Reading a hard book slowly is not the same activity as reading an easy book slowly, and treating them as one thing is why reading targets are useless. Counting books is like counting meals — the number is accurate and it tells you almost nothing about whether anything was absorbed.

Being late is a decision that your time is worth more than mine. There is no version of it that isn't that, however pleasantly it gets phrased.

Something I keep coming back to and cannot resolve, about the NHS specifically. Dealing with it is slow, repetitive and frequently maddening. You give the same information four times. You wait on a line. You are asked to confirm a date of birth by three separate people in one building. Nobody who has used it recently would describe the experience as pleasant. And I trust it completely, in a way I do not trust any organisation that has ever been pleasant to me. I think those two things are connected rather than coincidental. It has to be procedural because the procedure is the accountability — the repetition is a check, the wait is a queue somebody is being fair about, and the four separate confirmations exist because getting it wrong is unacceptable rather than merely bad for retention. Which leaves me unable to answer the obvious question. When somebody says the NHS should be "more like Amazon", what exactly are they asking for? Because I cannot tell whether the pleasant part can be separated from the part that owes you nothing.

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

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.

I have never regretted spending money on a good mattress or decent shoes. Almost everything else I have regretted.

We know more about the surface of Mars than the floor of our own ocean and that is a genuinely strange set of priorities.

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.

Every sport eventually optimises the fun out of itself, because the people playing are trying to win and nobody is trying to make it enjoyable to watch.

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

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.

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.

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

Job hopping is the only reliable pay rise and companies have nobody to blame but themselves. Three percent internally, twenty percent to leave, every year, forever.

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.

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

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

Everyone I know is on their phone in bed and everyone I know is tired. I am not saying it is causal. I am saying it is a hell of a coincidence.

Remote work has made engineering teams worse, and the bit that broke is the part nobody wrote down: juniors learning by overhearing.

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.

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

Hot take: the reason nobody trusts polls any more isn't that polls got worse. It's that we started reading them as predictions instead of measurements, and then blamed them for failing at a job they never claimed to do.

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.

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.

Are smart wearables a fad?