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

Sequels have not got worse. We got older, and no film is ever going to land on you the way one did when you were fourteen.

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.

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

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

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.

Group chats replaced forums and we lost the thing where a stranger's answer from four years ago was still there when you needed it.

F1 drivers are athletes in exactly the same sense footballers are, and the people who scoff have never held their neck steady at 4g for two hours in fifty degree heat.

UPI is the best thing an Indian government has built in my lifetime and it isn't close. A billion people moving money for free while most of the world still pays a card company three percent to do the same job.

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

Right, the thing nobody says about "learn to code" advice: It was decent advice in about 2012 and terrible advice by about 2020, and the people giving it never updated. It got handed to redundant workers as though the shortage was permanent and the barrier was purely knowledge. Both of those turned out to be wrong within a decade. What actually happened is that the entry level filled up while the senior end stayed short, which is the worst possible shape for someone retraining at forty. You can learn the language in a year. You cannot manufacture eight years of having seen things go wrong, and that is what the remaining jobs are actually asking for. I do not think the advice was cynical. I think it was given by people who got in early and genuinely could not see which parts of their own path were the ladder and which were the timing.

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.

Something I have thought about a lot since I started managing people, which nobody warned me about: you cannot tell someone they are underperforming in a way that does not change the relationship permanently. I do not mean they resent you, though sometimes they do. I mean that afterwards, every ordinary interaction has a second layer. You ask how the weekend was and they are checking whether you are asking because you are being normal, or because you are softening something. That layer does not go away when the performance improves. It just gets quieter. I still think you have to do it. Letting someone carry on failing is worse, and the version where you say nothing and then act surprised at review time is the genuinely unkind option. But I have stopped pretending it is a neutral conversation that a good manager can have without cost. It costs something every time, and the honest thing is to spend it deliberately rather than believe the technique makes it free.

Statistics should be taught instead of trigonometry. I have needed one of them roughly weekly since school and the other precisely never.

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.

There is no book everyone ought to have read, and the list is always suspiciously full of whatever the person making it was assigned at nineteen.

Renting is not throwing money away, and I say that as somebody who spent eight years feeling ashamed about it. You are buying the ability to leave.

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.

Everything is a franchise now and the honest reason is that an unknown thing is a risk somebody has to personally sign off on.

I miss being unreachable and I am aware I could simply turn the phone off, and I am also aware that I will not.

We have lost the ability to be mildly interested in something. It is either your whole personality or you have not heard of it.

Voting for the least bad option is not cynicism, it is the entire mechanism working as designed, and I have got tired of being told otherwise.

Most people who say they want honest feedback want accurate praise, and the two are easy to confuse until the feedback is actually negative. You can watch the switch happen in real time: the request is sincere, and then the first genuine criticism arrives and the next twenty minutes are spent supplying context.

Podcasts are radio with the editing taken out and we have agreed to call that intimacy.

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