Being a fan of something has turned into a job. Watch the thing, read the discourse about the thing, have a position on the discourse. I miss just liking a programme.

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

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.

Everyone I know who is good with money either earns a lot or was quietly given something early. The budgeting apps are for the rest of us to feel busy with.

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.

Every complaint about immigration in my town is actually a complaint about not being able to get a GP appointment, and both parties have found it easier to argue about the first one.

Museums should explain less. I have started reading the wall text before looking at the thing, which means I am now being told what to see before I have seen it.

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

Running is boring and that is the entire point. Every attempt to make exercise entertaining has produced something people stop doing in March.

Weather forecasting got quietly, enormously better and nobody noticed because we only remember the times it was wrong.

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.

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.

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.

Money has ruined more sport than it has rescued. Every competitive balance measure in every major league has got worse since it arrived, and that is the table, not nostalgia.

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

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

Polarisation gets the blame, but the lasting damage from social media might be flattening — every subject arrives at the same size, in the same box, with the same three reactions available, whether it is a war or a sandwich.

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.

Ask anyone whether they want the truth from their doctor and they say yes, then go to pieces the moment a doctor is actually blunt with them.

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.

Try watching a match with the commentary off. It is a completely different sport and you notice about twice as much.

Here is what I think happened to local news, and it is not really about the internet. The classified ads were paying for the journalism. Not the news, not the subscriptions, not the advertising in any form readers noticed — the small ads at the back, cars and jobs and flats. That was the margin, and the reporting was in effect a loss leader that made people pick the paper up. When classifieds moved online they did not move to news websites. They went to dedicated sites that did that one thing well and had no newsroom to fund. So the subsidy vanished, and what vanished with it was the only economic reason anybody had ever paid a person to sit through a council planning meeting. Nothing has replaced it, because nothing was ever paying for it directly. Local journalism was funded by an accident, and when the accident stopped, we discovered nobody had ever been willing to buy the thing itself.

Every awards ceremony is now three hours of people who have already won things being given more things by people who won them earlier.

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.

The best thing about a newspaper was that it ended. You got to the back page and you were done and nobody suggested anything else.