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.

Years of reading about the Grenfell inquiry, on and off, and the thing that has stayed with me is not the cladding. It is that everybody involved was following a process. The manufacturers tested to a standard. The certifiers certified against the standard. The contractors specified a product that held a certificate. The building control officers checked the certificate existed. At every single link somebody did the thing their role required, and the result was a building that burned in a way everyone had been told was impossible. That is much more frightening than corruption. Corruption you can find and remove. A system where every participant discharges their duty correctly and the aggregate is catastrophic has no villain to sack, and no obvious repair. I think about it whenever anyone proposes fixing something by adding a compliance step. Sometimes another check is exactly what is needed. Sometimes it is one more person who can honestly say they did their part.

Being good at your job and being good at describing your job are almost completely unrelated skills, and only one of them gets promoted.

I've come round to thinking most productivity advice is just a way of feeling organised for about a week.

You can love the work of someone appalling. I have never once met a person who manages it consistently, but in principle you can.

Your council decides more about your actual week than Parliament does — the bins, the buses, whether the road gets fixed — and you probably can't name a single councillor.

We keep calling it a housing crisis like it's weather.

Something I keep coming back to and cannot resolve. Every institution I have any faith in — the NHS, courts, universities, the BBC at its better moments — is one I would describe as slow, expensive and frequently maddening to deal with. And every organisation I have found genuinely pleasant to interact with is one I do not trust at all. Banks with lovely apps. Airlines with brilliant booking flows. Delivery companies that know exactly where my parcel is. I do not think this is a coincidence and I am not sure it is a paradox either. Institutions that owe you something have to be procedural, because the procedure is the accountability, and procedure is slow and irritating by nature. Companies that owe you nothing can afford to be delightful, because delight is cheap when there is no obligation underneath it. Which leaves me unable to answer the obvious question: when someone says a public service should be "more like Amazon", what exactly are they asking for? Because the pleasant part and the unaccountable part might be the same part.

Most productivity advice is survivorship bias with a system bolted on. Setting the system up feels like work, which is the whole appeal.

I want to defend something unfashionable, which is meetings that could have been an email. Sometimes the point of the meeting is not the information. It is that eight people are now jointly aware that they all heard the same thing at the same time, and nobody can later claim a different understanding. That is expensive and it is doing real work. The email version saves forty minutes and produces eight private interpretations, four of which are wrong and none of which surface until something breaks. Then you spend a great deal more than forty minutes finding out which four. I am not defending the recurring status meeting nobody has questioned since 2019. I am saying the calculation is not "was information transferred" — it is "did we need shared knowledge that everyone knows everyone else has", and for anything contested the answer is usually yes.

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

Ambition gets treated as a virtue and I am not convinced. Half the ambitious people I know are mainly frightened of turning out ordinary.

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.

A thing I have noticed after fifteen years of interviewing people: almost every interview process is measuring how comfortable someone is being evaluated, and then reporting that as a measure of how good they are at the job. The tell is that the same candidate performs completely differently depending on the room. Give someone a whiteboard and three strangers and you learn how they handle being watched. Give them a real problem and an afternoon and you learn something about how they think. These correlate weakly, and we have built an entire industry on assuming they correlate strongly. What makes it hard to fix is that the noisy signal is cheap and the good signal is expensive. An hour of whiteboarding costs an hour. A realistic work sample costs a day of the candidate's time and half a day of yours, and multiplied across a funnel that is a real budget line that somebody has to defend. So we keep the cheap test and then add stages to compensate for its noise, which is how a process ends up with six rounds that are each individually indefensible. I do not have a clean answer. I have stopped pretending the current thing measures what we say it measures.

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

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.

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.

An unpopular position I hold about hospitals: the food is bad for a reason that has nothing to do with catering, and fixing it would cost more than anyone will admit. Hospital food has to be safe for people with immune systems that barely work, edible by someone who cannot chew properly, compatible with about fourteen medical diets, transportable across a large building, and hold at temperature for the twenty minutes it takes to get to the far ward. Given those constraints, what arrives is roughly what has to arrive. Every campaign to improve it treats it as a failure of will, as though somebody in charge simply does not care whether patients enjoy lunch. Then a celebrity chef gets involved, produces something excellent in one ward for six weeks, and the programme quietly ends when it meets the other three hundred wards and the actual budget. I am not saying it could not be better. I am saying that "why is hospital food bad" has a real answer, and nobody campaigning about it ever engages with the answer.

Most people do not actually want a shorter commute, they want the commute to be the last unclaimed part of their day, and those are different things. When I moved fifteen minutes from the office I was delighted for about a month and then quietly miserable. It turned out the forty minutes on a train had been the only time nobody could reach me. Not leisure exactly. Just uninterrupted. I read more in that year than in the three since. Everyone I have said this to responds with either violent agreement or complete bafflement, and I have not found a pattern in which. It might be about whether you have people at home who need things from you the moment you arrive. I am not romanticising it. Standing on a platform in the rain is not contemplative. But I notice that the people who successfully work from home have all invented something to replace it — a walk, the gym, a stupidly long coffee routine — and I do not think that is a coincidence.

A university degree is now mostly a signal about who your parents were, and only incidentally about what you know. The tell is that employers screen on institution rather than transcript, and institution is set by admissions, which is set by schooling, which is set by money.

Can we talk about the specific misery of a group chat trying to decide where to eat? Six people, all of whom have a preference, none of whom will state it first. Somebody offers a place. Two react with a thumbs up, which means nothing. One says "I'm easy!" which is a lie. The person who actually wanted Thai says nothing, because saying it now would look like overruling. Ninety minutes pass. You end up at the place nobody chose, which everyone privately rates about a six. The thing is that this is not a coordination problem, it is a status problem. Everyone knows the fastest solution is one person deciding. What nobody wants is to be the person who decided, because then the evening is theirs, and if the food is mediocre it is their fault. So the group optimises for nobody being blamed instead of for anybody being happy, which I now think describes an enormous number of decisions well beyond dinner.

Home advantage is mostly the crowd, and the empty-stadium seasons proved it — it shrank, it did not vanish, and what was left was travel and the referee.

The four-day week only really works if your job is thinking. Every pilot anyone quotes was an office, and nobody ever ran one in a warehouse.

Peer review does more harm than good at this point. Two anonymous strangers, no accountability, eighteen months, and a result nobody will ever try to reproduce.

Nostalgia for early internet culture ignores that it was small, homogeneous and mostly male, and that almost everything people miss about it was a property of being small. Two hundred people can hold a norm in their heads without writing it down. Nothing about that survives contact with two million.