of them are any good.

Every winter the entire country gets the same cough and we have all agreed to describe it as "something going round".

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

Index funds have made markets less efficient — half the money in the room is now buying without an opinion about anything.

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

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

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.

Nostalgia is mostly just not paying attention now. The past feels richer because it has been edited down to the good bits and you were not doing the admin.

The algorithm has quietly killed the thing where you find something you were not looking for. Every recommendation is a slightly worse version of what I already like.

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

Everybody under thirty-five I know treats owning a home as roughly as likely as winning something, and talks about it in the same tone.