Nearly everything we were told about food between about 1980 and 2015 turned out to be wrong, and almost nobody who told us has ever accounted for it.

Every organisation says it wants honest feedback and has exactly one person who gives it, and that person is always halfway out the door.

Denzel curry is better than lil dicky. They're not even in the same league

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.

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

Every device I own wants to update itself at the exact moment I need it. I do not think this is bad luck any more.

"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.

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

Being the person in the group who organises things is a thankless job and it is always the same person, and that person is usually tired.

A pay rise disappears in about four months and nobody warns you. You adjust, the new number becomes normal, and you are back where you started with a bigger flat.

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

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.

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.

Small talk gets a terrible press, mostly from people who have never had to sit next to a stranger for two hours.

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.

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

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.

Live music is the one thing that has actually got better, and it is because everything else got worse. Nobody can make money from a recording any more so they all have to be able to play.

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.