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

Science journalism is mostly press releases with the caveats removed, and the caveats were the science.

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

Most advice on how to argue better assumes both people want to find out what is true, and in most real arguments at least one person is defending a position they have already told other people they hold.

Cookie banners were meant to give people control and have instead taught an entire continent to click the nearest button without reading anything. We have trained a reflex, not a decision.

Every company I have joined has a three week onboarding plan and the actual onboarding is one person who has been there six years and answers questions. Nobody has ever written that person into the plan.

Cities keep building cycle lanes that stop. Just end, mid-road, and you are in traffic. What is the point of ninety percent of a cycle lane?

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 will still be typing passwords in ten years. We have been promised their death for two decades and I am still resetting one most weeks.

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

Shah rukh is indeed the last of the stars. Prove me wrong ✌🏻

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.

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.

Nobody actually likes standing desks. We all just got told sitting was killing us and now we're too embarrassed to sit back down.

I have started saying "I don't know" out loud in meetings and conversations and it has been quietly transformative, which I did not expect.

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

Every few years somebody announces that we have cured a thing in mice, and nobody ever writes the follow-up where it did not work in people.

Anyone else notice that every "wellness" thing at work is something that would be unnecessary if the job were slightly less bad?

Being poor is expensive and nobody tells you until you are in it. Cheap shoes twice a year, the meter that costs more per unit, the deposit you cannot save because you are paying someone else's mortgage.

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

Nobody tells you that recovering from something takes about three times longer than the leaflet says, and that the last third is almost entirely boredom.

A cricket match that ends in a draw is a better result than most wins and this is the single hardest thing to explain to anyone who did not grow up with it.

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

Every government IT project fails the same way and everybody involved can describe the failure in advance, which is the part I cannot get past.

A thing about going to the doctor that took me far too long to work out. For years I went in and described my symptoms in the order they had bothered me, which is the order they occurred to me, which is almost exactly the wrong order. The thing I was most worried about came last, usually in the doorway, usually prefixed with "oh, and probably nothing, but". What changed it was a GP who interrupted me about forty seconds in and asked what I was actually frightened of. I said it out loud, she dealt with it in two minutes, and the remaining eight were useful for the first time in my adult life. I now write down one sentence before I go in, which is the thing I am afraid of, and I say it first. I am aware this sounds like a productivity tip for being ill. It has changed every appointment I have had since.