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.

The state of the roads is the most politically radicalising thing in this country and nobody in national politics has noticed.

Half of what gets called "doing your own research" is reading until you find somebody who already agrees with you and then stopping.

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

Every handover document is written by somebody who has already mentally left, which is why none of them are any good.

Within fifty years ageing will be treated as a condition rather than a fact, and the argument will move to who can afford the treatment.

Ask a city what it wants and it says better public transport. Ask about the bus and the room goes quiet. The bus is the only bit that is affordable, deliverable this decade and actually useful to people without money — and it is the one thing no city gets excited about announcing.

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.

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

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.

Make voting compulsory. Australia manages it, turnout sits around ninety percent, and nobody there appears to be living under tyranny.

Every job I have had contained about four hours of real work a day and an enormous amount of theatre around it.

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.

Sport is the only place left where we are collectively fine with someone being obviously, measurably better than everyone else, and I find it interesting that we cannot tolerate that anywhere else.

Everyone has become an amateur nutritionist about their own dog.

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.

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.

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

Every interface is now designed to be learned once and never thought about, which is wonderful until the day it does something you did not ask for.

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.

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

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.

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. The inquiry's recommendations are mostly more checks, and I do not know what else they could have been. But every one of them adds a person who will be able to say, honestly, that they did their part.

Football has too much football now.

Nobody has ever said "we should document this properly" and then documented it properly.