Cookie banners were meant to give people control and have instead taught an entire continent to click the nearest button without reading anything. We have trained a reflex, not a decision.

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

Antibiotic resistance is the slowest emergency we have and being slow is the entire problem. Nothing that takes thirty years to arrive ever gets a budget.

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

Lending money to family, and why I have stopped. I have done it four times. Twice it came back, twice it did not, and the two that did not are the ones that changed things — not because of the money, which I could afford, but because every subsequent conversation had it sitting in the room. The advice everyone gives is "only lend what you can afford to give away", and I think that is right about the money and wrong about the relationship. What you cannot afford is the asymmetry. They know. You know they know. There is no amount small enough to be invisible once it has not come back. What I do now is give a smaller amount and say it is a gift, out loud, once. It has cost me less and I have not lost anyone over it. It also feels slightly dishonest, because I am managing the relationship rather than helping, and I have not worked out whether that matters.

Startups are a worse deal for employees than they were ten years ago. Same hours, same risk, a much thinner slice, and the exit that justified it happens far less often.

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

"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.

My handwriting has become genuinely illegible and I only found out because I had to fill in a form in front of somebody.

Term limits, everywhere, no exceptions. Nobody should be able to build a forty-year career out of a job that was meant to be temporary.

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

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.

Buying a house is the only serious purchase where you bid against a number nobody will show you, and everyone has agreed to find this normal.

The algorithm has quietly killed the thing where you find something you were not looking for. Every recommendation is a slightly worse version of what I already like.

Why is every app now trying to be a social network? I want the thing to do the thing.

I want to defend something unfashionable, which is meetings that could have been an email. Sometimes the point of the meeting is not the information. It is that eight people are now jointly aware that they all heard the same thing at the same time, and nobody can later claim a different understanding. That is expensive and it is doing real work. The email version saves forty minutes and produces eight private interpretations, four of which are wrong and none of which surface until something breaks. Then you spend a great deal more than forty minutes finding out which four. I am not defending the recurring status meeting nobody has questioned since 2019. I am saying the calculation is not "was information transferred" — it is "did we need shared knowledge that everyone knows everyone else has", and for anything contested the answer is usually yes.

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.

Something I have thought about a lot since I started managing people, which nobody warned me about: you cannot tell someone they are underperforming in a way that does not change the relationship permanently. I do not mean they resent you, though sometimes they do. I mean that afterwards, every ordinary interaction has a second layer. You ask how the weekend was and they are checking whether you are asking because you are being normal, or because you are softening something. That layer does not go away when the performance improves. It just gets quieter. I still think you have to do it. Letting someone carry on failing is worse, and the version where you say nothing and then act surprised at review time is the genuinely unkind option. But I have stopped pretending it is a neutral conversation that a good manager can have without cost. It costs something every time, and the honest thing is to spend it deliberately rather than believe the technique makes it free.

I have started saying no to things eleven months in advance and it turns out absolutely nothing happens.

Football fans do not want their club to be successful, they want it to be theirs. That is why every ownership row goes the way it does.

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

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

Most "we need better communication" is really "somebody needs to make a decision and nobody wants to be the one who did".

We know more about the surface of Mars than the floor of our own ocean and that is a genuinely strange set of priorities.

Films are too long. Not artistically, logistically — I have children and a bus to catch.