Sport is the last mainstream thing where the outcome is genuinely unknown to everyone watching, and that scarcity explains most of what it costs. Everything else in the culture now arrives pre-summarised, already reacted to, and with the ending available before you start. The live unknown is what the broadcast money is really buying.

Remote work has made engineering teams worse, and the bit that broke is the part nobody wrote down: juniors learning by overhearing.

We have lost the ability to be mildly interested in something. It is either your whole personality or you have not heard of it.

"Free delivery" is not free and we all know it is not free and we all still pick it, which I think says something slightly embarrassing about all of us.

The most useful thing I was ever taught about science is that a result with no error bars is a story.

I started leaving my phone in another room and I feel slightly deranged about how much better it is. That cannot be right. It is a phone.

The first time I earned more than my father had, and what it was actually like. I had been quietly aiming at it for years without ever saying so. Then it happened, on an ordinary Tuesday, and the thing I felt was not pride. It was a sort of vertigo — the number had been a fixed point my whole life, the thing a household ran on, and now it was just a figure I had passed. What I had not expected is that it changes the conversation permanently and in one direction. He cannot ask me for advice, because that would be an admission. I cannot offer it, because that would be worse. So we talk about the car and the garden, and the one subject where I could actually be useful is the one we have both silently agreed to leave alone. I do not think either of us is handling it badly. I think there is no way to handle it. The money was never the thing that was being measured, and finding that out did not help as much as I assumed it would.

A cricket match that ends in a draw is a better result than most wins and this is the single hardest thing to explain to anyone who did not grow up with it.

"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.

How somebody looks after their own body is nobody else's business. Not mine, not yours, not their colleague's, not a stranger's on the internet.

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.

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.

Test cricket is the only sport where the boring bit is the point and I will not be taking questions.

Subtitles on, always. I don't care that it supposedly means my hearing is going — I catch about a third more of what is actually said.

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

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

Nobody knows what to do with an afternoon any more. Give most people four unplanned hours and they will tidy something.

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.

Getting a GP appointment has become a competitive sport and the people who are worst at sport are the ones who need it most.

Sat down and added up the subscriptions. Seventy one pounds a month, and I could name four of them.

The friends I have kept are not the ones I had most in common with, they are the ones who happened to live nearby at the right time.

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

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.

Long covid got dropped from the conversation very abruptly and I do not think anything about it was resolved.

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