Are smart wearables a fad?

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.

Voting for the least bad option is not cynicism, it is the entire mechanism working as designed, and I have got tired of being told otherwise.

Splitting the bill evenly is a tax on whoever ordered the salad, and everyone knows it, and everyone does it anyway because saying so costs more than the difference.

The replication crisis never really ended, we just stopped finding it interesting.

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.

Nobody finishes books and we have all quietly agreed to lie about it.

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

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.

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

Podcasts are radio with the editing taken out and we have agreed to call that intimacy.

Open-plan schools, hospital targets and the gig economy will look like the same idea wearing three hats — measure the throughput, ignore the thing being thrown through.

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.

We should be spending vastly more on stopping the next pandemic, and we will not, because prevention has no photograph attached to it.

The best thing about going to a match is the twenty minutes before anything happens, and no broadcast has ever worked out how to show it.

Open-plan offices are the clearest case I know of an entire industry adopting something because it was cheaper and inventing the reason afterwards.

Group chats replaced forums and we lost the thing where a stranger's answer from four years ago was still there when you needed it.

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

A backdoor for one government is a backdoor for everyone, and this is arithmetic rather than politics. A key that exists can be stolen.

Youth sport got professionalised and the result is ten year olds with strength programmes and nobody left to make up the numbers on a Sunday.

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.

Tipping culture has completely lost the plot and I'm saying that as someone who used to wait tables.

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

Every restaurant is too loud now and I refuse to accept it is just me getting old.

Music got worse when it got easy to make — not the songs, the filter. When a studio cost real money somebody had to believe in you before you got in the room.