Science journalism is mostly press releases with the caveats removed, and the caveats were the science.

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.

Everyone I know is one broken boiler away from a genuinely bad month and we have all agreed not to bring it up.

Nobody budgets for the thing that actually ruins a month, because the thing that ruins a month is never in the categories.

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

Every sport eventually optimises the fun out of itself, because the people playing are trying to win and nobody is trying to make it enjoyable to watch.

Watching your team lose is a better test of whether you like the sport than watching them win.

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.

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.

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.

Olympic sports get worse as they get more professional. What people actually miss is the amateurism, and it turns out that was most of the charm.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Shah rukh is indeed the last of the stars. Prove me wrong ✌🏻

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.

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.

Renting is not throwing money away, and I say that as somebody who spent eight years feeling ashamed about it. You are buying the ability to leave.

"Trauma" now stretches from genocide to a bad line manager, and somewhere in that stretch the word stopped doing any work at all.

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

Nobody has ever been promoted for the thing they are actually best at, in my experience, and I cannot decide whether that is a flaw.

I have stopped believing any product review I read and I do not have a replacement, which is a genuinely new situation.

Meetings are not the problem. Nobody distinguishing a meeting for deciding from a meeting for informing is the problem. Half the frustration in any organisation is people arriving in different modes and spending an hour discovering it, then booking a follow-up to do the thing they came to do.