Am I the only one who finds "quiet luxury" is just expensive clothes for people who got embarrassed about logos?

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.

That dentistry sits outside the NHS is the strangest line anyone has ever drawn through a human body. Teeth are in there. They hurt. Nobody can explain it.

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

Every company I have joined has a three week onboarding plan and the actual onboarding is one person who has been there six years and answers questions. Nobody has ever written that person into the plan.

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.

Nobody knows their neighbours and everybody says they would like to, which suggests the barrier is not that we do not want to.

Most people would be happier with fewer options. Ask anyone who has spent forty minutes scrolling and then rewatched something they had already seen twice.

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

Are smart wearables a fad?

T20 made Test cricket better, not worse, and the people who say otherwise have not watched a fourth innings run chase lately.

I miss being unreachable and I am aware I could simply turn the phone off, and I am also aware that I will not.

Nobody I know under forty mentions a pension and nobody over fifty talks about anything else. There is no middle period where it gradually comes up. One day it is simply the topic.

UPI is the best thing an Indian government has built in my lifetime and it isn't close. A billion people moving money for free while most of the world still pays a card company three percent to do the same job.

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.

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.

Follow the rules that make no sense anyway. The alternative is everybody deciding privately which ones are silly, and that unravels faster than you would think.

A thing about going to the doctor that took me far too long to work out. For years I went in and described my symptoms in the order they had bothered me, which is the order they occurred to me, which is almost exactly the wrong order. The thing I was most worried about came last, usually in the doorway, usually prefixed with "oh, and probably nothing, but". What changed it was a GP who interrupted me about forty seconds in and asked what I was actually frightened of. I said it out loud, she dealt with it in two minutes, and the remaining eight were useful for the first time in my adult life. I now write down one sentence before I go in, which is the thing I am afraid of, and I say it first. I am aware this sounds like a productivity tip for being ill. It has changed every appointment I have had since.

Won on the science, lost on the sequencing: almost nobody disputes the physics any more, and almost everybody disputes who pays first. Which means another decade spent explaining the greenhouse effect is a decade spent answering a question that stopped being asked.

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.

Index funds have made markets less efficient — half the money in the room is now buying without an opinion about anything.

Everyone has become an amateur nutritionist about their own dog.

We talk about AI as though the hard part is intelligence. The hard part has always been that we cannot say what we want precisely enough.

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

I have started saying "I don't know" out loud in meetings and conversations and it has been quietly transformative, which I did not expect.